We Live Inside Someone Else's Walls

On the first day Lin Wu moved in, she asked Zhou Ye, "Has anyone ever died in this room?"

Zhou Ye said he didn't know.

Three days later, someone really did die downstairs.

The deceased was Xu Linchuan, the previous tenant of this rental. The landlord said he'd gone back to his hometown to get married long ago, but Zhou Ye gradually found things he had left behind beneath the bed frame, inside the mirrored cabinet, and in the cracks in the wall. An old subway ticket, a photograph, half a bottle of perfume, and a group photo so faded it had begun to lose its color.

The person in the photo was Lin Wu.

At first, she said she barely knew him. Later, she changed her story and said he was her ex-boyfriend.

But after someone dies, the lies told by those still alive take shape, little by little.

Zhou Ye had only wanted a quiet life. He was twenty-eight, writing stories for other people at an advertising agency. After work, he came back to this rental, with its moldy walls, refrigerator door that opened only halfway, and window that always had someone else's laundry hanging outside, and thought this was probably all life had to offer. But Lin Wu was like a rainstorm that never quite stopped, barging into his life with a broken suitcase, boxes she never fully unpacked, and a habit of always being ready to leave.

They paid rent together, fought over the bathroom, ate instant noodles in the middle of the night, and shared ice cream from the freezer when the power went out and it was about to melt. And on an increasing number of nights when they should not have crossed the line, they began making a home of a place that belonged to neither of them.

But the thing Lin Wu was best at in life was leaving before anyone had a chance to ask her to stay.

Only later did Zhou Ye learn that Xu Linchuan wasn't the person she had described, that the fall from the building was far more complicated than he'd thought, and that he himself was gradually stepping into another