Twenty-One Letters in the Rain

[Print publication deal signed; not yet released]

[Small-town romance | Bittersweet slow burn | Mutual healing | One-to-one romance | Happy ending]

[Gentle and resilient × World-weary and lost]

At seventeen, Pu Yu transfers to a school in a remote southern town.

There, she meets Yuan Su.

Once, he was the town's brightest golden boy.

Now fallen from grace, he is someone everyone goes out of their way to avoid.

Everyone except Pu Yu.

-

An old street. A repair shop.

Their eyes meet across a floor strewn with wreckage.

"Stop coming here so often."

"Why?"

"...It's dirty."

Pu Yu says nothing.

The next day, at the very same time, she appears at the repair shop's door again.

-

Deep at the end of an alley.

Pu Yu's hand trembles slightly around a bottle of iodine antiseptic, tears slipping silently down her cheeks.

"Yuan Su," she says, her voice thick with tears, "let's pass the entrance exams and get out of here together, okay?"

Backlit, the girl stands with her school uniform billowing in the wind, like a butterfly about to break free of this desolate town.

He abruptly turns his face away, his chest heaving once.

In those perpetually shadowed eyes, something seems to catch fire.

-

Later, the cicadas fall silent.

He and that repair shop vanish from the town's summer together.

Only on a winter night in the north, when heavy snow blankets the streets and alleys,

does she finally understand the secret hidden in those twenty-one letters.