At their school reunion, he slipped her a note, disrupting the uneventful life she had led for thirty years.
Zhao Chunfang’s life seemed nailed to the yellow earth: she married the honest, simple Chen Dongsheng, tended a few acres of farmland, and poured her heart into raising their son. Then, at an elementary school reunion, she met Li Shouye again. He was the boy who had once taken punishment in her place and secretly slipped her an eraser. Now he was a successful businessman returning home in glory.
His phone’s wallpaper was their faded graduation photo, with her tucked away in a corner. He gave her a new edition of a collection of student essays, remembering that she had been the best writer in their class. With red-rimmed eyes, he said, “I heard your father beat you and said girls didn’t need an education...”
Her old feelings stirred, but Chen Dongsheng was there beside her, silently handing over the money he had saved for half a year. “Why don’t you sign up for a literacy class?”
Auntie Wang’s gossip stung like needles: “Shouye’s wife works at a bank. Just look at the life they have...”
The night their son came down with a fever, Li Shouye drove them to the hospital. When Chen Dongsheng rushed back, he saw Li putting his coat around her shoulders. In the silence between the two men lay the guilt she dared not speak of.
When Li Shouye’s wife came to her door, seething with anger; when Chen Dongsheng leaned on his cane to shield her from the villagers’ spit and scorn; when her son cried, “Are you going to leave us?”
She stood on the field ridge, with the family affection forged through the daily grind on one side, and the one she had cherished in her heart for half a lifetime on the other.
That elementary school graduation photo was still there, but the years had long since pulled them onto different paths.
In the end, she had to choose: pursue a love that had come too late, or hold on to the warmth of the hands beside her, rough with calluses but always clasping hers?
(One-line summary: After thirty years inside a marriage, she reunites with the love of her life and stands in the fields
