She is forty-eight years old and has lived alone for twenty years. He raised a daughter for his old friend, and also raised a body for himself that does not depend on anyone.
On the day Xu Zhu took her boyfriend home for dinner, Shen Nianhe was chopping vegetables in the kitchen and did not look back. The hum of the range hood covered up the sound of him changing his shoes. When she turned around, she saw a young man standing in the living room, taking down the book "In Search of Lost Time" from the top shelf for her. As he stood on tiptoe, his fingers brushed against the spine of the book and he paused.
The pause was covered by his own breathing.
But Shen Nianhe saw it.
Later, it was a rainy night, Xu Zhu's flight was delayed, and Lu Yan blocked her third glass of wine. She leaned on his shoulder, and the hot breath of red wine brushed his chin, like the edge of an old letter being slowly heated. She wasn't drunk, but she kissed him. He followed her upstairs and closed the door.
The next morning she picked up the fallen buttons of his shirt from the floor. It was off-white and round, like an old mark that she had been waiting for a long time to settle on. She cooked the porridge, put the button on the edge of the stove, and waited for him to come downstairs.
"When you nail it, come and serve the porridge," she said.
The third button is on the chest. He nailed it back, but the stitches were not neat. She watched them sew.
Later Xu Zhu moved away. Chang Ning is here. There was a pot of rose on the window sill, a light pink one. He turned it so that it was basking in the sun at the same angle as another white one. He said that together they could catch the morning light.
She is forty-eight years old. He is twenty-six years old. There were twenty-two springs between them, and the distance of a button that he had re-nailed.
Concept: Love is not about filling the gap between each other, it is about two complete people standing in their respective positions and still reaching out to hold each other.