Let the Past Be Wind

"I loved a boy for nine years. He's about to get engaged."

Shi Ruyi has spent nearly a decade loving Xu Zhifeng in silence. They were high-school classmates once—close enough to almost become something, before another girl came between them and they fell out of touch. She went to the same university but never dared to reach out. Every year on his birthday, she sent a single, careful greeting. He sent one back. That was the shape of her love: a thread so thin no one could see it.

By twenty, she is a rising actress. He is the nation's most-watched star. And at this year's biggest awards gala, the two of them are announced as the night's most talked-about performers—stand-in partners on the same stage, names pressed together on every trending list.

She expects nothing. She has learned, the hard way, never to.

Three years ago, she made one last attempt. She stood outside his apartment in the snow, waiting ten hours in the cold, while a single text arrived:

"There's no need. Just go home."

That was the last thing he ever said to her.

Until tonight.

Tonight he walks up to her, bends to adjust the hem of her dress, and asks, easy and warm, as if no time had passed at all:

"It's been a long time. Would you like to grab a meal?"

She looks at him. She remembers the boy. She remembers the ten hours in the snow. And she says, very quietly:

"Goodbye, Xu Zhifeng."

By the next morning, five topics have crashed the trending list. Her nine-year secret is no longer hers. His pristine image lies in pieces. And somewhere in the wreckage, the world is about to learn what a girl in love is really made of.

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A bittersweet second-chance romance about the love you carry in silence, the goodbye that breaks the internet, and the difference between a girl who smiles and a woman who has finally learned not to.

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For readers who loved Beating Again, Meteor Garden, and The Starry Love.