Looking for scissors in the tea tin, Xu Lan touched the letter first.
The envelope's edges had worn white. A corner still held tape from ten years ago. Under the lamp were the same name and address: no stamp, a carefully pressed seal.
Her assistant asked whether it was secondhand stock too.
“Not for sale.”
He separated it from the scissors and went back to unpacking books.
The used-book shop had moved twice: first from behind a cinema, with damp walls and a small winter heater; then from beside a market, where vegetable leaves accumulated on the step. Now it occupied a second floor, its entrance invisible from the street.
Xu Lan numbered moving boxes and still lost things: a binding awl, old magazines missing their final issue, the blue stamp from her opening year. The letter remained. She had done nothing special beyond moving the tin whenever she cleared the counter.
Its owner was a young woman sheltering from heavy rain. She bought a book and tried fitting the envelope inside. It protruded, so she took it out again.
“Larger paper bag?” Xu Lan offered.
“No. I'm going out for a moment. Could you keep this here?”
New to the business and afraid of seeming unhelpful, Xu Lan put it beneath the cashbook.
“Tomorrow,” the woman said.
After the rain she left. Xu Lan later forgot her face, remembering only a bent umbrella rib she had to straighten by hand.
Tomorrow passed, then a week. Xu Lan sent a notice to the envelope's address saying only that an item awaited its owner. It returned with an official mark. She stored the notice and letter together.
Someone suggested opening it for contact details. She did not. As work grew, it became an object encountered during tidying, neither constantly remembered nor thrown away.
This autumn the stairwell light failed. A woman climbed through the dark and asked whether the shop used to be behind the cinema.
“Long ago.”
“I asked in three shops downstairs.”
Her hair was short. Creases marked the corner of her canvas bag. She circled the shelves, picked up a book, put it down.
“There was a red rack outside.”
“Broke. This one's newer.”
The woman nodded, looking at the counter. “Do you keep things from a very long time ago?”
Xu Lan looked toward the tin. The scissors still lay beside it.
“What sort of thing?”
“A brown envelope. No stamp. I said I'd come tomorrow.”
Xu Lan did not hand it over immediately. She asked the name on the envelope and which book had held it.
The woman hesitated over the title, then corrected herself. “No, the one beside it. I changed because that one was too small.”
She remembered rain, the heater, and Xu Lan drying a wet art book. Their memories gradually matched. Xu Lan set the letter and returned notice on the counter.
The woman touched the envelope, turned it over, and exhaled at the intact seal.
“I thought it would be gone.”
Xu Lan nearly said she might have come sooner. Instead: “Would you like to sit?”
The assistant cleared books from the only customer chair, revealing faded fabric. The woman sat with the letter in her lap.
“How much?”
“For what?”
“Keeping it.”
“Never charged for that.”
Did she need to buy books? Only if she wanted to read them, Xu Lan said.
No other customers came. When the assistant left for lunch and shut the door, traffic sounded farther away. The woman rubbed the seal without opening it.
“I didn't do the same work then,” she said.
Xu Lan did not ask what she did now.
“A colleague took responsibility for something for me. When I left, I didn't explain properly. Later I wrote so many drafts.” She smiled down. “Never posted it.”
Xu Lan had imagined love letters, apologies, messages home, even a misplaced bill. Those guesses no longer mattered.
“Is she still there?”
“No. I found her a few days ago.”
“You can send it now, then.”
The woman looked at the old address without answering.
Halfway through boiling water, Xu Lan heard her ask for a knife. She fetched a letter opener, then paused. “You want to open it now?”
“Yes.”
Paper made a fine sound in the quiet shop. The woman read the first page, turned to the second, returned to the first. She searched her bag for glasses. A receipt fell from the case; Xu Lan picked it up.
“I remembered writing this rather well.”
Xu Lan waited with the water.
“It's all about how hard things were for me.”
She folded back the last page, briefly exposing the first lines, then covered them. Xu Lan did not read.
“I could write that,” the woman said, negotiating with herself. “But it shouldn't be all I write.”
She drank after the water cooled, folded the pages as before, and returned them to the old envelope. She neither tore them nor put them in the shop's recycling.
“Do you sell writing paper?”
Three types stood by the window, one with pale flowers. She chose the plainest and two envelopes.
Paying, she asked where to write a new address clearly. Xu Lan pointed out the place, without choosing a posting day for her.
The assistant returned to an empty chair and began replacing the books.
“Collected?”
“Yes.”
“People really do come back.”
Xu Lan wiped the letter opener and put it away. With one thing missing from the tin, the scissors could finally lie flat.
At dusk she replaced the stairwell bulb. Coming upstairs, she noticed a fresh-looking scrape on the rail—perhaps the woman's bag clasp, perhaps older. She left it.
At the door she put a book on the chair, considered it, and took it away again.