The Butterfly Crossed the Sea

He gave me the whole starry sky, then sank into an endless night himself.

The day he was diagnosed with brain cancer, Shen Xinghe did one thing: right in front of me, he took my best friend's hand. “Lin Jianlu, they were just sweet words. You actually believed them?”

With a broken heart and the child I hadn't yet given birth to, I left for Paris. I made it through washing dishes, morning sickness, and being too poor to afford a meal. But I couldn't bear the anonymous deliveries of ginger tea, French books, and gallery contracts. Every single one bore his handwriting.

It turned out he had sent me across the sea while drowning in the storm he had sailed through to get there. It turned out that betrayal had been the last road he laid out for me.