After Becoming the Province's Top Scorer, I Moved in with a Movie Star

Reader’s guide: Top scorer x movie star. A healing, sweet romance with sugar from beginning to end. The leads are three years apart in age. A story about ordinary people growing up, told in a restrained style. Please don’t read if that’s not your thing.

The summer she turned eighteen, Jiao Tang’s world fell apart.

Her mother died on an ordinary evening and never woke again. Everyone thought the orphaned girl would fade into obscurity, but she wiped away her tears, walked into the exam hall, and turned in a score of 725, becoming the first provincial top scorer this city had seen in a hundred years.

Flowers and applause poured in, and the richest family in the city, the Song family, gave her an apartment with a river view. On the day she went to claim it, Jiao Tang met Song Xu, the Song family’s only son and a rising actor who had become a household name at just twenty-one. They exchanged a few pleasantries and went their separate ways, assuming they would never meet again.

After settling things back home, Jiao Tang headed to the capital early. She had already found an internship and hoped to put down roots as soon as possible. But the moment she landed, Song Xu called: he would be filming on location for three months, and no one could look after his two cats. He asked if she would move into his spacious apartment and help out. A basement room for a luxurious home with a river view? It seemed like a deal she couldn’t lose, so she said yes.

At first, the reason was simple: she needed a place to live, and he needed someone to watch his cats.

Later, when he finished filming late at night, she would listen to him talk about household errands and read through his project analysis from start to finish. She helped him pick scripts and calculate returns, going from a complete outsider to his right-hand woman. He taught her how to find her footing, and over four years she became the person he could least bear to be without.

On the night Song Xu received a nomination for Best Actor, someone asked him what the luckiest thing in his life was. His gaze crossed the bustling room and came to rest on a figure in the corner. The girl who had once had nothing was long gone. The person standing there now was the one he had nurtured with his own hands