The Swan's Broken Wing

Three years ago, on the day ballerina Lin Wan was diagnosed with stomach cancer, she misread her husband Gu Chenzhou’s diagnosis for ALS. She tore up the medical report, pressed a bloody fingerprint onto the divorce papers, and left for Switzerland, determined to spare him the pain of caring for a sick person. Three years later, she returns with chemotherapy scars along her neck, only to stumble upon Gu Chenzhou’s engagement party. Tattooed around his wrist are suture stitches spelling her name; in his suit’s inner pocket, he keeps half of the swan scarf she left behind. The engagement date is May 12, the very day he once promised to register their marriage after she recovered.

At the engagement party, he tosses her stomach cancer records onto the corner of the table. “Lin Wan, even your lies are as graceful as dancing Swan Lake.” Kneeling in a river of blood mingled with shattered glass and rose petals, she holds out the electromyography report that had been misread all those years ago. “Your hand won’t tremble, because ALS was a joke played by God.” But he doesn’t know that she has hidden her cancer’s return and the fact that she kept performing charity shows to fund research into his ALS. She doesn’t know that he has bought every champagne rose he could find, piling them in the entryway into a tomb for his longing, while secretly tracking every chemotherapy session she underwent in Switzerland.

When blood-red ribbons wind around a scalpel and a broken-winged swan’s pointe shoes cross the tiles of the emergency room, the two people who once defined love as “self-sacrifice” finally understand: true salvation doesn’t mean falling alone into the abyss. It means allowing each other to become the other’s painkiller. When the scar at her neck meets the tattoo of sutures, the words “Chenzhou, stay alive” finally emerge from inside the ruby necklace. It turns out that, long before fate misdiagnosed them, they had already stitched their souls together into a swan and a scalpel, never to be parted.