# Chapter 045: The Hard Drive Without a Hundred Billion
The next afternoon, Xiao Yezi was still sitting on the same stool as the day before. Ye Yan turned the inspection machine around, checked the working copy of the wallet they’d extracted yesterday, and only then opened the program.
The old wallet opened. The first batch of fifty coins and the twenty sent out later were all in it. Xiao Yezi recognized the date and leaned closer, but Ye Yan still wasn’t done. He continued, having the program sync with the network and compare the records for the old keys against those of the current shared wallet.
While they waited, he reconnected the scratched work USB drive and made copies of the two folders for family matters and shop business. Once all the files had been copied, he safely ejected the original USB drive, put it in a small pouch along with its loose cap, and tucked it into his bag.
At the other end of the counter, the child spread out the paper she'd drawn yesterday and waited for Dad to look. Ye Yan promised to look once they were done checking things here. She turned the paper toward him, then sat on a low stool and colored in the blank corners.
By a little after three, all the keys they could verify in the old wallet matched the existing shared-wallet backups, and the current unspent amount had also been recorded in the shared wallet.
Ye Yan looked through the notebook again, the tip of his pen pausing over a new line.
“It's still the same as before. I thought maybe we'd saved a little more somewhere else years ago.”
When he finished speaking, he left that line blank and slowly closed the notebook. Little Yezi didn't move away either. The figure she'd nearly asked about yesterday finally had an answer, but her chest felt strangely empty, as if a large computer case had just been hauled away.
The child dragged her stool over, and the corner of the paper brushed Ye Yan's arm. He told her not to put it on the counter just yet, but the mouse had already moved to the folder of photos they'd just retrieved.
A row of thumbnails appeared. He clicked one at random, and four people appeared in the doorway.
Ye Yan immediately leaned toward the screen. “This one's still here!”
The child stood up on tiptoe to look. Little Yezi held the stool steady so she could climb onto it, then stepped aside. In the photo, the baby's hat was tilted a little, and Wu Chunhua was holding its strap in place. Ye Yan held the child, his face turned toward the shop. The person at the far right was half cut off by the edge of the frame.
She was wearing the same jacket as back then, with Ye Yan's tool bag at her feet.
Little Yezi remembered the water stain on the right side of the printed photo. A pale patch covered the doorframe, making even the person's outline impossible to make out. When she was little and flipped through the album, she saw only her parents and herself, and thought it was a rather poorly taken family photo of three. Later, when she'd stood beside the camera and seen the full image, she still couldn't stop thinking about that white patch. She wanted to save extra copies, but was afraid that if she reached out and touched it, everything might change.
Now the photo had really opened. She moved the mouse back, selected that one, and didn't scroll any further.
“Dad, who's this baby?”
The child's finger was about to touch the screen. Ye Yan gently held her wrist and told her it was her. She didn't believe him. She looked down at her shoes, then went back to search for the little foot peeking out from under the baby's blanket.
“Was I really this tiny? How did you hold me?”
Ye Yan drew her closer to his leg and showed her by comparison. She laughed and tucked both arms in, trying it once, then pointed to the far right. “Aunt Lan's there too.”
Wu Chunhua had been looking for the two shop records, but at that, she looked up. She recognized her own hand and laughed, saying the hat always tipped to one side, so she'd had to hold it in place for the photo.
“I was still thinking about the power supply I'd just finished repairing.” Ye Yan looked at his own turned-away face. “Junzi called for another take, then the phone rang again. Nobody stayed put.”
The child wanted to find Junzi. The person behind the counter looked up from the parts list and said that he was the one holding the camera—how could he take a picture of himself? She thought about it and decided that made sense, then asked Dad if he'd seen her smile back then.
Ye Yan enlarged the photo a little and only then noticed that the baby wasn't looking at the camera either.
“You were looking at me the whole time.”
Satisfied, the child leaned against his arm. Ye Yan's tense shoulders relaxed, and he leaned back against the chair, one hand still resting behind her. Little Yezi steadied the stool and watched along with them for quite a while.
Wu Chunhua sat back down and opened the shop records copy. The repair log listed dates, parts, and handover marks, but the other quotation sheet was all crammed together: the item names took up half the page, only two or three digits of the numbers behind them were visible, and the last column had been pushed onto the next page.
Junzi leaned over to look and frowned. “Don't use this one. I put it up behind the counter back then, and people still kept asking me about it after reading it.”
“The one you put up was the printed copy.” Wu Chunhua widened the columns, and only then could she see the hidden headers. “The file's still here. Let me format it first.”