In the twelfth lunar month of 1998, amid the fog at Linjiang Port, Cheng Shouren, who ran a tea stall, fell from barge No. 07 and drowned. The death was ruled accidental.
His twenty-year-old daughter, Cheng Yan, refused to sign the papers.
She spread out the blue cloth ledger her father had left behind and resewed the hidden lining around a piece of paper marked with three horizontal lines and a circle.
Her father had kept track of tea tabs his whole life, but he had never made a mark like that.
From that day on, Cheng Yan began keeping a different kind of account: who owed her father a life, who had erased a zero from the ledger, and who had taken money at his funeral.
Twenty years. One ledger. One person.
The accounts are being settled.
This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.
