Lin Wei's left hand bears a childhood scar, like the secret she has kept for 26 years. Her mother's emotional blackmail is a thorn wrapped in sugar; her father's absence is a door that can never be shut. In the library's ancient book restoration room, she has turned herself into a silent, incomplete manuscript.
Then Chen Yu appears, carrying his old camera. He is a photographer whose lens captures nothing but broken scenery, a lonely man who dreams at night of his mother falling from a building. His father's liquor bottles and his mother's bloodied body are shadows he has spent twelve years trying to escape, yet never managed to leave behind.
They meet again over a damaged Qing Dynasty manuscript. Amid the damp, musty smell of ancient books, they recognize the scent of each other's wounds. She restores torn pages; he photographs ruined landscapes. Two people crushed by their families try to piece together the shape of a home in each other. He makes her a warm cup of honey water while she restores books late into the night. She quietly cleans the old camera his mother left behind, carefully avoiding the undeveloped roll of film.
But trauma is a thorn buried deep in the bones and blood. The slightest touch can leave them both battered and bleeding. Lin Wei's mother's serious illness drags her back into a suffocating home, while Chen Yu's father reappears and tears open wounds that have yet to heal. Online abuse lays his past bare, raw and bloody. He loses control amid the shouts of “You killed your own mother,” and finally leaves her with the words, “I don't deserve your light,” before disappearing from her world.
Five years later, Lin Wei's memory begins to falter. She is afraid she'll forget the warmth of his palm, afraid she'll forget the light in his camera lens. Meanwhile, in a border town, Chen Yu repeatedly runs his fingers over the roll of film he has kept for five years, even as stomach cancer pains him. On it is his
