Weiran had made himself comfortable on his bed. He’d ordered a couple of croissants at some point and had them lined up on the nightstand next to him, but it didn’t look like he’d touched any of them, nor did it look like he’d touched the latte he’d ordered either. He looked up when Xingyu came in with this question and a plastic bag of takeout, a little startled. “I don’t have the—”

“It’s not about that.” Xingyu reached into his back pocket and pulled out the stack of photographs he’d taken from Xiao-Xiao’s room. “Look at these. You took photography classes, so you can say something about them, right?”

“You came here because of my photography skills? I’m not actually good at photography,” said Weiran. “You know that, right?”

“Just look at them.”

“Fine.” Weiran accepted them and started flipping through. His brow furrowed. “Where did you get these?”

“Can you tell me about them?”

“I mean…I guess I could speculate. There’s a lot of talk about how photographs are the windows to the soul or whatever, but I was never good at doing what we were all theorizing about.”

“What about this person’s soul?”

Weiran paused on one photograph of an empty hallway. It was beautiful, as far as Liu Xingyu could tell—it looked long and endless despite Liu Xingyu knowing exactly where it was and knowing that it only went on for about fifty paces. Sunlight streamed in through the windows and littered the paneled wooden floors with geometric patterns. “Do you remember what your brother’s feedback was for me? When he saw my photographs in the gallery.”

“Yes,” said Xingyu.

“All the flaws he pointed out—the framing, the angles…it’s all perfect here. It’s something a lot of people take for granted, and even if you can figure out what looks wrong, most can’t figure out how to do it right after that. So in a technical aspect, everything is flawless. They’ve got a gift and probably a lot of years of practice under their belt, to boot.”

“That doesn’t say anything about the soul.”

“If I had to pick a word,” said Weiran, and he paused again, his gaze lingering on the photograph for much longer than Xingyu had given it. “Lonely,” he said at last.

“Lonely,” Xingyu repeated.

Xiao-Xiao. Depression.