Late spring cherry blossoms rustled down onto Lin Xia's shoulders. She stood before the old mailbox, clutching a faded envelope while the mottled green rust on its metal surface gleamed coldly in the sunlight. This was her seventh consecutive year of insisting on mailing letters here, each sheet densely filled with her deepest thoughts, yet she had never received a single reply.
That spring seven years ago, seventeen-year-old Lin Xia met Cheng Xu amid a shower of cherry blossoms. He stood by the floor-to-ceiling window of the library in a white shirt, the sunlight casting a gentle halo around him. At that moment, Lin Xia was stumbling along while hugging a stack of books, which scattered all over the floor. Cheng Xu bent down to help her pick them up, his slender fingers brushing casually across the back of her hand like a feather sweep, leaving a tremor in their wake.
"My name is Cheng Xu. I'm in the next class," he said with a smile, his eyes curving into crescents. "These books look heavy. Let me help you carry them back."
Chapter 87