A forbidden love that crosses the boundaries of ethics and convention, a desperate gamble to trade one's body for eternity.
At 22, Lin Xi meets Shen Youwen, a 35-year-old gallery owner, on a rainy night at the gallery: an elegant yet broken single mother. What should have remained a relationship between a part-time teacher and her student spirals out of control after Lin Xi moves into the home and becomes the "big sister" the two children depend on. Over seven years together, they build a glasslike illusion of a family with tenderness.
Then Shen Youwen's adolescent son breaks with the family. At the depths of despair, she proposes a shocking bargain: "We should have a child, a child who truly belongs to 'us.'" After a year of struggle, 28-year-old Lin Xi signs the contract in blood and tears with her own body.
From the medical ordeal of IVF and the depths of postpartum depression, to confronting legal loopholes and society's scrutiny, the two women struggle forward between lies and truth. The boy, Nianxi, conceived through medicine, is both the fruit of their love and the shackles of ethics. When the legal "father" steps in, the child's origins are exposed, and social prejudice surges toward them like a tide, they must answer: Is this "forever," bought with a body as its stake, a salvation or an even deeper prison?
This is a story about how love becomes entangled with selfishness, and how a family can be rebuilt through its cracks. It is imperfect, yet painfully real. When love crosses the boundaries of gender, blood ties, and ethics, are we creating new possibilities or repeating the ancient impulse to possess?
Theme: This is a work of serious fiction about how love struggles to take root amid the fractures of ethics, law, and society. It does not settle for romanticized imaginings of same-sex love, but confronts its most brutal realities: When a family cannot be recognized by law, when motherhood needs a medical contract as proof, and when a child becomes a bargaining chip in emotional ties, can love remain pure? Through a shocking bargain to "have a baby through IVF," the story lays bare the undercurrents beneath the glossy surface of a "nontraditional family."
