Shen Yuchu’s life was like a chess piece tossed around by fate again and again.
As a child, she curled up into a shadow beneath her family’s cold stares. Three years of bullying in high school dragged her into an abyss without a bottom, until Lu Xingci appeared. Like a glimmer of light cutting through the fog, he showed her for the first time what it felt like to matter to someone.
University was a rare sunny spell in her life. The warmth of her roommates was like a spring drizzle, slowly soaking into her parched heart. The piano music flowing from her fingertips became wings that carried her out of the mire. When she became the youngest piano teacher, she thought she could finally hold on to a lasting light.
But Fu Jinnian’s arrival was like a sudden downpour. With his deadly charm, he drew close and dragged her from the heights she had barely managed to reach, pulling her back into an even deeper mire. The wounds that had finally begun to heal were torn open again, and shadows crept back into the corners that had once been illuminated. In the end, neither the light she had borrowed from Lu Xingci nor the warmth gathered by her roommates could withstand the boundless despair.
She stopped breathing in the winter of her twenty-fifth year. The piano lid was open, and the final note hung frozen in the air like a sigh no one heard.
