The Cherry Blossom Promise

--A long first love, from the library to the wedding

The shy Wan Ning never imagined that an accidental basketball mishap would bring her together with the sunny, cheerful Jiang Yu. A misplaced blue ballpoint pen and a library “chance encounter” that was anything but chance quietly sent her high school life down a new path. She secretly wrote down his class schedule, while he quietly kept the bookmark she had dropped. When Pride and Prejudice met The Three-Body Problem, and a boy turned back with a smile beneath the cherry blossoms, Wan Ning finally understood:

A secret crush is something shared by two people. It’s just that neither of them ever said so.

Ten years later, an unpublished novel manuscript sits on display at their wedding. On its title page are the words: “For Y, my sunshine, my first love, my whole life.” But the guests below don’t know that a faded smiley-face sticker is still tucked into the groom’s suit pocket.

It’s a piece of youth that a girl carefully hid when she was seventeen.

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“You ask me what it means to be destined for someone?”

“It’s exchanging glances through a gap in the library shelves, sitting next to each other on a graduation trip while pretending it was accidental, and saying ‘I miss you’ at the same time during a video call from a foreign land.”

“Most of all, after years of twists and turns, I can still recognize you at a glance beneath the cherry tree, the one who blushed for me.”

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