International Plane Ticket Folder: Ah Yu received a plane ticket from Lin Wanqing, with a note inside: "Go after the person who fills up your phone's photo album."

The wind in Tibet, carrying snowflakes, lashed against the wooden windowpanes, making a soft, crackling sound. Ah Yu squatted by the fire pit, adding firewood; the flames licked at the pine logs, warming his profile. Across the fire pit, Zhong Hua was curled up in a wool blanket, flipping through an old photo album. As his fingertips traced a particular photograph, he suddenly let out a soft "Eh."

"What are you looking at?" Ah Yu threw a cypress branch into the fire, and the smoke carrying the scent of pine resin spread out.

Zhong Hua held up the photo album: "Look at this one—last year at the Gu Group's annual meeting, Lin Wanqing secretly switched our wine glasses. What you were drinking was actually my juice." The crystal chandelier in the photo was dazzling. Zhong Hua was wearing a champagne-colored dress and was being cornered by Gu Yanting. Not far away, Ah Yu was holding a wine glass, and the lipstick stain on the glass was clearly Zhong Hua's usual mauve color.

Ah Yu's Adam's apple bobbed. That party felt like a hazy dream. He remembered the resistance in Zhong Hua's eyes when Gu Yanting grabbed his arm, and he remembered clenching his fists, wanting to rush over, but being stopped by Lin Wanqing. "Don't rush," she whispered in his ear at the time, "Some plays have to be played out by herself."

Looking back now, Lin Wanqing was always like that. She seemed to be an outsider, but she saw right through everyone's thoughts.

Zhong Hua suddenly coughed, probably from the smoke. Ah Yu quickly got up and opened the window, letting in a rush of cold air mixed with the sound of prayer flags fluttering in the distance. He casually picked up his coat from the back of the chair and draped it over her shoulders. When his fingertips touched the back of her neck, she flinched as if burned.

"Does it still hurt?" he asked.

She shook her head and placed the photo album face down on her lap: "The doctor said I'm recovering very well and will be able to go down the mountain next week."

Ah Yu didn't reply. These past two weeks in Tibet had been like a stretched cotton thread, simple yet resilient. Every morning, she accompanied Zhong Hua on a walk along the prayer wheel path, watching her tie red ropes to the copper rings of the prayer wheels, their redness like flames in the snow; in the afternoon, she would sit in front of the wooden house basking in the sun, listening to her talk about the interview drafts that hadn't been published yet. When she got excited, she would unconsciously touch her chest—where a recording pen used to be clipped, but it was lost in a mudslide; in the evening, while he boiled water to wash vegetables, she would sit by the stove peeling garlic, the garlic skin sticking to her fingertips, which she would always wipe on his nose when he turned away.

These fleeting moments, like pebbles thrown into a still lake, rippled outwards. Ah Yu would occasionally pull out his phone to capture them, but when the lens was pointed at her, something always felt off. Until one morning, he saw Zhong Hua standing under prayer flags, looking up at the snow, tiny snowflakes clinging to her eyelashes. The photo preview that automatically popped up on his phone showed almost entirely pictures of her from the last three months—her pale face when she woke up in the ICU, her profile as she sat at a snow-capped mountain pass eating a barley cake, the stray hairs blowing in the wind as she tied a red string…

It turns out that there were some concerns that had been hidden behind the camera all along, without even being noticed by themselves.

“Oh, right,” Zhong Hua suddenly remembered something, “the postman down the mountain said yesterday that you had an international express package, it seems to have been sent from France.”

Ah Yu was stunned. France? Besides Lin Wanqing, he couldn't think of anyone else who would send things from there. Ever since Gu Yanting's suicide note was exposed and the real culprit was caught, Lin Wanqing had completely cut off contact. The lawyer said she had given up all of Gu's inheritance, taken her passport to Paris, and that someone had seen her in the refugee camp, saying she had cut her hair short, was wearing a faded windbreaker, and smiled brighter than the sun when distributing bread to the children.

He got up and rummaged through the wooden shelf by the door. Sure enough, among a pile of yak cheese and medicinal herbs, he found a kraft paper envelope with the Eiffel Tower printed on it. The edges of the envelope were worn, clearly indicating that it had traveled a long distance. The stamp had three postmarks, indicating that it had traveled from Paris to Beijing, then to Chengdu, and finally arrived at this small wooden house deep in the Tibetan region.

Ah Yu's fingers trembled slightly as she opened the envelope. What fell out wasn't a letter, but two neatly folded plane tickets—Paris to Beijing, then a connecting flight to Chengdu, with the return date blank and the departure date three days later.

"Who sent it?" Zhong Hua leaned closer to look, his gaze landing on the handwritten signature in the upper right corner of the ticket. "Lin Wanqing?"

Ah Yu didn't speak, his fingertips tracing the name on the plane ticket. Lin Wanqing's handwriting was always like this, sharp strokes, yet with a gentle curve at the end, just like her—seemingly resolute, but always leaving room for others. He gently shook the plane ticket, and a folded note slipped out from the fold and landed on the wool blanket by the fire pit.

Zhong Hua bent down to pick it up, and when he saw the words on it, he suddenly held his breath.

The note was a coaster from a Parisian café, with light brown coffee stains printed on the edge, and a line written in pen: "Go after the person who fills up your phone's photo album."

Ah Yu's heart clenched as if struck by something. He instinctively reached for his phone in his pocket. The screen was lit up, displaying the photo album—the latest picture was taken this morning. Zhong Hua was squatting in the snow feeding a lame Tibetan mastiff, her scarf slipped down to her shoulder, revealing a small patch of pale neck. Sunlight fell on the top of her hair, like a layer of gold dust.

When did he collect so many photos of her? From her sleeping face with an oxygen tube in the ICU, to her hand covered in mud but tightly clutching a ginkgo leaf specimen after the mudslide, to the fine lines at the corners of her eyes when she smiled during these days in Tibet, to the corners of her mouth pursed when she frowned in thought... It turns out that those moments he deliberately ignored had already been quietly recorded by the camera.

“She…” Zhong Hua’s voice was a little hoarse, “How did she know…”

Ah Yu looked up at her. Zhong Hua's cheeks were flushed red by the firelight, her eyelashes drooping like a startled butterfly. He suddenly remembered that on the road to recovery in the snowy mountains, when she tied a red string to a prayer wheel, he had secretly tied the same one next to her. It was very windy then, and the red string was tangled in the wind. He thought she hadn't seen it, but later, when he was tidying up her backpack, he found a red string that had been broken by the wind tucked into her notebook, exactly the same as the one he had tied.

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