Shen Yuji's greatest wish in life was to be a cloud.
Free, weightless, and unattached.
But at twenty-two, she was just a hotel receptionist. Thin and pale, with no light in her eyes, she was like an old object someone had abandoned in a corner. Her father died young, her mother remarried, and she was raised by a grandmother who favored boys over girls. She had long since grown used to being used, ignored, and treated like an object with a price tag.
Then, late one night, her colleague brought the drunken Fu Xizhou back to the hotel.
She handed him a glass of warm water, and he remembered her name.
Fu Xizhou was the only son of a hotel chain's owner, a master's graduate who had returned from overseas, gentle and refined, and never short of elegant women around him. But he saw something different in her: a quiet, heartbreaking fragility. He wanted to save her.
He got her out of a matchmaking arrangement involving a 200,000-yuan bride price and took her away from that devouring home. He taught her to play the piano, watched the city with her at four in the morning, and told her, "You deserve every good thing in the world."
Those were the brightest days of Shen Yuji's life.
But light can't reach every corner. Her mother's extortion, the class divide, pressure from his childhood sweetheart, and the voice in her heart that kept saying "I'm not worthy": each one dragged her down.
Fu Xizhou tried with all his might to hold on to her.
But at the last moment, she let go.
Because she finally understood: some clouds can't be held.
A story about salvation and futility.
It's not that he didn't love her enough. Love simply couldn't cure the illness in her heart.
