When Jiang Ye was seven, a little crybaby with pigtails moved in next door.
She clutched the hem of his shirt and called him softly, “Brother Ye.” From then on, everyone in the alley knew that Shen Zhiyi next door was under Jiang Ye’s protection.
In high school, Jiang Ye was a notorious school bully, equally skilled at skipping class and getting into fights. He was the infamous troublemaker everyone at the affiliated high school feared. Shen Zhiyi, meanwhile, was the obedient good girl teachers and parents adored. She always sat in the front row, kept her homework neat, and seemed to live a peaceful, uneventful life.
No one knew that the boy who fought the fiercest would climb over the school wall in the middle of the night just to buy the girl a bag of the chestnuts she craved.
And no one knew that every page in the gentle girl’s hidden diary was filled with his name.
On the day students chose their academic tracks in eleventh grade, Jiang Ye looked at the girl’s course form and grinned nonchalantly, though his eyes held a seriousness unlike anything she’d ever seen. “Shen Zhiyi, where do you want to go? I’ll work myself to the bone if I have to. I’m getting into the same university as you.”
Everyone took it as a joke. But Shen Zhiyi alone knew that from that day on, the once-feared school bully began to put away his fists. The lights burning at four in the morning bore witness to a boy’s determination to change for love.
Years later, Jiang Ye, now a successful and celebrated man, stood before the girl in her wedding dress at a ceremony watched by everyone. At last, he said the confession he had owed her for ten years: “Zhiyi, thank you for helping me become the best version of myself.”
