Shen Wanqing is the youngest partner at a family law firm in Jicheng. She excels at cleaning up other people’s romantic messes, but has locked her own heart away behind an old wound from three years ago. She doesn’t believe in marriage or lasting love, until she meets Gu Yi’an.
Gu Yi’an is a designer who came from Nanxi to make her way in Jicheng. She has a respectable boyfriend and a life that follows a predictable course, yet feels a vague emptiness on countless late nights, until an inheritance case pits her against Shen Wanqing in a meeting room.
One is a cool-headed lawyer accustomed to keeping everything under control; the other is gentle but stubborn, with an eye for detail. They go from rubbing each other the wrong way to glimpsing the cracks and light beneath each other’s armor as they work together day and night. Their feelings quietly take root, still unnamed, but reality soon catches up: her boyfriend’s proposal, an ex’s return, and their own fears and hesitation send them retreating in disarray at the height of their ambiguity.
Misunderstandings, silence, and struggles fought alone. In court, Shen Wanqing watches a same-sex couple’s twenty-two-year relationship fall apart, and suddenly understands every unfinished sentence Gu Yi’an ever spoke. Back in her hometown, Gu Yi’an unearths old sketches and realizes that every cityscape she drew captured the daylight outside Shen Wanqing’s window on the day they first met.
It takes them three years to understand that love isn’t a gift, but a choice. Staying is harder than falling in love, but worth it.
This is a story about two imperfect people learning, clumsily, how to love and how to stay, as they find their way around the wounds in their hearts. In an era when same-sex marriage is legal but the road is far from easy, they have been each other’s hidden light for a long time. At last, they decide to stop hiding.
