That day was no coincidence — it was a high school reunion.

It was the kind of gathering that happened every few years — old classmates crowding around a hotpot table, filling the air with laughter and the sharp smell of spice. Lin Wanqing had almost not come. She wasn’t the type to chase nostalgia. But Wang Lin had called three times, and saying no a fourth time felt cruel.

She was fine. She was having a perfectly normal evening, chopsticks in hand, half-listening to someone talk about their new apartment, when Wang Lin leaned over and said his name.

“Gu Chen is nearby, actually. Taking a break at that café down the street — you know, the one next to the old bookshop. He’s on shift later tonight.”

Lin Wanqing stopped chewing.

She didn’t say anything for a moment. The table was loud. No one noticed.

Gu Chen.

Ten years. The name still landed the same way it always had — somewhere behind her ribs, quiet and heavy.

“I want to go say hi,” she heard herself say. “Just — as an old friend.”

Wang Lin blinked, then smiled. “Sure, I’ll take you. My bike’s outside.”

She didn’t let herself think about it on the way there. That was the trick — don’t think, don’t calculate, don’t ask yourself why your hands feel cold. Just sit on the back of Wang Lin’s bicycle and watch the streetlights blur past and pretend this is nothing.

Five minutes away. A century long.

The bike hadn’t even stopped when she slid off the back seat, her eyes already moving toward the café entrance. The warm light spilled out onto the pavement. Through the glass, she could see a few people inside, the slow drift of an ordinary evening.

And then she saw him.

He was sitting by the window, a paper cup in his hand, head slightly bowed. He hadn’t aged — that was the first thing she thought, and then she corrected herself, because that wasn’t quite right either. He had changed, just not in the way she expected. The boyishness was gone, replaced by something steadier, something that settled in the jaw and the set of his shoulders. He was broader now, the kind of build that came from years of real work — his skin a deep bronze, warmed by sun and heat and whatever it was that firefighters walked into when everyone else walked out. He looked like someone who had grown into himself completely.

He looked, if she was being honest, devastating.

Lin Wanqing stood on the pavement and forgot, for a moment, how to breathe.

Her gaze — restless, searching — went still