Eight Hours Offline

At 3:17 p.m. that afternoon, I entered a tunnel under construction deep in the Qinling Mountains. As a communications engineer, I needed to test signal coverage on the newly opened stretch of road. The signal bars on my phone went from three to one, then vanished completely.

I knew that for the next eight hours, I would be cut off from the world.

The tunnel was so long that it took me twenty minutes to reach the test site. When I finished work and prepared to head back, a loose slab of rock came crashing down, not on me, but onto the cable box twenty meters behind me. Sparks flew, and the tunnel plunged into darkness.

The backup power kept the lights on, but the communications equipment was completely out of order. All I could do was wait for the crew aboveground to notice something was wrong and come to rescue me. During those eight hours without a signal, with only the headlamp on my hard hat and a phone that couldn't receive a single message, I began thinking back over the years.

I remembered the look in his eyes that morning as I left, as if he wanted to say something but couldn't. I remembered how he'd been working late more and more often and growing increasingly distracted over the past six months. I remembered the perfume on his shirt last week, a scent that wasn't mine.

In the darkness, I made a decision: once I got out, I would listen to whatever he had to say.

But I never imagined that during the eight hours I was out of contact, he would think I wasn't coming back. So when the rescue team pulled me out of the tunnel at one in the morning, the moment I turned on my phone, I saw the messages he'd sent:

Eighty-seven WeChat messages, thirteen text messages, and twenty-one missed calls.

His last message had been sent at 12:37 a.m.:

"Since you already know, I won't hide it from you. I've been with her for three years..."