All her life, she was always too late.
Shen Changning spent her whole life doing one thing: waiting.
When she was eight, she climbed the plum tree by the river and waited for him to catch her.
At fourteen, when she heard he was going off to war, she pored over her father's military books, learning the mountains and terrain of the northern frontier page by page. She was waiting for him to return.
At sixteen, he split his family's jade pendant in two and hung half around her neck. He said he would marry her once he put the pendant back together.
She smiled and said yes.
Later, the Shen family was arrested and their home confiscated. Kneeling in the prison, she clutched her half of the pendant. When the guards changed shifts, they heard a faint sound coming from her cell, as if someone were rubbing a piece of jade over and over.
She told herself that she would never see him again in this life. It wasn't that he had broken his promise. Fate had simply denied him the chance.
She picked herself up from the main road, survived the prison cart, and walked all the way back to the capital from a clinic in Jiangnan.
She honed herself into a blade: sharp, composed, and never willing to show weakness in front of others.
He cleared her name, trading a marriage he didn't want for the chance to give her a respectable place in the sun. In his heart, he always kept a place for that half of the jade pendant, and for the light in his eyes as he looked down at her beneath the fireworks on the Lantern Festival so many years ago.
Later, war broke out on the northern frontier. When he spurred his horse through the city gates, she didn't call his name. She knew him too well. If he had even the slightest intention of surviving, he wouldn't have charged so resolutely toward the enemy lines. She stood atop the city wall and watched his figure disappear into the swirling snow. Suddenly, she remembered a spring afternoon many years ago: a young man practicing his sword beneath the willows, and herself beneath a ginkgo tree on the opposite bank, listening to her own heartbeat.
