"Chen Zhou, can I ask you a question?"
After three years of high school, Fan Ningyan only dared to use this excuse to look back at him.
She remembered everything about him: the beads of sweat on his forehead during the basketball game, the corners of his mouth that slightly raised when he solved the problem, and even just the piece of air at the corner of the corridor that was brushed by the hem of his school uniform.
"Here you go, umbrella." During the heavy rain, he turned back and tilted the umbrella toward her, "On the way."
That was the closest distance between them, and it was also the most turbulent silence in her youth.
On graduation day, she secretly hid only one thing in everyone's graduation photo album - a piece of scratch paper that he threw away casually. On the back, she wrote in the smallest words: "Chen Zhou, I wish you a bright future. Also: In fact, your method of solving the third question went too far."
He will never know.
Many years later, an overseas phone call shattered the peace.
"Chen Zhou, Fan Ningyan... Died in order to save a child."
At the funeral, he received a yellowed photo album. Turning to the last page, the familiar scratch paper fell gently. The small words on the back finally caught his eye after many years.
Only then did he suddenly realize——
It turns out that throughout his youth, he was the only protagonist in another person's story.
And he never even had a chance to look at the catalog.
Intention: It is not to praise regret, but to try to understand how a silent emotion can form a universe of its own, and to examine how we face those unnoticed contributions, unacceptable echoes in life, and ultimately, how to carry that belated and heavy knowing.