On the day Shen Tingyun returned to China, he ran into the person he had been secretly in love with throughout high school at the airport duty-free shop.
The man was lowering his head and gently coaxing a four or five-year-old girl in his arms. The wedding ring on his ring finger reflected the cold light.
Shen Tingyun pulled the suitcase, turned around and left.
"Shen Tingyun." A deep voice sounded behind him, with a trace of imperceptible tension.
He stood still and did not look back.
"What are you hiding from?" Footsteps approached, "Aren't you the one who left me without saying goodbye eighteen years ago?"
Lu Chenzhou, the eternal myth of Linjiang No. 1 Middle School, the top scorer in the college entrance examination and the gold medal in the competition, was the only person on the yellowed classmate list in Shen Tingyun's drawer who dared not write a message.
It was also the grandest, most hopeless, and most carefully hidden secret in Shen Tingyun's entire youth.
When they met again eighteen years later, he became a calm and self-possessed investment banking elite, while Lu Chenzhou was a self-made technology upstart with an impressive net worth.
The dignity of adults allows each other to play the role of "old classmates" in a tacit understanding.
Until a business cocktail party, Shen Tingyun was pestered by his collaborators, and Lu Chenzhou pulled him to a dim fire escape.
"Help you get out of trouble," the man's breath brushed against his ear, carrying a hint of alcohol and some kind of hidden emotion, "The reward is to answer a question for me."
"Shen Tingyun, the poem I wrote on the last page of my competition book - 'When the clouds stop and the mist comes, it rains mist. The eight watches dim together, and the flat land becomes the river.'"
"After all, you are wishing me a bright future..."
His fingertips brushed against the end of Shen Tingyun's eyes, and his voice was hoarse:
"Or are you secretly telling me your name and mine?"
Later, Shen Tingyun finally found out that the little girl in Lu Chenzhou's arms was his niece, and that the wedding ring was his disguise to cope with the pressure to get married.
There is a locked drawer in Lu Chenzhou's study, which contains: an old competition book with "Shen Tingyun" written all over it, a stack of air tickets from Linjiang to every city where Shen Tingyun later lived, and eighteen letters that have never been sent.
The first letter began: "Zhiyun, today's flag-raising ceremony, you stand in the third row diagonally behind me, with the sun on your eyelashes."
The last letter ended: "I seem to have spent the whole summer in the year I loved you."
Food guide:
1. Sobriety and restraint·Secret love comes true·Shou of the investment bank elite (Shen Tingyun)
2. Reunion after a long absence, two-way secret love, extreme adult pull, sourness and sweetness intertwined
3. The timeline intersperses campus memories and urban reality, with equal emphasis on group portraits and nostalgia.
Purpose: True love can withstand the tempering of time. The unspoken throbbing in youth will settle into a more firm and calm affection in mature years. As long as you have courage, you can finally reach the other side.