BRING YOUR MOTHER.
The mirror cleared, but Martin continued looking at the place where the sentence had been.
The storeroom became small and ordinary again: damp cardboard, an old cable sagging in one corner, four security feeds in which Hannah Teoh did not exist. Her twelve exported clips still occupied Evelyn's directory. Every file was zero bytes.
Evelyn packed the mirrored menu stands away. “Call her.”
There was no need to ask whom she meant.
Clara Tan answered on the sixth ring. Television news played behind her, repeating Tianheng's safety demonstration. The applause sounded thin through the phone.
“At this hour?” she asked.
“Have you heard of Wing On Watch Repair?”
Her end went quiet. Not the quiet of someone searching her memory. The television continued and water ran into a sink, but Clara missed one breath.
“Number seventeen, the rear lane off Jalan Sultan,” Martin added.
“That shop closed years ago.” The answer came too quickly.
“You've been there?”
“No.”
“How do you know it closed?”
The tap finally stopped. Clara lowered the television and asked whether he had begun digging through his father's old belongings again. Before Martin answered, she said, “Don't take me there.”
It was the first time she had refused something he had not yet proposed.
Evelyn heard it. She kept her distance from the phone and entered Clara's exact words and the time in the black notebook.
“Someone told me to bring you,” Martin said.
“Who?”
“Hannah Teoh.”
Crockery touched at the other end. Clara did not ask who Hannah was. She did not say the name meant nothing to her. She only repeated, “Don't come for me tonight.”
The call ended.
Martin watched his screen go dark. His mother had given him three answers: the shop was closed, she had never gone there, and she would not go back. Only one could be true.
“We check the location first,” he said.
“That wasn't the instruction.”
“I'm not taking her into an unknown shop.”
Evelyn closed the notebook. “You're choosing the safe route for her.”
Martin did not argue. Tianheng also had reasonable language for protecting people without consent. The difference was one of scale, not grammar.
He still did not go to fetch Clara.
The choice was his. So would be its consequences.
They left the coffee shop at 9:17. Shutters were descending throughout the old quarter, although the eating shops remained hard and white with light. Folding tables crowded the five-foot way. Rainwater carried vegetable leaves, ash and a crushed number ticket along the drain.
The rear lane off Jalan Sultan was narrower than the map suggested. Number fifteen stored prayer goods. A signless hotel occupied the floor above number nineteen. Between them stood a brick wall pasted with demolition notices.
Martin counted the turns he had taken instead of the doors in front of him.
Right from the stopped clock. Through the entrance marked twenty-four. Seven paces to the sixth pillar, then left. The route ended at a half-lowered metal shutter set into the wall. There was no number, but two older characters—Wing On—showed beneath the blue paint.
Evelyn aimed her torch across the fascia. One section was cleaner than the rest. A wooden board reading WATCH REPAIR had once hung there.
The shutter would not lift. Beside it sat a bell with no button, only a flat brass plate stamped with an open book and a page missing from its centre.
Martin pressed his palm to the brass.
Dozens of small ticking sounds started behind the wall. Not one clock but many, waking at different distances. The sound travelled left to right through the brick and stopped beneath his hand.
A narrow opening appeared without a sound.
The man inside looked first at Martin's hands, his soles and the cuffs of his shirt. Then he considered Evelyn, half a step behind.
He was in his sixties. Dark-blue sleeve guards covered his forearms, and a watchmaker's loupe remained clipped over his left eye.
“How many?” he asked.
“Two,” Martin said.
The watchmaker glanced into the empty lane behind them. “The message named three.”
Evelyn left Martin to explain.
“She refused to come.”
“Did you ask whether she was willing, or decide this place was unsafe for her?”
Martin said nothing.
The man removed his loupe. “Come in. One person missing means one fewer form of proof. That isn't punishment. It's the gap you brought with you.”
Behind the shutter was a passage narrow enough to turn them sideways. The real shop occupied the far side of the brick wall. Dismantled movements, yellowed straps and gears in folded paper packets filled the cabinets. Every clock was slow by a different amount.
A ledger lay open on the counter. It had no field for names, only three questions: Whom do you remember today? What makes you believe they existed? Who can show that your memory has not changed?
The watchmaker made them power down their phones and place them in a lead-lined box. Amir's black screen still displayed one bar of impossible signal. It vanished only when the lid closed.
Beyond the counter was a room wider than the storefront could account for.
Eleven people sat at three scarred tables. No uniforms, insignia or matching colours joined them. A bus driver mended the cuff of his shirt. A young woman divided tablets into seven compartments. A schoolboy copied addresses in careful capitals. The room smelled of clock oil, coffee and medicated balm.
At half past nine, a clock without a face struck once.
Everyone stopped.
They turned towards one another in pairs and began to recite.
“Melissa Koh. My sister. Forty-two. She can't click the fingers of her left hand and she hates papaya. At seven this morning I still remembered her.”
“I confirm you said the same yesterday. She won't eat papaya, but she always cuts it for you.”
“Hamid Salleh. My husband. Air-conditioning repairman. Old injury in his right knee. He lowers his head before he laughs. At three this afternoon, I lost the sound of his voice.”
“I confirm that you still leave an extra pair of slippers beside the door.”
Each pair received one minute. They did not praise the missing. They recited small, inconvenient facts: bitten nails, a fear of cats, unpaid loans, the noise someone made over soup. Desire could manufacture a perfect person. Annoyance usually required a real relationship.
When the recitations ended, everyone inspected the wrists of their partners.
Some wrote dates in stubborn ink. Some tied a different colour of thread each day. Others drew short lines beside old scars. A mark proved no memory true. It proved only that yesterday's self had asked today's self to investigate again.
At the end of one table, the young woman abruptly insisted that Melissa's burn scar crossed the web of her right hand. Her verifier shook her head. Left hand. Neither argued, and no one called a vote.
The watchmaker gave them matching envelopes and asked each to draw the scar. A third custodian unlocked the previous week's physical record. The old diagram marked the left hand. The photograph made it appear on the right.
“Neither memory failed,” the watchmaker said. “We forgot the photograph had been mirrored.”
They circled the discrepancy in red and erased nothing. If all three records diverged again tomorrow, they would suspend that detail rather than allow one confident error to spread through trust.
Every person in the room completed two checks a day. Some had lost jobs because of it. Some had been cut off by families who thought them ill. Remembering did not restore a relationship for free. They fed the gap with time, reputation and the ordinary shape of their lives.
The schoolboy wore seven blue lines on his wrist. The bus driver opposite him had only seven, although his stitching left an eighth space in the cuff.
“Who did you forget today?” the boy asked.
The driver lowered his head. “I don't know.”
The boy did not offer a name. He placed three things on the table: a bus ticket, a handwritten account, and a photograph in which two people stood an inexplicable distance apart. At the third item, the driver's right hand went automatically to his breast pocket.
“Arif,” he said. “He always pushed his ticket into my pocket.”
The boy added an eighth line to the driver's wrist. A woman at the next table signed beside it.
No single object had restored the man. A ticket could be misplaced. Testimony could be rewritten. A bodily habit could have another cause. Three incomplete forms of evidence constrained one another and kept a name in the room for one more day.
“This is the Missing Page Society?” Evelyn asked.
The watchmaker shook his head. “Missing Page is what other people call us. We have no membership cards. We don't promise to remember.”
“What do you promise?”
“That before somebody is forgotten completely, at least two people will notice the page is gone.”
He pushed an empty record across the table.
Martin entered Hannah Teoh. In the relationship field he hesitated, then wrote: subject of investigation; companion.
For evidence he listed the black notebook, Ian Cheong's memory, the route recovered from the mirror and the encrypted package on Amir's phone. He named Evelyn as verifier.
The watchmaker read it without declaring it sufficient. “Does she take sugar in her coffee?”
Martin did not know.
“Which stroke does she make first when she writes?”
He did not know that either.
“When she's angry, does she raise her voice or become quieter?”
Again, nothing.
The watchmaker returned the page. “You've proved an anomaly. You haven't proved this person.”
It was more precise than denial. Martin had traced Hannah's accounts, routes, work number and erased relationships. He knew almost nothing of how she had lived between those records.
Evelyn took the pen and added one line beneath the evidence: She refused to leave a delivery rider carrying a second risk. She placed the file with people who could choose.
“That's an interpretation,” the watchmaker said.
“It's a choice she made.”
He studied Evelyn, then filed the page in a drawer.
“Has Hannah been here?” Martin asked.
“The answer changes by the day.”
“What do you remember today?”
The watchmaker rolled back one sleeve guard. Three dates were written along his forearm. Beside each was the same small Chinese character from Hannah's given name.
“Today, I remember.”
“Why did she tell us to bring my mother?”
“Because some relationships cannot be proved by one person's memory.”
He offered nothing more. Instead, he led them through a door hung with trays of spare parts. Cork lined the corridor beyond. The ticking vanished, and every footstep became unnaturally soft.
Narrow cabinets ran along both sides. Each compartment held three things: an object, another person's account, and a record of bodily habit or action. Labels were rewritten every day. The old ones were never discarded; they hung by date from lengths of cotton.
Some names shortened day by day. Others had grown from a single character back into full names.
Martin found Hannah's compartment.
There was no photograph. It held a red pen emptied of ink, a page torn from a school communication book, and a medical note recording an old injury to her right ring finger. Today's label still carried the whole of Hannah Teoh.
“Where are the photographs?”
“Photographs are very good at persuading us we've seen everything,” the watchmaker said. “So we keep them for last.”
A curtain closed the far end of the corridor. The watchmaker asked Martin to say his father's name three times before they crossed it.
“Why my father?”
“Your mother isn't here. We have to enter through a relationship you did bring.”
“Victor Tan,” Martin said.
The first time, it was only a name.
The second time, he remembered how his father had scored the crossbar of every handwritten 7.
The third time, he tasted the cheap bitter coffee sold near a repair shop when he was a child. The memory held no image, only Victor's hand pushing a sugar packet away.
The watchmaker drew the curtain.
Hundreds of photographs covered the wall: identity portraits, wedding snapshots, family groups, blurred security stills. Some people remained whole. Some had been reduced to a shoulder. Other pictures contained spaces too wide for their compositions. Slips of paper hung beneath every photograph, crowded with dates of recitation.
Martin looked first for Hannah.
Evelyn stopped at the far left. She did not call him. She moved her torch onto a fading black-and-white print.
The man in the photograph was younger than Martin remembered. He wore Wing On's dark-blue apron and held a dismantled clock in his left hand. Beneath the print, different hands had rewritten the same name two hundred and seventy-three times.
The most recent entry was from that morning.
Martin read the name.
Victor Tan.
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