She Heard the Old Things Speak

My name is Lin Zhiqiu, and I restore old things. Other people fix objects. I fix the words left unsaid inside them. The moment my fingertips touch an old object, I can "hear" faint echoes of its owner's voice. A grandfather clock that had been stopped for twenty years let me hear an old man's last words before he fell to his death: "Don't push me." A gold pen buried in the mud on a riverbank led me to an innocent soul who had been tricked into copying a "confession letter" and then murdered to silence them. A faded old photograph quietly tied my father's disappearance ten years ago to case after case. I give countless old objects a voice and help the dead find justice. But there's one thing I've waited ten whole years for: the music box my father was repairing when he disappeared, left unfinished halfway through. This time, I'm going to hear it all the way to the end.