[Hong Kong-style angsty romance + rekindled love + calculating, possessive screenwriter × stubborn, sharp-tongued award-winning actress]
She is Shu Yu, a sharp-tongued actress who shot to fame overnight, with a thorny past she keeps hidden. He is Chen Zhouxing, a brilliant screenwriter who seems gentle and refined but is, in truth, ruthless and calculating.
A brass key engraved with the character Yu, a tiny apartment in a Wan Chai tenement building: together, they hold all the passion and tenderness of the couple's early days.
He understands her pride and protects her sincerity; she understands his devotion and welcomes his tenderness. Just the two of them beneath one roof, a single lamp, manuscripts scattered everywhere, the scent of white orchids drifting in from the balcony, and Hong Kong Island's neon lights shining all night beyond the window. They thought they could live like that forever.
But later, the moonlight faded.
Clouds drifted across the sky, yet it looked as if the moon were sailing through them. A boat moved along the water, and after a while, it no longer seemed that the boat was moving, but that the shore was shifting. It was all an illusion, the beautiful illusion people conjure up.
She went north alone, while he set off for Paris.
The same road, different times; the same wind, different companions.
Seven years later, she returned to Hong Kong to deal with the demolition of the old apartment.
He blocked the entrance to the tenement building. His eyes were as warm as ever, but his voice brooked no refusal:
“Shu Yu, you left without a second thought back then. Now it's time to pay your debt.”
She put on a brave face and called him a persistent ghost, eyes red, but she couldn't escape the web of love he had already spun around her.
Round and round they went, hurting each other to the bone, caught in a struggle that lasted half a lifetime.
This time, he wouldn't let her go, and she had nowhere to run.
Fog rises over Victoria Harbour; the boat finds its way home.
