He crossed the room slowly, took her hands. “Jane Costa,” he said, as if tasting the syllables. “I think I fell in love with you the moment you said ‘silence inside the noise.’”

“You see the silence inside the noise,” he said, without turning around. He had a deep, soft voice, English precise but accented.

Gang left on a Tuesday morning. Jane stood at the airport window, watching his plane lift into a gray-blue sky. Her phone buzzed: a single line of text from him.

“Good,” Gang said. “Fear means it matters.”

She didn’t know how the story would end. But for the first time in a long time, she was in love with the not-knowing.

He proposed something neither of them expected: a year. One year of letters, video calls, flights when they could afford them. One year to see if this thing between them could survive the distance. If it could, they would decide together where to build a new life—maybe São Paulo, maybe Shanghai, maybe somewhere in between.

He turned then, and smiled. “I’m Liu Gang. I’m here for three months. I was told you’re the person to talk to about Brazilian visual poetry.”