When Lin Xiaotang woke up, the spicy taste of last night's hot pot still lingered in her mouth. She rolled over and reached for the phone on her bedside table. Its screen was blindingly bright. It was 7:43 in the morning, and her alarm hadn't gone off yet. Out of habit, she opened WeChat. The first post in her feed was a nine-photo collage from her best friend, Zhou Yu, tagged at Jiefangbei in Chongqing, with the caption “Hot pot.” Tsk, out eating again, Lin Xiaotang muttered as she was about to hit Like. Then her finger froze. She clearly remembered Zhou Yu saying yesterday that she was working overtime and couldn't finish the project, and hadn't even eaten dinner.
Lin Xiaotang sat up and rubbed her temples. Something was stirring in her mind, like fragments of a memory trying to break through. She closed her eyes and tried to seize the images: the hot pot's crimson, oily broth, Zhou Yu's face as she gasped from the spice, and the man sitting beside her. A man?
Lin Xiaotang's eyes flew open. She didn't know the man, but in her memory he was sitting right next to Zhou Yu, wearing a dark blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms. An old-fashioned mechanical watch was on his wrist.
She had never seen that watch before.
“Xiaotang! Are you up yet?” her mother called from outside the door. “Get up, or the buns will get cold!”
