I lost my home when I was six. The Lin family took me in, and Lin Yushen became my big brother.
He was two years older than me, and everyone at school knew Shen Nian was Lin Yushen's little sister. He warmed milk for me, peeled my eggs, and always carried two umbrellas on rainy days. He had a say in what dresses I wore, when I came home, and who I spent time with. Everyone said, "Your brother is so good to you." I nodded, thinking that was just what big brothers did.
Later, I gradually realized something wasn't quite right.
No brother would keep the wrapper from a piece of candy his little sister casually gave him for ten years. No brother would sit by his sister's bed after she fell asleep, staring blankly until dawn. And no brother would look so coldly at someone giving his sister a love letter that they didn't dare go near her.
Before my seventeenth birthday, I found a yellowed piece of paper at the bottom of his bookcase: an adoption certificate, dated the year I came to live with the Lin family.
I took it to him. He glanced at it, fell silent for a long time, then said, "You became part of my family when you were six. And you always will be."
He'd looked after me for seventeen years. Starting today, he said, he would look after me for the rest of my life, too.
A long, tender story of devotion: "I look after you because I can't bear to let you go." Childhood sweethearts, non-blood-related siblings, and a sweet, heartwarming healing romance.
