Meng Fanxing, thirty-six, is the perfect woman in everyone's eyes: an outstanding news editor, an impeccable wife, and a dutiful daughter-in-law. Her marriage to architect Gu Weian is the envy of their social circle. Yet beneath this perfect facade lies a wound from the summer when she was fourteen.
To conceal and try to heal the shame and brokenness she has carried for twenty-two years, Meng Fanxing has used astonishing self-control to construct an exquisite shell of a life. Then her mother-in-law suddenly dies. After delivering the ultimate performance as the “perfect daughter-in-law” at the funeral, she calmly asks her husband for a divorce. He has just lost his mother and sees Meng Fanxing as his only support.
What seems like a sudden break is, in truth, the inevitable result of twenty-two years of gradual collapse. In the shadows of her marriage, she has conducted a series of desperate experiments on herself: a brief emotional deviation with a young intern; emotional manipulation at the hands of her husband's close friend, a university professor who cloaked it in “academic deconstruction”; a physical relationship with a personal trainer to test whether she could still feel “alive”; and even an attempt to contact the person she had secretly loved as a teenager, hoping to touch the possibility of the innocence she had before it was destroyed. Each deviation was like drinking poison to quench her thirst, and each betrayal dragged her deeper into shame...
