Anna's father died at 4:17 in the morning.
The hospital called her mother first. Her mother was still quarantined inside the family home, so she called Anna's younger brother. He called Anna from the kitchen because he could not make himself enter their father's empty bedroom.
Anna answered on the second vibration.
"They tried," her brother said.
He repeated it three times.
The sentence was all he had.
Anna sat on the edge of her dormitory bed while the video call showed her brother crying beneath the clock their father had repaired every year. The clock kept moving as if nobody had been removed from the house.
"Did Papa say anything?" she asked.
"The nurse said he was sedated. She said he wasn't alone."
"But he was."
"There were nurses."
"He was alone from us."
Her brother covered his face.
Anna apologized immediately, because grief had made both of them defend the same impossible thing from opposite sides.
At 4:31, she called Kitty.
Kitty did not offer a reason. She did not say that Anna's father was in a better place or that everything happened according to a plan. She listened while Anna described the last three-minute call and the two fingers he had lifted toward the screen.
"I didn't tell him I loved him," Anna whispered.
"You called him Papa before you said anything else," Kitty replied. "He knew."
At 4:46, NS joined without turning on his microphone. At 4:52, June appeared. Then Bunny, Cherry, Jihye, NC, HS, JP, TZ, and Mr. Kim.
My phone began vibrating at 5:03.
I woke from a dream about The Walls and saw twelve faces surrounding one black square.
Nobody had to tell me what happened.
The infection-control rules allowed no traditional wake.
The hospital released Anna's father's body through a designated funeral service. The coffin remained closed. Only the pastor, two funeral workers, and one relative who had already completed quarantine could stand near the grave. Anna's mother and brother watched from separate rooms because their test results had not returned.
Anna watched from Campus Two.
The church set a phone on a plastic stand beneath the cemetery shelter. Rain struck the metal roof so loudly that the pastor had to repeat several sentences. The camera pointed too low at first, showing mud, shoes, and the bottom of the coffin. A funeral worker adjusted it with gloved hands.
There were no flowers from neighbors.
No crowded prayer hall.
No line of people carrying food into the family home.
The restrictions were necessary. Anna understood that better than most people after working on the hotline.
Understanding did not make the empty chairs kinder.
Mr. Kim obtained permission for our class to attend the stream. Everyone entered with microphones muted. No virtual backgrounds. No jokes about frozen cameras. HS sent one instruction before the service.
Write his full name correctly: U Daniel Aung. Do not turn him into "Anna's father" in every message. He had a name before we knew her.
Anna saw it and began to cry.
"Thank you," she said.
The pastor spoke about U Daniel Aung's patience, his years repairing radios and household appliances, and the way he refused payment from elderly neighbors who could not afford it. Anna's mother had sent a photograph of him at his workbench. The church placed it beside the phone.
I recognized the shirt.
He had worn it during Foundation Year's family visit day. He had stood outside Utopia Tower carrying a box of fried noodles large enough to feed an entire floor. Anna had been embarrassed when he called all of us future doctors and demanded that we eat before studying.
JP remembered too.
He wrote in the funeral chat.
Uncle Daniel told me I was too thin and gave me two portions. I was not too thin. He was just generous.
TZ added:
He repaired Anna's desk fan and somehow repaired mine on the same visit. He refused my money and called it a student discount.
One memory became six.
Bunny remembered his terrible singing in the parking lot. Cherry remembered that he brought extra umbrellas because he had checked the weather before Anna did. Jihye remembered him asking whether tarot could predict exam questions. NC remembered how seriously he listened to the answer.
June unmuted herself when the pastor invited friends to speak.
"U Daniel Aung once told us that caring for one student meant caring for the people who stood beside her. I didn't understand how much that mattered until today. Anna, your father made room for us before he knew whether we deserved it. I am so sorry. We will remember him with you."
Anna pressed both hands over her mouth.
The coffin descended while every one of us remained trapped inside a little box.
The funeral service returned his belongings after the burial.
They arrived at the family gate inside two transparent bags that had been wiped down and labeled by the hospital. Anna's brother showed them through his phone because their mother was still not permitted to leave her room.
One bag contained the clothes U Daniel Aung had worn to the emergency department. The other held his wallet, glasses, wedding ring, cheap silver watch, and phone.
The watch had stopped at 4:17.
Not because that was the time he died. Its battery had been weak for months, and Anna had promised to buy him a better one after graduation. It had probably stopped days earlier.
That made it worse.
"He repaired clocks for everyone," Anna said. "Why didn't he repair his own?"
Nobody tried to answer.
Her brother charged the phone. When it restarted, the lock screen showed a photograph of Anna in her Foundation Year uniform. Beneath it were seven missed calls from her.
Calls made after sedation.
Calls he could never have answered.
Anna touched her own screen as if she could remove the red numbers from his.
"Delete them," she said.
Her brother reached toward the phone.
"No. Wait. Don't delete them."
He pulled his hand back.
The two of them stared at the notifications, unable to decide whether unanswered love should be erased or preserved.
Kitty remained beside Anna's name on the funeral stream. NS remained beside Kitty's. The rest of us stayed too, our cameras holding open a room no government order could allow us to enter.
The first political post appeared before the burial ended.
An exile account used U Daniel Aung's photograph beneath a claim that the restored government had denied him oxygen while saving beds for "foreign-funded Wall heroes."
The photograph had been taken from the public funeral stream.
Another account blamed the Malaysia students for bringing the virus into Yandong. A third blamed me personally for forcing the government to waste its remaining money rebuilding Utopia instead of buying ventilators.
The lies surrounded pieces of truth.
Hospitals were short of equipment.
The treasury had been looted.
Utopia had received emergency reconstruction money.
U Daniel Aung had died.
That was how VT's surviving network worked. It did not need to invent grief. It only needed to place a target inside it.
I stared at the post until the old taste returned to my mouth.
Seventeen mornings.
The number suddenly felt small enough to throw away.
My delivery app still remembered the shop. The brown paper sleeve waited inside my order history. Two taps could return the first twenty minutes of quiet.
Then Anna sent a message to the class.
Please do not argue under those posts. Report them. Save evidence. Do not let strangers use Papa's name to make you hurt each other.
I closed the delivery app.
I sent the link to NS's evidence folder and wrote to my counselor.
Funeral. Bad craving. I have not ordered.
Then I placed my phone on the other side of the desk and waited for the next ten minutes.
Grief did not make me sober.
Anna did not save me by losing her father.
I simply refused to make her funeral the excuse for another bottle.
That was the only honest version of what happened.
After the burial, the university opened a private memorial room online.
Students entered in groups because the platform could not display everyone at once. Faculty spoke first. The hotline team followed. Residence workers brought a sealed meal to Anna's door and left a white paper flower made by Bunny outside it.
Kitty remained connected throughout the afternoon.
"You can leave," Anna told her.
"I know."
"You haven't eaten."
"Neither have you."
NS sent meals to both residence desks. He did not announce that he had paid. Kitty recognized the restaurant from the receipt and messaged him.
You cannot solve mourning with delivery.
No. But both of you can mourn after eating.
Bossy.
Alive.
Kitty stared at the final word for a long time.
Then she sent him a photograph of two empty bowls.
HS would have demanded proof that food had entered human bodies. NS accepted the bowls.
June called Anna privately at six.
Anna answered with swollen eyes and the paper flower resting beside her laptop.
"I wanted to say this without everybody listening," June said. "U Daniel Aung once told us that caring for one student meant caring for the people beside her. Your father made room for us before he knew whether we deserved it. I am so sorry. We will remember him with you."
Anna became very still.
It was not similar to the message from the funeral.
It was the same message.
The same pauses. The same words. Even the same small breath before she said his name.
"June," Anna said carefully. "You told me that this morning."
June's smile remained for one second too long.
"I know. I wanted to tell you privately too."
"You used exactly the same words."
"Because I meant them."
Anna looked toward the edge of her screen, uncertain whether grief had made her suspicious of kindness.
"Thank you," she said.
June ended the call and opened her notebook.
The funeral speech was written across an entire page in her handwriting.
Beside it, she had drawn a check mark after delivering it.
She did not remember drawing the mark.
Her fingers began to shake.
The phone rang before she could call NS.
A.V.'s name appeared.
June rejected it.
He called again.
The third time, her mother's name appeared instead.
"Why did you miss your medication reminder?" her mother asked.
June looked at the weekly organizer beside the notebook.
"I didn't."
"The monitoring app says you dismissed it without confirming."
"I was attending a funeral."
"Then confirm it now. A.V. arranged that consultation. Do not waste his effort because of XH's friends."
"Her father died."
"And I am sorry. But forgetting your own care will not bring him back."
June stared at the funeral photograph on her screen.
"What was his name?" she whispered.
Her mother did not hear.
June found the name at the top of the page.
U Daniel Aung.
She copied it beneath the speech.
Once.
Twice.
Five times.
Then she wrote a new reminder in capital letters.
ANNA'S FATHER DIED. I ALREADY TOLD HER I AM SORRY. DO NOT MAKE HER HEAR IT AGAIN.
Anna joined our evening call because the silence in her room had become worse than our voices.
Nobody asked her to be strong.
JP told the story about the second portion of noodles. TZ accused him of stealing a third. Bunny displayed the paper-flower instructions so other students could make them. Jihye promised to preserve every memory posted during the service.
June remained quiet.
I messaged her privately.
Are you okay?
She read it but did not answer.
Her face appeared pale in the corner of my screen. She kept looking down at something beyond the camera.
"June," I said aloud.
She looked up.
For one terrible second, she did not seem to know who had called her.
Then her expression softened.
"I'm here, XH."
"I asked if you were okay."
"I am. Just tired."
NS watched her from another square.
Kitty watched NS.
Anna watched all of us and understood that grief had not made the rest of the world stop carrying its own hidden emergencies.
"Can we say his name once more before we leave?" she asked.
HS unmuted himself first.
"U Daniel Aung."
One by one, we repeated it.
When June's turn came, she looked down at the page.
"U Daniel Aung," she read.
The name was safe for one more night.
None of us yet understood why June had needed to write it down.