Before he reached the glass door of 姜家早安烘焙, with the smell of warm bread slipping through the cracks, Shěn Yīniàn had already crossed many other doors: small apartments, cold laboratories, silent hospitals. None of them, however, had prepared him for that morning when the bakery bell was still quiet, but the day, in some strange way, seemed about to change course.
Shěn Yīniàn, 沈一念, learned early that the world could be counted.
As a child, in the cluster of gray buildings on the outskirts of Beijing, he didn't memorize letters first, but numbers. He counted the floors of the neighboring block, the windows still lit after nine, the steps between the gate and the bus stop where his mother left him every morning.
— One, two, three… — he whispered, his hand clinging to her bag.
His mother worked in a small district hospital as a nursing technician. His father was, officially, a "truck driver", but in practice, he was becoming an increasingly distant ghost.
At first, when Yīniàn was still very young, there were suitcases near the door, the smell of the road, vague promises:
— It's just for a while, I'll be back soon — his father would say, ruffling his hair with a heavy hand.
"Soon" kept stretching. The suitcases came and went, then only went. Visits grew rare; phone calls became short messages, too far apart. Until, one day, not even that.
There was no big scene, no shouted argument, no door slammed in his face. There was only a silent disappearance, like a radio signal that gradually fades until it disappears completely into background noise.
Sometimes, Yīniàn would wake up in the middle of the night and hear his mother sitting at the table, stirring an empty mug, staring at her phone as if it might ring at any moment. For a long time, it didn't.
And so he grew up in a home where there were only two pairs of slippers by the door — his and his mother's — and an empty space no one named.
It was by counting that he discovered the dawn had different temperatures.
In winter, he woke up before the alarm, pierced by a cold that seemed to come from inside, and curled up under the blanket while he watched the digital clock by his bed.
04:59. 05:00. 05:01.
At eight years old, he already knew that, between five and six in the morning, the apartment changed somehow. The noise in the pipes sounded louder, the buses in the distance came more muffled, and the air had an almost invisible weight. He couldn't explain it, but he felt it. Later, in high school, he would discover those things had names: temperature variations, thermal gradients, thermal inversion, circadian rhythms.
Back then, however, it was simply "the hour when the world isn't awake yet, but isn't sleeping either."
The silence of that hour was different from the silence his father left behind. The dawn silence felt full of things about to be born; the other belonged to something that would not come back.
The first memory of the smell of real bread didn't come from home, but from the street.
One random Saturday, his mother pulled him by the hand to take a shortcut through the hutong behind the hospital. It was a maze of narrow alleys, bicycles leaning against the walls, clothes hanging from windows. At the end of that corridor of worn bricks, there was a simple storefront with hand-painted characters: 姜家早安烘焙.
The sign looked old, but the smell was new: butter, sugar, coffee. The kind of smell that sticks to your shirt and to your memory.
— Let's get something for breakfast — his mother said, adjusting the strap of her bag on her shoulder. — Today's shift was way too long; I deserve decent bread.
It was the first time Yīniàn went into the Jiāng family bakery. He didn't yet know that, years later, that would be the place where his heart would trip without warning. That day, all he saw was a counter too high, the glass fogged by the steam of freshly baked bread, and a small figure behind it.
A girl in an apron that was far too long, her face dusted with flour, was trying to lift a tray of bread heavier than she was.
The tray started to slip. Her father appeared in one quick movement, catching it from underneath.
— Miánmián, I've already told you to wait for me to help you — the man's voice was firm, but warm. — You don't have baker's arms yet.
The girl let out a small laugh, half embarrassed. Yīniàn, who until then had only counted numbers, caught himself counting something else: how many strands of hair had escaped her ponytail, how many flecks of flour marked the apron, how many seconds her cheeks stayed flushed before she disappeared back into the kitchen.
He and his mother sat by the window. She drank her coffee. He ate a sweet roll that stuck to his fingers. They didn't exchange a single word with the girl behind the counter.
Even so, in the boy's mind, the bakery became a fixed point on the map of the city. A place that had a smell, a temperature, and a girl in a big apron — and, in some way, an entire family scene he didn't have at home: father, daughter, oven, laughter.
When they left, Yīniàn held his mother's hand more tightly.
— One day I'll buy bread for you, Mom — he said, serious.
She laughed, running her hand through his hair.
— Alright, my little scientist. I'll hold you to that promise.
At home, life didn't have much sugar.
His mother came back from shifts with aching feet, deep mask marks on her face, but still walked into the kitchen before going to bed, to check if he had eaten, if his uniform was ready.
As for his father, only a few photos remained in an envelope in a drawer she rarely opened. There was also a surname, an ID number in some distant registry, but no concrete presence.
Yīniàn never saw the exact moment his father decided to leave. For him, it all boiled down to a vague perception: from one year to the next, his father's place at the dinner table became an empty chair no one pulled out.
Once, at eleven, he found his mother sitting in that chair, in the dim kitchen light, staring at the table set for two.
— Mom? — he called softly.
She blinked, as if waking up from a thought that had gone on too long, and cleared the plate in front of her.
— Sorry, Yīniàn… — she gave a smile without teeth. — I got distracted.
He looked at the empty chair, at the plate that wouldn't be used, and that night, instead of crying, he picked up his math notebook. He began to list things: number of families with absent fathers, divorce statistics, percentage of children raised by a single parent. He didn't really understand the graphs he found, but he copied them, like someone searching for a hidden pattern.
Maybe, if he could understand why some people simply vanished, it would hurt less.
Later, his mother leaned against his bedroom doorframe, watching the numbers spread out over the page.
— Yīniàn…
He lifted his eyes.
— If I understand the probabilities, this won't happen again — he murmured.
She came closer, ran her hand through his hair and sighed.
— There are people who do everything right and still get left behind. Some things don't obey our calculations.
He didn't answer, but that sentence followed him for years. That night was the beginning of his obsession: to find, in what seemed random, some kind of hidden pattern.
In high school, teachers started using the word "prodigious" with an annoying frequency.
— Shěn Yīniàn, have you ever thought about the physics olympiad? — one would ask, excited.
— There's a special program for students like you at such-and-such university — another would say.
While his classmates studied just enough to pass the exams, he went further. The library became his second home. He stacked up books on thermodynamics, statistics, neuroscience. He especially liked the chapters that dealt with complex systems: climate, stock markets, neural networks, living organisms.
The idea that the whole world could be described by equations, from the movement of galaxies to the propagation of a nerve impulse, comforted him. As if, by finding the right formula, he could keep some things from breaking — or some people from leaving.
His mother, with increasingly deep dark circles under her eyes, kept working shifts, but smiled every time she received notes from teachers praising her son.
— Just don't forget to eat, Yīniàn — she would say, pushing a plate in front of him. — You can't study on an empty stomach.
He laughed, distracted.
— Glucose is my fuel, don't worry.
By then, 姜家早安烘焙 was no longer on their regular route. They had moved to a slightly more distant neighborhood, his mother's hospital had changed address, and tight schedules didn't allow detours. The memory of the girl in the apron was stored away with other things: the smell of dough rising, the sound of the bell on the door, the baker's voice correcting the sugar's "point".
Only many years later would those memories regain their own temperature.
Entering university was like stepping through a portal into another country, without leaving Beijing.
The campus was a world within the city: rows of trees, glass laboratories, cafeterias full of different accents. Yīniàn chose a course on the border between physics and biology, something the professors called systems biophysics.
— You have a researcher profile — his supervisor commented at their first meeting. — Someone who isn't afraid of big numbers or ugly graphs.
He got used to the smell of solvent in the hallways, the cold light in the microscopy room, the feeling of constantly chasing a deadline. Instead of counting lit windows in the buildings, he now counted fluorescence pulses, graph peaks, heating curves.
In one of those labs, he stumbled, by chance, upon an article about "thermosensitivity of ion channels involved in the perception of heat and pain." As he read about proteins that opened or closed at certain temperatures, like tiny molecular doors, he thought about what he had always felt at dawn.
Maybe what he called "the hour when the world isn't awake yet but isn't sleeping either" could be explained by internal rhythms, by invisible thermometers inside cells.
From then on, the topic found a home in his mind and, later, a place in his doctoral thesis: he specialized in studying how the human body adjusts its temperature throughout the day and how that influences sleep, hunger, mood.
The temperature of dawn, for him, stopped being just a feeling and became a curve on a graph, a line in an article, an equation.
The more he understood, however, the more he noticed an uncomfortable distance between theory and practice. People around him kept sleeping badly, eating at chaotic times, getting sick in ways his graphs didn't predict.
His own mother, even after he insisted she get check-ups, took a long time to go to the doctor. When she finally did, the diagnosis arrived on a white, cold piece of paper: uncontrolled hypertension, altered blood glucose, chronic exhaustion. The body collecting on decades of shifts.
— I'm fine, Yīniàn — she would say in the hospital hallway, when he showed up with printed articles under his arm. — I just need some rest.
He knew it wasn't that simple. But he was also learning, with an almost physical discomfort, that knowing more didn't mean controlling everything — it didn't bring anyone back, and it didn't stop anyone from leaving.
After graduation and his PhD, the academic world swallowed him up with the same urgency as an oven that's too hot.
Little by little, the boy who counted windows became the young researcher who counts papers, citations, deadlines. The nights went back to being poorly slept, not because he feared the dark, but because of spreadsheets that wouldn't balance, grant proposals that had to be submitted, lectures he prepared with excessive care.
His colleagues saw him as someone calm, methodical, "unchangeable", like a well-fitted graph. Inside, however, he felt the temperature rising.
One of those early mornings, sitting alone in the lab office with the monitor light reflected in his glasses, he realized he couldn't remember the last time he had woken up without an alarm, just because the sky was changing color.
His research was precisely about the body's rhythms, but he, ironically, was living out of sync.
It was on a particularly exhausting weekend, after a tense meeting with his senior supervisor about deadlines and results, that his body decided to send a clearer warning.
He woke up with a tight chest, his heart racing, his hand trembling over the desk. He measured his own blood pressure with the device he kept at home at his mother's insistence. The number, far too high, flashed on the screen like a silent siren.
He thought of her, her tired eyes, the repeated advice, the empty chair that had once belonged to his father. He did not want to repeat the cycle of someone who suddenly disappears from the life of those who love them.
That morning, he chose not to open his computer.
He put on the first coat he found, shoved his phone in his pocket, put on a mask and left. He needed to walk without a destination, to let the city lead him, like when he was a child counting lampposts.
Beijing was slowly waking up. A light haze of pollution formed a filter over the buildings, and the cold air scratched at his throat. Yīniàn walked without looking at a map, letting his feet decide the route.
He turned corners, crossed almost empty avenues, entered alleys he hadn't seen in years. At some point along the way, he realized his heart had slowed down — no longer from the scare of high blood pressure, but from the rhythm of walking.
Then, on a narrow street, the smell hit him first: butter, sugar, coffee.
It arrived like an immediate recognition, the kind that doesn't go through reason. The name surfaced in his memory before he even lifted his eyes to the sign at the end of the hutong:
姜家早安烘焙.
For a moment, he saw two overlapping images: the small bakery from years ago, when he still came there from time to time with his mother, and the one now, with glass fogged by steam and a rectangle of yellow light spilling onto the snow.
He hadn't planned to end up there. If anyone asked, he'd tell the simple truth he was already starting to assemble in his head: "I was just passing by."
The wind pushed a puff of bigger flakes. The ground, covered in a generous layer of fresh snow, looked soft, almost inviting. Yīniàn knew it wasn't: beneath the fluffy snow, there was often a thin, transparent sheet of ice, ready to trip the first distracted step.
Automatically, he started to calculate: dawn temperature, humidity, time of day, probability of ice. It was the kind of calculation he made without noticing.
Then he heard the metallic sound of a shovel scraping the ground.
At the bakery door, a slender figure in an apron was clearing the step with firm movements. Her hair was tied back with a blue ribbon; the warm vapor from the oven drew a halo around her in the pale light.
Yīniàn slowed his pace without realizing it. It wasn't exactly curiosity; it was the feeling that that scene had a different temperature from the rest of the city.
A second later, he saw the exact moment everything tilted out of place: her right foot searched for solid ground and didn't find it; her body's weight tipped into a wrong angle; the step, half-hidden by snow, turned into a threat.
The thought came quickly, cleanly, just as it did when he was looking at a graph about to go off track: "If she falls like that, she'll hit her head on the step."
He didn't think of anything else.
He crossed the short distance in a sharp impulse. One gloved hand caught her wrist; the other found the side of her ribs, firm, bringing her body back into line.
For a moment, the street seemed to stop: only snow in the air and two pairs of lungs making small clouds.
Up close, Yīniàn noticed details that don't fit into equations: the fright in her eyes, the color in her cheeks from the cold and the almost-fall, the bow of the ribbon slightly crooked, the apron stained with flour no one had had time to wipe.
— Careful. — he said quietly.
The word came out in Chinese, clean, automatic, the same way the titles of the papers he read every day came in English.
She drew a deep breath, regaining her balance.
— I… I'm fine. — she answered, slowly letting the air out. — I almost turned into a story to tell.
He glanced quickly at the ground, closing the mental calculation.
— A thin sheet of ice formed under the snow. — he explained, in the neutral tone of someone who sees the physics before the drama. — Sorry for grabbing you like that without warning.
— Thank you for grabbing me like that without warning. — she corrected, with a brief smile, still out of breath.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket; a quick glimpse showed 5:10. The wind pushed more snow into the small doorway. Yīniàn was already about to step back, ready to slip back into the role of passing stranger, when he heard the sentence that would change the temperature of that day:
— Come in for a minute. At least to warm your hands.
He hesitated. He had tests to schedule, things to sort out, an entire mental plan for a "responsible weekend." But it had been far too long since he had stepped into a place where the dominant smell wasn't alcohol, disinfectant, or machine coffee.
— Just a minute. — he agreed, with that contained calm his colleagues mistook for coldness.
The bell on the door tinkled as they went in. The heat from the oven enveloped Yīniàn's bones in an almost clinical way: you could feel, clearly, the difference in temperature between the air outside and the air in the kitchen. The yeast in the air gave that warmth a living texture.
A woman — her mother, he concluded in half a second — looked up, surprised to see someone so early, and even more surprised to see her daughter intact.
— Good morning. — said Wáng Àilián, gently.
— Good morning. — he replied, taking off his gloves. — Would it be possible to have a black coffee?
— Of course. — the mother was already turning to the filter.
Meanwhile, Jiāng Mián was still holding the shovel as if it were part of the conversation.
— Thank you for not letting me fall. — she said at last, looking at him with that mixture of embarrassment and relief.
Yīniàn shook his head, almost awkwardly:
— I just… got there one second earlier. Sometimes that's all we can do.
— And sometimes that's exactly what saves the day. — she answered.
Her mother set the cup on the counter. With the automatic gesture of someone who already knows the house's rhythm, Jiāng Mián laid a freshly baked roll beside it. The crust cracked with a fine sound when she touched it with the knife.
— Taste it. It's still singing. — she said, sliding the plate toward him.
Yīniàn took a bite. The crust yielded, the warm crumb released its aroma, and for a second his tired brain went silent. It was the same kind of bread he'd eaten there once as a child, beside his mother. His face almost smiled, a minimal movement, before returning to its usual calm.
— Thank you. — he said, sincerely. — I… was just walking around.
— Then Beijing decided to bring you to the right place. — she replied, with a slightly wider smile. — I'm Jiāng Mián.
He felt the name settle into his memory like an important piece of data.
— Shěn Yīniàn. — he answered, inclining his head slightly. — Pleasure.
Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a small pan of sugar over low heat. The researcher's instinct almost made him follow the point; politeness made him look away. Still, he registered the color, the viscosity.
She dipped the spoon, let a thin stream fall into a glass of water. Between her fingers, the little ball that formed yielded without breaking.
— Soft ball. — she murmured, more to herself than to the others. — Today is not a glass day. With this cold, everything that shines too much breaks beautifully.
Yīniàn nodded faintly. For the first time in a long while, he felt that someone was talking about temperature and "point" without tables — and yet he understood perfectly.
When he finished the coffee, it wasn't just caffeine warming his chest. There was also bread, yeast, sugar at the right point, and something no formula described well.
At the door, putting his gloves back on, he turned to her:
— Thank you… for the coffee. And for… not letting me get there too late.
She laughed softly.
— You arrived exactly on time. — she said. — One second early is early enough.
He stepped back out into the snow with the clear impression that, of all the mornings he had turned into graphs, not a single curve explained that: a walk with no destination, a slippery step, an old bakery, a blue ribbon, a "singing" loaf of bread, and the sense that the world's temperature had shifted half a degree to one side.
Yīniàn had never believed much in coincidences.
But that day, he quietly recorded: if the human body has its rhythms, maybe destiny also has its own timetables — and for some reason he still didn't understand, his had been calibrated to pass by the door of 姜家早安烘焙 at exactly 5:10 that morning.