When Song Zhaoning was seventeen, someone wrote a line in pencil on her practice exam: "One connection is enough." She tucked the paper into a drawer and told herself: Just observe. Don't go beyond the limits of observation.
Later, she went to Beijing, attended the best law school, and became the youngest partner at her firm. Every night, she relied on half a sleeping pill to fall asleep. He went to Shanghai, spent eight years writing code, and started a business at thirty. On his desk sat a blurred photo of his high school class. In the fifteen years they were apart, they never sent each other a single text.
Then, in the spring of her thirty-second year, a project brought her back to Nancheng. Below Building C in the business park, she saw a familiar figure: his weight on one leg, the tip of his foot touching the ground. She knew that stance. He had stood like that during the high school sports meet in their sophomore year, holding a bottle of water and never once coming over to her.
He turned around. After fifteen years, the first thing he said was her full name. It ended with a period, not a question mark.
After they reunited, from tomato-and-short-rib stew in the cafeteria to osmanthus wine in the old town's alleys, from an umbrella blown inside out in a rainstorm to the ginkgo leaf tucked into page seventeen of an old textbook, two people who were both terrible at expressing themselves began to gravitate toward each other by instinct. She helped him revise contracts. He helped her keep track of her sleeping pill dosage.
But getting together was only the first step. She didn't know how to say sweet things, how to rely on someone, or how to accept love without feeling indebted. He asked her if she didn't need him. She gripped the edge of the sink until her knuckles went white. "I have to learn. You have to teach me."
From seventeen to thirty-five. At last, she learned to turn toward him when she rolled over in the middle of the night. The old textbook still sat on the bookshelf. The ginkgo leaf was still on page seventeen.
Theme: Contemporary romance, reunion after a long separation, secret crush becoming mutual, each other's first love, slow burn, workplace, a heroine who grows, happy ending
