Chen Man was promised to Wei Lin, the eldest son of the Wei family, at birth. She thought her life was already laid out for her: stay on course and become a suitable fiancée.
Then came the day Wei Lin had an accident.
That afternoon, as the news arrived, his younger brother Wei Tongzhou pinned her beneath a ginkgo tree at a service area and kissed her. She slapped him, and he caught her hand. “Not hard enough. Hit me again.”
That was the first time she really looked at him. From childhood onward, he had always stood three steps away. When she looked up at Wei Lin, when she saw Wei Lin off, when she stood among the crowd as his fiancée, he was always on the outskirts, leaning against a wall with a can of soda in his hand. She never looked back. He never walked away.
After the funeral, she moved far away to Haixian and became a low-level office worker, thinking she had left the past behind. Six years later, he showed up as an investor. After the meeting, his car was parked outside her workplace, and he was holding a bag of dumplings.
“From that place in the east of town, the pork and cabbage ones. You said you liked them one winter when you were in your second year of high school.”
From the time he was four until he was twenty-four, he waited for her for twenty years. She wasn’t a substitute or a consolation prize. She wanted to be someone worthy of love in front of Wei Lin. In front of him, she didn’t have to.
From then on, she couldn’t bring herself to look at Guanyin.
