He searched for her for twenty years, while she spent a year right by his side.
Fu Chengyan remembered the girl who had saved him.
He had kept a strawberry-flavored candy for twenty years.
He thought the girl had been Lin Qianxue.
Shen Mian remembered the boy who had fallen into the water.
It was the last candy her mother had left her.
She gave it to a stranger.
On the day she married in someone else’s place, Shen Mian wheeled her suitcase into a guest room at the Fu residence.
“One-year contract. We stay out of each other’s business.”
She wore old pajamas and sprawled on the sofa watching Empresses in the Palace, with a bag of potato chips always within reach.
Fu Chengyan thought his substitute bride was strange.
She could spot a problem in a financial report at a glance, yet said, “I saw it on TV.”
She discussed an acquisition in flawless English on the balcony at three in the morning, yet called herself “unemployed.”
When he made her pear soup while she was sick, she drank it and said, “Not bad.”
He had no idea she was designer Q, investment banker Shen, and heir to a reclusive family.
He also had no idea that the girl who gave him that candy twenty years ago was right there in his living room, eating potato chips.
He didn’t find out until she handed him a divorce agreement and walked away without looking back.
Fu Chengyan fell to his knees in the rainy night, clutching the old, yellowed candy.
“Shen Mian, could you save me one more time?”
The fourth-floor window never lit up.
He finally found her later.
“You’re Shen?”
“Mm.”
“What else have you been hiding from me?”
“A lot.”
“When are you going to tell me?”
“When the time is right.”
He crouched down and looked into her eyes.
“Shen Mian, I waited twenty years for you. Now that I’ve found you, I’m never letting you go again.”
Under the moonlight, she held out her ring finger.
“Put it on.”
