The White Moonlight at Dusk

In 1937, Suzhou fell. Shen Zhiyi, the daughter of a successful examination candidate, pawned her wedding dress to bury her father. Beneath the city gate, a wounded young man mistook her for a comrade. He pressed a bloodstained codebook into her hands, said only, “This matters more than life,” and collapsed into her arms.

She could have thrown away the trouble, but she didn’t. She wanted to know what kind of person could consider their own life less valuable than a sheet of paper.

When Gu Muzhou clawed his way back from a pile of corpses to find her, he discovered that this seemingly delicate young woman had carefully copied the entire codebook in tiny, neat script. She had hidden the original beside her father’s grave.

“Here. I don’t owe you anything now.”

But she didn’t know that from the moment she buried the codebook in her father’s grave, there was no way to keep herself out of it.

He was an intelligence operative working undercover in occupied territory, code-named “Dusk.” She was the daughter of a former Qing dynasty examination candidate, whose hands had held nothing but a brush. The chaos of war bound them together: he kept her safe, and she covered for him. The embroidery shop became an intelligence station, their marriage certificate a cover for posing as husband and wife, and their daily meals concealed coded messages.

But nothing is harder to hide than the way you look at someone.

It rained in Suzhou for a year, and they spent 365 days pretending to be married. On the day Gu Muzhou decided to ask his superiors to turn their act into a real marriage, an order transferred him to Chongqing, while the organization assigned Shen Zhiyi to remain undercover where she was.

He never got the chance to tell her.

She never got the chance to wait.

For the rest of their lives, through fire and separation, with death passing them by, each believed the other had died in some bombing. Yet neither ever married again. In the cracks of a world at war, each kept the other’s