Gu Shen is 26, and today is the 23rd blind date his father has forced him to attend.
He only means to go through the motions. But the moment he steps into the Island Cafe, the nerves he has kept wound tight for ten years snap all at once.
The employee behind the counter smiles gently at him. It is Shen Yu, the sick boy from beneath the ginkgo tree at the hospital ten years ago, who had a shaved head and cried for fear that people would see his surgical scar.
Gu Shen was only sixteen then. One thoughtless promise to comfort him, “When we grow up, I’ll marry you,” has stayed with him for ten whole years.
But Gu Shen is the only one overwhelmed by their reunion.
Looking into Gu Shen’s familiar, almond-shaped eyes, Shen Yu feels an inexplicable flutter in his chest. Their old promises and the vow they made in the winter garden are now nothing but hazy fragments.
He has filled an entire sketchbook with drawings of the boy whose face he can no longer remember, day after day, never knowing that the boy has crossed a sea of people and ten years just to find him.
His father’s pressure to marry, a life bound and stifled, and the old promise between them that has been forgotten…
A must-win for the new year