The Translator’s Way Home

[Aloof military officer × resilient female interpreter] | Rekindled romance | Returning from undercover work

Six years ago, Chen Yiheng ended his four-year relationship with Luo Yi in a three-minute phone call. No explanation, no room for discussion. She was the best translation student at the university of foreign languages, and he was the gentlest lover of her youth. But after that call, she erased every photo of them, went on to graduate school, traveled for work, and crossed the world’s war zones alone, forging herself into a blade.

She thought he had fallen out of love and would never come back.

Six years later, in the Sahel region of North Africa, Luo Yi was taken hostage by terrorists. In the darkness, she negotiated with her captors, translating their demands in the steadiest voice she could manage.

Then she saw the man in the corner.

He had spent three years undercover in the terrorist group, operating under the codename “Tree Sparrow.” She was the hostage he most wanted to protect, and his most fatal weakness.

And he was still alive. So was she.

From the enemy camp in North Africa to the Northern Lights in Iceland, from a hostage with her hands bound to an interpreter fighting shoulder to shoulder with him, she had spent six years growing a backbone.

He said he owed her six years. She told him, “I don’t want you to repay me. I want us to stop keeping score, so that from now on, neither of us owes the other anything.”

“I loved the twenty-year-old you back then. Now I love the thirty-one-year-old you. At twenty, you would have stood in front of every danger for me. At thirty-one, you tell me what the danger is and let me decide whether to face it with you.”

She told him, “If you can do that, I’ll always be here.”