On the night she was called in for a layoff meeting, 38-year-old Shanghai advertising director Shen Li received news that her father had been hospitalized with a cerebral infarction. During the seventy-two hours she spent back in Suizhou caring for him, she pieced together the truth about her family, misunderstood for seventeen years, one layer at a time through her father's old phone, her mother's diary, a creditor's IOU, and accounts from his coworkers: "Xiaoman," the name her father called out while unconscious, was her mother's nickname; the "lost contact" in 2010 was actually her father being gravely injured and left near death while saving a coworker, a fact her dying mother had arranged to keep from the family; and the debt wasn't a bad loan, but the cost of her mother's treatment that her father had shouldered alone.
