Round Orange

[The simplified Chinese edition is under contract. Updates on its progress will be posted on Weibo.]

[Complete. One-on-one pairing, happy ending. Writing is hard, so please support the official release. The next novel is Winter Night Reply. Visit the author's profile to add it to your reading list =W=]

Many years after leaving school,

before she received the long-overdue apology, what lingered in Shu Yuan's memory was still that dark storage room from her youth, the door that was always "accidentally" locked from the outside, her unanswered pounding, and the classmates' looks and jokes that they thought couldn't hurt her. She remembered it all for years.

As for the one kindness fate had shown her, there was probably only one.

It was that, later, she got to marry the man who had stood up for her, opened the storage-room door, and sheltered her from the storm.

The story of Cinderella and her prince is nothing new.

Even Shu Yuan herself always thought that her marriage to Jiang Cheng was simply the result of his pity and generosity.

Only Jiang Cheng knew the truth.

From beginning to end, Shu Yuan had always been the one holding the kite string.

*

As a girl, she was a little round orange, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter. He used to toy with her, manipulate her, and find her amusing and fascinating. He never imagined that years later he would fall into her hands and finally taste true bitterness.

He loved her until he was close to tears.

Vulgar and foolish. Just like she had been back then.

One-on-one pairing, unchanged.

Blurb for Winter Night Reply:

Every graduation season, classmate memory books become bestsellers.

So, in the year he graduated from high school, Xie Linyi bought one at his underlings' urging and passed it around for people to fill in. After lunch, he soon got back a whole stack of completed "replies."

Amid a sea of lovelorn confessions from girls, one stood out for its utter lack of tact. In the message box, it read: "Xie Lin, wishing you academic success and a bright future."

The wording was so earnest it was almost laughable.

He immediately set that memory book aside, crumpled it up, and tossed it into the trash.

The student on trash duty was Chi Xue, who cleaned up especially thoroughly that day.

*

As luck would have it, he lived up to everyone's expectations, and his future really wasn't bright.

Instead, he took one step and landed in a quagmire. Nearly ten years passed like a dream. He quit the police force and moved into a rundown public-housing block. When an old injury flared up in the middle of the night, he had no choice but to brave the snow and seek help at the shabby little clinic across the street.

The desk lamp inside flickered on and off. The doctor, bent over a medical chart, raised her head. Her features were plain and delicate. He felt he had seen her somewhere before.

"Name?" she asked.

"...Xie Lin."

Soon, the room fell silent, with only the scratch of her pen against the paper.

He suddenly said, "You actually knew which Xie it was."

Her hand stopped.

She suddenly stared at him, stunned. But Xie Lin's expression remained subdued, his brow slightly furrowed.

Ten years later, she still felt inferior beneath his gaze.

*

"His gaze suddenly fell on the blue vase on the desk in front of him.

It was empty. For the first time in all these years, the vase was empty on his birthday. There were no flowers in it. He was startled, as if an invisible door had suddenly opened, letting the cold draft from another world into his quiet room.

He felt death. He felt immortal love."

Stefan Zweig, Letter from an Unknown Woman

Theme: Love helps her become a better version of herself.