Cedar Embers

Seven years is enough time for love to turn into the most soul-corroding poison, and for a person to be utterly broken apart and remade.

Chen Wanqiu wakes up at the Mandarin Oriental in Munich, still hungover. On the table lies a keepsake from seven years ago: a ginkgo-leaf bookmark. The indistinct silhouette from last night points to Jiang Huai, the lover who left without a word and vanished without a trace.

Their reunion takes her by surprise. He is the heir to a vast business empire; she is a flight attendant who travels at an altitude of thirty thousand feet. An accident involving spilled red wine, an appointment as his “assistant,” and a cold contract force her back into the gilded cage he has so carefully built for her.

Their old love, seemingly reduced to ashes, rekindles beneath hatred and resentment. He remembers her knees aching in the cold, her chronic stomach pain, and the design dreams she once sketched casually. He gives her a scarf that matches his tie, yet in public he says offhandedly, “A friend from my days studying abroad. She’s doing me the favor of working as my assistant.” In the dark, when they are alone, his fingertips tremble as they brush her hair; he silently watches as he drapes a coat over her in the pavilion; hot tears fall when their foreheads touch… Each time they draw close, they knowingly sink deeper, hoping to find the vibrant rose that once bloomed along their thorn-covered path.

His world is ringed with walls: a sunny, soon-to-be fiancée from a family close to his, a talented design director who stands shoulder to shoulder with him, and the immense, cold burden of family duty. Her world is covered in scars: the degree she was forced to give up, her mother’s disappointed deathbed, and the life she buried in despair, her deepest secret… unborn.

When the locked study is accidentally opened, a strip of film showing a silhouette in a rainy Munich alley, and a slightly worn wooden