Disconnected for Eight Hours

At 3:17 that afternoon, I walked into a tunnel under construction deep in the Qinling Mountains. As a communications engineer, I need to detect signal coverage on newly opened road segments. The mobile phone signal bar changed from three bars to one bar, and finally disappeared completely. I knew that for the next eight hours I would be cut off from the rest of the world. The tunnel is so deep that it took me twenty minutes to reach the testing point. When I finished my work and was about to return, a loose rock slab came crashing down—not on me, but on the cable box twenty meters behind me. Sparks flew and the tunnel was plunged into darkness. Backup power kept the lights on, but communications equipment was completely disabled. I can only wait for the ground personnel to find something abnormal and come to the rescue. During these eight hours without signal, I relied on a headlamp on a helmet and a mobile phone that could not receive any messages, and began to reminisce about these years. I remembered the look in his eyes that hesitated to speak when he went out this morning. Thinking of the past six months, he has been working more and more overtime and being absent-minded. Thinking of the scent of perfume that wasn't mine on his shirt last week. In the darkness, I decided that no matter what he had to say when I got out, I would listen. But what I didn't expect was that during the eight hours I lost contact, he thought I would never come back. So, when the rescue team rescued me from the tunnel at one o'clock in the morning, the moment I turned on my phone, I saw the message he sent—— Eighty-seven WeChat messages, thirteen text messages, and twenty-one missed calls. The last message was sent at 00:37: "Since you already know, I won't hide it from you. I have been with her for three years...