Zuo Yu took the subway for an hour and a half, clutching the job offer she'd just received, and went to talk to Lin Chuan about settling down after graduation. She thought she was going to hear about moving in together and building a future. Instead, he said, “You were the one who came after me. I never liked you.”
He turned, got into a taxi, blocked her on every platform, and left Jiangcheng that very night. Everyone called Lin Chuan a jerk. Only he knew the truth: his mother had been diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer, his younger sister was still in her final year of high school, and his father had died years ago. He was the only one left to hold the family together. How could he talk about a future? How could he hold a young woman back?
Back in his small hometown, he delivered food to pay for his mother's medical bills. He used a soldering iron to build three safety devices and installed them in every corner of the house, afraid something might happen to his mother while she was alone and no one would know. He thought this was how his life would go: taking care of his sister, seeing his mother off, and slowly enduring the days.
Then, at his sister's high school parents' meeting, he sat in her seat and looked up to see Zuo Yu at the doorway, handing her cold medicine. She was the homeroom teacher's daughter. Her mother was his own mother's attending physician.
Though she was so close, she had no idea that the man she had hated for so long had hidden all his tenderness and every way out behind the moment he turned away.
