[Contemporary coming-of-age + class divide + nanny’s daughter × son from a powerful family + slow-burn pure romance + ensemble character growth + mutual salvation]
The summer she turned eighteen, Xu Zhaoning followed her mother, who worked as a live-in caregiver, to Beijing. There, she was unexpectedly caught up in a caregiving accident at the Cheng family’s home.
Two calls on the bell, and one delayed response, tore apart the invisible line between nanny and employer, responsibility and respectability. It was also there that she met Cheng Weizhao.
He was born into a wealthy family governed by strict rules. She had to keep scrambling for financial aid, part-time wages, and job opportunities for her mother.
Once the accident was investigated, Gao Xiuqin returned the keys, and Xu Zhaoning entered university. Military training, dorm life, classes, work-study jobs, and three roommates with very different personalities gave her, for the first time, a youth of her own.
And Cheng Weizhao began, little by little, to approach her again, now that there was no accident to use as an excuse.
One was used to shouldering everything alone; the other was used to solving everyone else’s problems.
Though separated by their family circumstances, upbringing, and utterly different starting points in life, they learned through one concrete choice after another to respect and trust each other, and to truly fall in love.
Beijing summers are short.
But some feelings don’t truly begin until summer is over.
