My Husband Is Twenty Years Older Than Me

[Twenty-year age gap | She pursues him | Heartbreaking redemption | Reconciliation after a breakup | Happy ending | One-on-one romance]

On a rainy night, twenty-two-year-old Lin Zhiyu pushed open a wooden door to get out of the rain.

Inside was an old bookshop. A man stood on a ladder, wearing a white shirt, his temples faintly graying and his profile lean and straight. He looked down at her and offered her a handkerchief and a cup of warm water.

He was forty-two that year. She was twenty-two.

She thought they were just strangers who had crossed paths. But the light of that bookshop never went out in her heart.

She began pursuing him. With clumsy packed lunches, questions posed as if she didn't understand, and fingers that lightly tapped his palm with the tip of a pen. Little by little, she knocked down the walls he had built over the years, never knowing what lay behind them: a son who had died before his eyes at the age of three, an ex-wife who had dragged him into the abyss, and guilt that ran bone-deep.

He said, “Lin Zhiyu, I'm twenty years older than you. I'm not worthy of you.”

She said, “You don't get to decide that.”

Later, she held a pregnancy test report in her hand. She kept it secret.

Later came conspiracy, miscarriage, and separation in a foreign land.

Later, he stayed by her mother's hospital bed for two years. He was driven away and cursed at, but never left.

Later, they met again at dusk.

He had once said that restoring books was like restoring the heart.

And with every day they spent together, she mended his heart, scarred and broken beyond count.