She thought he chose to leave. He thought she knew the truth. Neither of them knew about the letter sitting undelivered in a drawer for seven years.

Between Two Lifetimes Episode# 4: She Never Got the Letter

He wrote everything down. He trusted the wrong person to deliver it. And she waited two hours and fourteen minutes for a man who was already gone.

Photo by Life on the road on Unsplash

A serialised love story. Episode 4 of 15. Start from Episode 1 if you’re new here. Links are provided at the end.

Recap of Episode 3:

In Episode 3, Meilin and Wei Chen found themselves in the same restaurant on the night of her engagement dinner. Two tables apart. She passed his table on the way to the powder room. He said her name. She stopped. She told him to bring the truth on Thursday. Then she went back to her fiancé and smiled through the rest of the evening.

Today, the truth begins to surface.

If you missed Episode 3, read it here first. — link

[embed]Between Two Lifetimes Episode #3: The Engagement Dinner He was two tables away. She had nowhere to run. And the word fiancé had never felt so heavy in her mouth.medium.com

Shanghai. Present day. Thursday. 1:58 p.m.

She was at her desk when her assistant knocked.

“The two o’clock is here, Ms Lin.”

Meilin closed the proposal she had not been reading for the last forty minutes. She straightened the pen on her desk. She looked at the window, at the grey sky, at the rain that had started again this morning and showed no sign of stopping.

Then she said, “Send him in.”

The door opened.

Wei Chen stepped into her office and stopped. She stood. For a moment, neither of them said anything. The city went about its business outside. Somewhere down the corridor, a phone rang and was answered.

She had prepared things to say. Arranged them carefully, the way she arranged everything. But before she could say any of them, he reached into the inside pocket of his coat and took out an envelope. Old, worn at the corners, the paper softened with age and handling. He crossed the room and set it on the desk between them.

He didn’t explain. He didn’t apologise. He just looked at her steadily and said:

“Read this first. Before either of us says anything.” A pause. “Please.”

She looked at the envelope.

She looked at him.

She sat down, reached forward, and picked it up.

She began to read.

Seven years ago. December. Three weeks before he disappeared.

The letter took Wei Chen four days to write.

Not because he struggled with words. He had always been precise, the kind of person who said exactly what he meant and nothing more. But this was different. This was the kind of thing you could not take back once it was said, and so he sat with it across four evenings at his desk in his rented room in Jing’an, the city loud and indifferent outside, and he wrote and crossed out and began again until what remained on the page was as close to the truth as he knew how to get.

He told her everything.

About his father’s debt. The full amount of it, the kind of number that kept you awake at night. About the men his father owed it to, who were not the kind of men you reported to banks or police. About the arrangement that had been proposed by a powerful man named Guo Bingwen. Wei Chen would leave Shanghai and go to work for Guo Bingwen in the south. In return, the debt would be cleared, and his family would be safe. His mother. His sister Yuna is seventeen years old and in her final year of school.

He told her he had said no at first.

He wanted her to know that that his first answer had been no.

He told her what had changed his answer.

He told her he was leaving on the twenty-third of December. That he would be at Hongqiao Station at six in the evening, that if she came, he would find another way, he didn’t know what way, but he would find it, he would walk away from the whole arrangement before he left without seeing her face and telling her that he was sorry and that she was the best thing in his twenty-six years and that he loved her. Which he had never said aloud. Which he was saying now in ink because he was afraid of the important things and had always been.

He sealed the envelope.

He gave it to Yuna.

Seven years ago. December. Yuna. Age seventeen.

She had not meant to read it.

The envelope had not been sealed properly. Wei Chen had always been careless with his hands, all that precision in his mind and none of it in the small physical things. The flap had come loose in her bag on the metro, and she had opened it only to reseal it. That was what she told herself.

She read the whole letter standing on the platform at Zhongshan Park station, commuters flowing around her like a river around a stone.

She stood there for a long time.

She thought about what would happen if Meilin came to the station. She thought about her brother’s face when he talked about Meilin, that helpless, unguarded openness she had never seen in him before, because Wei Chen had always been the careful one, the one who held everything together while their father fell apart.

She thought about Guo Bingwen. She had answered enough of the phone calls, had seen enough of her mother’s face in the mornings, to understand what kind of man he was. If Wei Chen didn’t go, Guo Bingwen would find another way to collect what he was owed. And Yuna had a very clear idea of what that other way might look like.

She stood on the platform until the thought completed itself fully.

Then she put the letter back in her bag. She pressed the flap flat with the edge of her student ID card.

She never delivered it.

She told herself it was protection. She believed that, mostly, for seven years. The way you can believe something that saves you from the alternative. The alternative being that she was seventeen years old and frightened, and she had made a catastrophic decision and handed her brother’s whole life to it.

Seven years ago. December 23rd. Hongqiao Station. 6:00 p.m.

Meilin arrived at ten minutes to six.

She had dressed carefully. She told herself she had not dressed carefully, but she had tried on three things and settled on the grey coat, the one he had said once made her look like someone out of a film. She had worn her hair down. She arrived ten minutes early because she did not want to look like she had been waiting.

She waited.

6:15. 6:30. The crowds moved and thinned. Trains departed. She watched the doors. She called his number at 7:08. Eight rings, then voicemail. She called again at 7:15 and 7:22.

Voicemail both times.

She put her phone in her pocket.

She looked at the doors for four more minutes.

Then she walked to the taxi rank, got in a cab, and gave her address in a voice that was completely steady. She looked out the window the whole way home. She did not cry that night, which she was proud of then and ashamed of later, because the crying came eventually. It came for months. In the 2 a.m. silences, she still woke up inside. In the rain that this city never seemed to run out of.

She spent seven years believing the simple, terrible version. That he had chosen to go. That she had not been enough to make him stay.

It was a clean story.

It was made entirely of the wrong material.

Shanghai. Present day. Thursday. 2:34 p.m.

She read the letter twice.

The first time, quickly, her eyes moved faster than her understanding. The second time, slowly, every sentence, his handwriting was familiar in the way a piece of music is familiar when you haven’t heard it in years. Your body recognises it before your mind admits it.

When she finished, she set the letter down on the desk carefully, as though it were something that could still break.

Wei Chen had not moved.

“Yuna,” she said. Not a question.

“I found out six months ago,” he said. “She told me herself.” Something moved across his face, not quite anger, not quite grief, but the complicated place where the two things meet when you love someone who has hurt you and cannot stop loving them. “She has been carrying it for a long time.”

Meilin thought about a girl of seventeen standing on a metro platform with an open letter in her hands. She tried to feel only anger and found it there, real and present. But behind it, quieter and more uncomfortable, was something that felt almost like understanding.

She did not want to understand. Not yet.

“Why didn’t you come back?” she said. “After. When you were free.”

“I tried.” He said it simply. “The first time was three years after I left. I came to your old firm, and they said you had gone. No forwarding address.” A pause. “The second time was two years after that. I found you. I stood outside this building for an hour.”

She stared at him.

“You were with someone,” he said. “Coming out of the lobby. Laughing. You looked settled. Like you had built something real.” He held her gaze. “I told myself it would be selfish to walk back in.”

“That was not your decision to make,” she said quietly.

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t. I know that. I came back anyway because not telling you became worse than telling you. Even if it changes nothing.” His eyes moved briefly to her left hand, to the ring. “Even if it is too late.”

The rain pressed against the window.

She looked at the letter on the desk between them.

She looked at him.

“I need time,” she said. “I cannot do this right now. I need to think.”

“I know,” he said.

“You cannot just walk in here after seven years and hand me all of this and expect — “

“I know,” he said again. Gently. Without defence. Just receiving everything she was giving him, the way he always had, like he believed she had every right to it, and he would stand here all day if that was what she needed.

She pressed her fingers to her temple.

“The Henderson account,” she said. “Your company is the client?”

“Yes.”

“Then we will need to meet. Regularly. Professionally.” She looked at him steadily. “Can you do that?”

He understood what she was asking. She could see him understand it.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then I will have my assistant schedule the first working session for next week.” She straightened the letter on her desk without looking at it. “And Wei Chen.” She met his eyes. “What you told me today stays in this room.”

He nodded once.

He picked up his coat. At the door, he stopped without turning around.

“For what it’s worth,” he said quietly, “you were worth finding another way. I just didn’t know then that other ways existed.” A beat. “I know now.”

He left.

She sat alone in her office for a long time. The letter is on the desk. The rain on the window. The city was going about its business as though nothing had happened.

She supposed that, to the city, nothing had.

To her, everything had.

Teaser into Episode 5:

Next episode, Wei Chen becomes Meilin’s client.

They must sit across the same table every week and call it professional.

And Zhou Hao walks into the room at exactly the wrong moment and shakes the hand of the man he has been watching for eight months.

Episode 5: Between Two Lifetimes — The Same Company. Coming Monday.

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If you missed previous episodes, please click below.

[embed]Between Two Lifetimes Episode #3: The Engagement Dinner He was two tables away. She had nowhere to run. And the word fiancé had never felt so heavy in her mouth.medium.com

[embed]Between Two Lifetimes Episode #2: What the Rain Remembers Before the silence, before the station, before the seven years — there was a rainy night, a borrowed umbrella, and a…medium.com

[embed]Episode #1: Between Two Lifetimes — The Man at the Door She had spent seven years building a life without him. He walked back in on a rainy afternoon and said he owed her the…medium.com

[embed]Love Stories I Created in Silence A weekly serial story (Between Two Lifetimes) inspired by childhood memories, imagination, and the love stories I once…medium.com