Sixteen Years of Wind Couldn't Blow Away That Year's First Flutter of the Heart

In 2006, on the third floor of Northern University’s library, by a window, the shy, introverted Chen Yu, a boy from a mountain village, met Lin Wan, a bright and gentle girl. “Is anyone sitting here?” Their first meeting, amid the scent of gardenias, stayed tucked away in his heart for twenty years. He believed he should become good enough before approaching the person he liked. She offered him kindness again and again, quietly waiting for a response, for three years. A confession letter was accidentally lost. On a rainy night, an umbrella tilted toward someone else. There were no tragic partings or melodramatic clashes, just two young people trapped between pride and timidity, unable to move forward or let go. They parted for sixteen years. Chen Yu found his footing in Shanghai, while Lin Wan built a peaceful family in the north. Each married and settled into a good life, yet when the same autumn wind blew and the same old song played, their hearts tightened at the same time. There is no rekindled romance, no crossing the line, only the most restrained kind of reconciliation between adults: clearing up every misunderstanding from back then and giving their twenty-year-old selves the explanation they had waited so long for. The deepest regret is never simply loving someone you cannot have. It is thinking of each other all these years later, yet tacitly choosing to stop there and leave each other in peace for the rest of your lives. This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.