Xu Nuo Yusheng, forty-five years old, divorced for ten years, raised her daughter alone. On the night of his daughter's 20th birthday, the champagne tower collapsed and he became drunk and passed out. The person who helped him go upstairs was his daughter's best friend—37-year-old Xu Nuo, a professor of Western literature history at the university. She had disappeared in the morning light, leaving only a pearl earring on the bedside, burning through him for the rest of his life. Three weeks later, he enrolled in adult college. On the podium, wearing a navy blue suit, his eyes swept over him without any disturbance. When "Xu Nuo Yusheng" was called on the roster, she paused for 0.7 Seconds. He said: "Professor Xu -" she replied: "Classmate Xu, call me teacher outside the classroom." Above the classroom, she was the embodiment of power, telling "Lolita" and her eyes were fixed on him. Behind the classroom, she was a secret accomplice, the apartment door was unlocked, and the coffee was brewing: "That night you called my name, not Professor Xu, but a promise." Her daughter's suspicion, anonymous forum posts, and suppression by the vice principal—the countdown to identity exposure, every second of suffering. At the airport security checkpoint, he shouted: "Promise!" She turned around and burst into tears. The plane took off, but she did not board it. Eight years later, when she was forty-three and wearing a white wedding dress, he finally asked her to be the bride. The daughter cried in the audience: "I have not lost my father, I have gained a mother." She is her daughter's best friend and his professor; he is her student and the patriarchal shadow that she cannot overcome. Forbidden love is the crack in the power structure through which the light comes. From the age of forty-five to eighty, from pearl earrings to school badge rings, from "Classmate Xu" to "husband" - they spent their whole lives turning taboos into legends. "Promise." "Promise Yusheng." "In this life,
