"Every reunion after a long separation is a meeting that was long in the making."
Synopsis
The two boldest things Zhou Xiaoman has ever done are:
First, secretly falling for Lu Chenzhou, the prodigy next door at the law school, when she was seventeen.
Second, seven years after leaving without a word, barging into his conference room with a camera and accusing him of being "an accomplice to evil."
By then, she is a documentary journalist fighting to protect the old neighborhood, while he is the "cold-blooded lawyer" hired at great expense by a property developer.
At their first reunion, he slides a cease-and-desist agreement toward her. She recognizes the rusty brass key on his keychain: the "master key" she gave the boy next door when she was a child, engraved with her crooked handwriting: "Always be happy."
Lu Chenzhou has imagined countless ways to get back at her. Yet when she blocks his car with evidence in hand, he inexplicably rolls down the window. "Reporter Zhou, stalking is illegal."
What she doesn't know is...
Locked in his office drawer are clippings from her high school newspaper.
An old recording he listens to when he can't sleep contains the words she said at seventeen while taking song requests at the school radio station: "This one's for Lu from Class 7, Senior Year."
He took the demolition case only to uncover the truth behind her disappearance all those years ago.
As long-buried misunderstandings are revealed one by one, she asks with red-rimmed eyes, "Lu Chenzhou, have you been waiting for me all this time?"
He bends down and kisses the tears from her fingertips. "I wasn't waiting for you. I was looking for you."
Gu Man-style tropes
▷ Reunion after years apart | Second chance romance | Two equally formidable leads with career arcs
▷ Restrained, devoted lawyer × resilient, healing journalist
▷ A fateful bond forged by a key and an old neighborhood | Unrequited love finally returned
