On Lin Shen's fortieth birthday, his wife Fang Xiaohe handed him a divorce agreement.
"You haven't looked at me and Niannian for a long time." She said, "You are at home, but you are not here."
The fourteen-word verdict declared the death of a marriage. There was no quarrel, no betrayal, just the disappointment that an ordinary woman had saved up for ten years.
Lin Shen moved into a rental house in an old community. Next door lived an old man who planted flowers and raised cats. There was a pot of clivia on the balcony that was dying. He thought his life had hit bottom, but he didn't know that the real abyss was still ahead - his daughter's words "You promised to take me to the aquarium" were like a dull knife, cutting him day after day; the words "I'm sorry, son" in his father's diary before his death made him cry for the first time for the man who beat him all his life; and the mentally disturbed homeless man in the nursing home holding a broken guitar was actually the neighbor's brother who taught him how to play the piano.
He thought he was rebuilding, but found that he couldn't even love someone normally.
This is a novel about "rebuilding after brokenness." There are no counterattacks, no cool articles, just an ordinary person who, at the age of forty, breaks the first half of his life into pieces and then picks them up piece by piece to piece together a less complete but at least true version of himself.
In the story, there is a little boy hiding in the cupboard, a lame stray cat, "The Little Prince" with "May you never be tamed" written on the title page, old friends who meet again after twenty years, Cheng Yuan who will never get better but learns not to be afraid, Lao Zhou who entrusts the cat and Clivia to him, and a woman who goes from hatred to forgiveness.
