Tuesday, 9:02 a.m. An image arrived from a Shanghai number I didn't have in my contacts. No hello, no name, no question mark. A screenshot, and nothing after it.
The interface was in French. That's how I recognised it before I'd even read it: the menus in that language I learned for the pleasure of it, the time in the top right-hand corner, 10:51 p.m., and the contact's name. She had saved him as "Lukas Voss". First name and surname, like a supplier. In my own phone, he is called Lukas Voss. It was that line that did something to me, not what came after.
What came after was a sentence in Chinese, and under the sentence the grey line that says a message has been recalled. She was sending it to me without a word because she couldn't read it herself. She had chosen her translator well: in this story, that's me.