The bravest thing Shen Zhi ever did wasn’t climbing out a twenty-seventh-floor window to escape. It was this:
He loved Lu Shiyan for six whole years.
From bit player to rising star, from eighteen to twenty-four.
He filled entire notebooks with that man’s name and watched his films hundreds of times. For him, he had entered an industry that devoured people without a trace.
He thought he had finally been seen.
Then he found that photograph in the study.
The person in it looked seventy percent like him. On the back, someone had written: “A Zhi, my one true love in this life.”
So he hadn’t been loved after all.
He had only looked like someone else.
No, he wasn’t even worthy of comparison. He was merely a shadow’s stand-in.
The day he left, Lu Shiyan panicked for the first time.
He searched the entire city for him for three days and nights, then knelt in the rain for half an hour, saying “I’m sorry” a hundred times.
Shen Zhi stood behind the window, watching his knees scrape raw and his clothes become drenched. He didn’t shed a single tear.
“Lu Shiyan,” he said, “you made me love you on my knees for six years. Now I’m standing here, watching you kneel and beg me.”
“Fortunes change. You should accept your fate.”
Later, someone stood behind him.
His name was Gu Yanzhi.
He had been waiting for Shen Zhi since college, for six whole years.
When Shen Zhi was attacked online, he said, “Come with me.”
When Shen Zhi’s mother was critically ill, he said, “I’ll pay for the surgery.”
On the night Shen Zhi slit his wrists in the bathroom, Gu Yanzhi rushed in and held him, his voice trembling:
“You’ve hurt him enough. From now on, his life belongs to me.”
