Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Of course I couldn’t possibly listen to him.

The man had just been taken away by a ghost bus right in front of me.

And then he texted me: “Don’t come save me.”

Any normal person who saw that would call the police.

So I did.

After the police arrived, they pulled up the surveillance footage, took statements, and checked the roads.

But in the footage, there were only me, my mom, and Liang Yan standing at the entrance of the café.

No bus.

No faceless passengers.

Liang Yan had taken two steps forward on his own, then vanished into thin air.

The young officer taking my statement looked at me with a very complicated expression.

I understood.

If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would have thought it sounded like a breakdown from too much stress too.

My mom, on the other hand, was very calm.

She described what had happened clearly, and even remembered the bus’s plate number.

Jiugang 312.

When the officer heard that number, his expression changed.

I immediately asked, “Is there something wrong with that plate?”

He hesitated for a moment, then said, “Twenty years ago, there was indeed an accident involving a Route 312 bus on the Jiugang Line.”

My heart sank.

“What accident?”

“It plunged into the river during a rainstorm. There were seventeen people on board, but only sixteen bodies were recovered.”

I asked, “Who was missing?”

He flipped through the files.

“The driver.”

My mom suddenly said, “It wasn’t the driver who was missing.”

We all looked at her.

She was gripping a disposable paper cup, her knuckles white.

“The one missing was me.”

The police station fell silent.

I thought I had misheard.

“Mom?”

She closed her eyes briefly.

“Twenty years ago, I almost got on that bus.”

It had been raining heavily that day too.

My dad was working overtime, and she was carrying feverish me to the hospital.

The last bus on the Jiugang Line stopped in front of the platform, and the driver urged her to hurry and get on.

She had just stepped up with one foot when she heard someone call her.

“Zhou Lan, don’t get on.”

She turned around and saw a woman in a beige trench coat standing in the rain.

The woman was holding a little girl in her arms.

The little girl had a burn scar on her wrist.

When my mom got to this point, her voice went hoarse.

“She looked a lot like you.”

The blood in my body went cold little by little.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I thought I had just been badly frightened.”

She lowered her head.

“Later, when that bus plunged into the river, your dad said I was lucky to be alive. I thought so too.”

“Until three years ago, when Liang Yan came to find me.”

I snapped my head up.

“He came to you first?”

My mom nodded.

She said that on the night I saved Liang Yan three years ago, Liang Yan actually hadn’t disappeared.

After he woke up, the first thing he did was go to the elementary school where my mom had once taught.

He waited for her at the gate for an entire day.

Back then, he still looked twenty-six, and he was holding an old photograph.

In the photo were me in my forties, and my mom in her fifties.

At first, my mom thought he was a con man.

Until he accurately described what had happened on the platform twenty years ago.

He said that one day, she would receive an invitation to a blind date.

When the time came, she had to go.

Because it wasn’t a blind date.

It was Echo Station’s final attempt to locate the present Xu Zhixia.

My head hurt from listening. “So you kept this from me for three years?”

My mom looked at me.

“I thought about telling you.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

Her tears fell.

“Because he said that if you knew in advance, you would go looking for the Jiugang Line.”

I absolutely would have.

I had been stubborn since I was little.

The more someone told me not to touch something, the more I had to understand it.

My mom said, “I just wanted you to get through these three years safely.”

My chest felt unbearably tight.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t angry.

It was just that when I saw her cry, I couldn’t bring myself to say anything too harsh.

In the end, the police told us to go home first and wait for news.

When we left the police station, it was already dark.

Sitting in the passenger seat, my mom suddenly asked me, “Zhixia, do you blame me?”

I gripped the steering wheel.

“I do.”

She lowered her head.

Then I said, “But I’m even more scared.”

Scared she would disappear.

Scared Liang Yan wouldn’t come back.

Scared that the me behind that bus window had really died somewhere twenty years in the future.

After we got home, I took the old ticket out of the drawer.

There had originally been nothing on the back of the ticket.

But now there was an extra line of words.

The handwriting was very faint, as if it had been soaked by rain.

[Jiugang North Station, 12:17 a.m.]

There was another sentence underneath.

[Bring the sugar jar from when you were ten.]