Synopsis of The Osmanthus Falls
Even after four years, Long Qingsong still couldn’t move on from the winter night Duan Yuansi died in his arms. He watched over the Pengying Hotel Group they had founded together, the three-story osmanthus tree in Courtyard No. 1, and the half-string of lights she never got to finish hanging on its branches, as if guarding a dream he would never wake from.
Then one day, outside a university’s administration building, he met an eighteen-year-old freshman. She stood beneath an osmanthus tree in a white shirt, a faint brown mole near the end of her eyebrow. Tilting her head, she smiled at him and asked, “Do you... recognize me?”
Her name was Duan Yuansi. She shared the name and face of his dead wife, and even paused in exactly the same way when she spoke. Long Qingsong told himself it was only a coincidence. His Sisi had already been cremated, and her ashes were buried beneath that osmanthus tree. He had buried them there himself. But every detail forced him to face an answer he hardly dared believe: the curve of her wrist as she handed him tea, the way she tapped the screen while presenting a proposal, the way she quietly stepped in front of him at a banquet.
And Duan Yuansi remembered everything. The gunshot in the cold-storage room, the instant she threw herself at him, and the words she wanted to say but never finished: “The osmanthus lights aren’t all hung yet.” She woke on a metal bunk in a university dormitory, carrying thirty-six years of memories in an eighteen-year-old body. It would be a full four years before she met Long Qingsong again.
She had to return to his side, whether or not he recognized her, no matter how many misunderstandings, rumors, conspiracies, and fractures in time she had to cross. …
