At eighteen, Su Nian brought the damp air of a southern town with her when she entered a prestigious university, and came into Shen Zhixu’s view. Not because she was dazzling, but because she looked so much like someone: her features were strikingly similar to those of his first love, who had drowned three years earlier.
One night, he drunkenly collapsed by the roadside, and she stood by him with an umbrella until dawn. When he opened his eyes, he hazily called her by another name. She didn’t correct him, only handed him some warm water. From then on, she became a presence in his world, one he tacitly accepted: an open secret, a stand-in everyone knew about but never discussed.
She learned to cook the hometown dishes he never asked for, copied down poems he casually mentioned, and kept the scraps of paper on which he’d written that other woman’s name while drunk. When he wore a white shirt, she put on a white dress. When he listened to piano music, she sat down at the piano. He was gentle with her, touching her hair and waiting for her to finish class late at night, but he never crossed the line, as if she were a fragile porcelain doll placed just so in the empty space in his heart.
Su Nian thought that if the illusion could remain unbroken forever, perhaps it could become another kind of truth.
Until one day, when he fell asleep in his study and she draped a coat over him, she caught sight of a wedding dress design spread across the desk. In one corner of the page were the measurements, fabric, and a date: three years earlier, on the other girl’s birthday.
She suddenly understood that she had never entered his story. She was only the paper he used to trace his memories, every line and stroke shaping someone else’s silhouette.
The midsummer cicadas shrieked deafeningly. Standing behind him, she didn’t pick up the design that slipped to the floor for the first time.
