The day he graduated from vocational school, Ye Chen washed his uniform, folded it neatly, and tucked it into the bottom of his closet. He thought he could finally breathe.
He got less than two weeks of breathing room before the draft notice arrived.
Military service. No man got out of it.
The standard process was three months at a training center, then assignment to a unit. The training center existed for one purpose: to turn an ordinary person into someone who at least looked like a soldier. Running, push-ups, low crawls, rifle range, guard duty, folding blankets, memorizing military songs—from sunup to sundown, every day, until the iron discipline of vocational school felt like preschool by comparison.
Ye Chen adapted fast.
Not because he was in great shape, but because he'd already been through one round of this. How to fold a blanket, how to line up your shoes, how to stand at formation, where to fix your eyes when an officer was speaking—he already knew all of it. While the other new recruits were still fumbling around, he had his bunk squared away and was sitting on the edge of his bed, waiting.
The squad leader noticed this recruit—quiet, never complained, but always got everything exactly right.
One day after formation, the squad leader pulled a few men aside and asked, "Anyone want to go NCO?"
NCO. A few more months of training, and you came out with a higher rank and better pay.
Ye Chen thought it over. More training in exchange for more money. Worth it.
"I'll go," he said.
So while everyone else finished their three months and shipped out to their units, he was sent somewhere else to keep training.
NCO training was harder than basic.
It wasn't just the physical demands—you also had to learn how to lead men, how to manage people, how to give commands in front of a group. Ye Chen was quiet by nature, and when he stood in front of the formation and called out orders, his voice came out barely above a murmur. The drill instructor frowned. "You talking to ants? Louder."
He took a deep breath and pushed everything he had into his throat. "Atten—tion!"
The sound that came out startled even him. The instructor gave a single nod. "That's more like it."
Ye Chen discovered something: a lot of things weren't beyond him—he'd just assumed they were. Put him in the position, and he could do it.
It was like the singing competition in elementary school, the woodshop class in middle school, the bugle in vocational school. Every time, he'd been sure he couldn't do it. Every time, he'd gotten through it.
Halfway through NCO training, a typhoon hit.
Not an ordinary typhoon. The kind where the weatherman's expression changes on camera.
The wind and rain came in fast and hard. The flagpole on the training ground bent like it might snap. Several trees in the camp came down; one landed directly on a military vehicle in the parking lot and shattered the windshield. The rain didn't fall so much as slam—like someone holding a hose against the window.
All training stopped.
Not to rest. To do something else: disaster relief.
After the typhoon passed, damage reports came in from every direction. Mudslides in the mountains, rivers overflowing their banks, low-lying areas completely submerged, entire neighborhoods with their ground floors filled with mud and water. The footage on the news looked like the end of the world, but for soldiers, those images weren't something you watched—they were somewhere you went.
The first night, the assembly whistle blew.
Two in the morning.
Everyone climbed out of their bunks, pulled on their fatigues, laced up their boots, strapped on their helmets, and ran to the assembly ground. In the dark, several large military trucks were already running, engines rumbling, headlights cutting two white beams through the night.
"Load up!"
One command, and dozens of men filed into the truck beds. No seats—just two rows of iron benches along the sides, cold against the backs of your thighs. Everyone held a tool: shovels, pickaxes, rakes, brooms. Ye Chen held a round-point shovel, the blade cold against his arm, which helped him stay awake.
The trucks rolled out through the camp gate and onto the highway. Almost no other vehicles. Some streetlights were on, some were out; power lines snapped by the wind hung along the roadside like dead snakes. Here and there the road surface was buried under mud and rubble, and when the truck tires rolled over it, the whole bed shuddered and groaned.
Nobody spoke.
Just the engine and the howl of wind through the gaps in the canvas. Everyone had their eyes closed, but no one was asleep. Not because they couldn't sleep—because they didn't know what they were about to see.
When they arrived at the disaster site, Ye Chen understood for the first time what it meant for a place to be utterly destroyed.
It was a street.
Not a long one—maybe two or three hundred meters, shops and houses on both sides. But now the whole street looked like a giant hand had dragged something down from the mountain and smeared it across everything: mud. Mud everywhere. Not a thin layer—thick, dense, concrete-heavy mud, covering the street from one end to the other, knee-deep in the worst spots.
The roll-up metal doors of the shops had been knocked sideways by the floodwater; some hung half-open, dark inside, mud seeping through the gaps at the bottom. Motorcycles lay toppled in a row along the curb, buried to the handlebars and mirrors. Utility poles leaned at angles, streetlights dead. The only light came from the truck headlights and a few temporary floodlights set up on poles, their cold white beams turning everything into a black-and-white photograph.
The air had a smell. Not exactly foul—more like a combination of wet earth, rotting wood, gasoline, and something else he couldn't name. Heavy and close. It made you want to cough.
"Move out!"
The commanding officer gave the order, and everyone spread out to their positions.
Ye Chen gripped his shovel and started digging.
Digging mud. From storefronts, from the road surface, from the tops of drain covers. One shovelful at a time, the mud heavy and sticky, each load requiring a hard flick of the wrist to shake it free. His gloves soaked through almost immediately; mud seeped in through the seams, and his fingers sat in it, cold and slick.
But you didn't stop.
The men beside him were digging too, every one of them head down, shovel after shovel. Nobody said they were tired. Nobody complained. Not because they weren't tired, not because they didn't want to complain—but because if you looked up for a moment at the residents standing along the road, watching their homes buried in mud, the look on their faces made every word die in your throat.
An old woman stood in her own doorway, wearing rubber boots, holding a broom. She wasn't sweeping. She just stood there, looking at the mud inside her home, eyes red, lips moving without sound.
When Ye Chen passed her door, she suddenly spoke. "Young man. Thank you."
Her voice was so soft the wind almost took it. But he heard it.
He nodded and kept digging.
Disaster relief wasn't a one-day job.
For a week straight: leave at midnight, arrive before dawn, dig until noon, eat a boxed lunch, keep digging until evening, load up and drive back to camp. Back at camp, shower, collapse into bed, sleep a few hours, and then the whistle blew again.
By the end of the week, Ye Chen had several blisters on his palms. Some had broken open, exposing the raw pink skin underneath, which stung every time it touched the shovel handle. He wrapped his hands in tape and kept digging.
In the process, you'd occasionally unearth things.
The mud held everything—pots, dishes, clothes, shoes, books, toys, picture frames. Some things were already ruined, but some weren't. A rice cooker, caked in mud on the outside, that still worked when you wiped it down and plugged it in. A pair of sneakers, waterlogged but intact, still wearable after a wash. A photo album with a mud-covered cover, but most of the pictures inside still visible.
Whenever they found something like that, the men would set it on the side of the road for residents to claim. Sometimes a person would spot something from their own home, crouch down, and wipe the mud away piece by piece—and then start crying.
Ye Chen thought it was a little like digging up sweet potatoes in a clay oven as a kid. Both involved pulling things out of the earth. But what you dug up in a clay oven was anticipation. What you dug up here was heartbreak.
One night, around three in the morning, Ye Chen was working with his team on a street, clearing mud.
This street was in better shape than the ones from the previous days—the mud wasn't as deep—but almost every shop along both sides was shuttered, the roll-up doors pulled down, the gaps at the bottom packed with dried mud. Most of the streetlights were out; only one far down the road still glowed, its yellow light not reaching very far.
Ye Chen crouched in front of one of the shops, using his shovel to clear the mud packed under the door. He was working through it when the blade hit something soft.
He stopped and brushed the mud aside with his hand.
A banknote.
A hundred dollars.
Crumpled, coated in mud, the color barely visible. But he recognized it—red, a hundred.
He looked around.
Three in the morning. The only people on the street were the men in fatigues. His teammates were all at their own spots, digging. Nobody was watching him.
Ye Chen picked up the bill, wiped it on his pants, and slipped it into his pocket.
A hundred dollars. At that age, a hundred dollars could buy a decent meal or a few rounds of pool. But what made him pocket it wasn't the money—it was a strange feeling, like this bill had been waiting in the mud for him for a long time, waiting to be found by him specifically.
He didn't think about it too hard. He kept digging, kept working, and when dawn came he got on the truck and went back to camp.
He spent that hundred dollars eventually. He couldn't remember what on.
But that shop—he remembered it.
Not on purpose. It was what happened later that made him unable to forget it.
Many years later, Ye Chen had already finished his service, started at the factory, and met Liu Ruping. One day off, Liu Ruping took him to her aunt's restaurant for dinner.
He parked the car, got out, and looked up at the restaurant sign.
Then he stopped.
That street. That spot. That door.
He knew it.
Not because he'd ever been to this restaurant—but because at three in the morning, in the mud, he had crouched in front of this exact door, worked a shovel under it, brushed mud aside with his bare hand, and pulled a filthy hundred-dollar bill out of the gap at the bottom.
Right here.
Ye Chen stood in front of the restaurant, something turning over inside him that he couldn't name. It wasn't surprise, and it wasn't the excitement of a coincidence—it was something deeper. Like fate had laid down a thread a long time ago, running from that typhoon night, through that mud, through that hundred-dollar bill, all the way to now, to him standing here, to the woman beside him.
He wanted to tell Liu Ruping.
But the words came up and he swallowed them back down.
Because who would believe something like that?
"When I was in the service, we went out for disaster relief in the middle of the night, and I found a hundred dollars in the mud in front of your aunt's shop"—that sounded like something you made up to impress someone. Not like something that actually happened.
But it had happened.
Ye Chen kept it to himself. He never told Liu Ruping.
He just, without quite meaning to, glanced down at the gap under the door as he walked in.
Clean. Nothing there.
The mud had been gone for years. But the version of himself who had crouched at that door at three in the morning—he was still there.
After the relief work ended, NCO training was nearly over. Graduation, assignment, deployment to a unit.
Ye Chen was assigned to a headquarters company.
Headquarters company sounded impressive, but it was just the company directly under the battalion commander. Compared to the other units—infantry companies, weapons companies, the ones that ran you into the ground every single day—headquarters company was relatively easy. No five-kilometer runs every morning, no field exercises every other week. The main job was supporting battalion administration, handling duties, and taking care of miscellaneous tasks.
Not bad, Ye Chen thought.
But the story wasn't over.
The camp was large—large enough that walking from one end to the other took more than ten minutes. Under the headquarters company were several platoons, and one of them had been detached to a guard post on the outer perimeter of the camp. That post was some distance from the main building; the platoon leader was the highest authority there, no company commander looking over your shoulder, no battalion commander wandering through. The daily mission was traffic control, guard duty, and patrols. Basically like clocking in and out.
Even better, Ye Chen thought.
But the story still wasn't over.
Under that platoon, one squad had been pulled out further and sent to an even smaller outpost outside the camp entirely. How small? One low building, a small courtyard, a perimeter wall. The squad leader was in charge, with a handful of men under him. The daily mission was even simpler: keep the outpost secure. No platoon leader coming to check, no company commander coming to inspect. The squad leader's word was law.
This is incredible, Ye Chen thought.
But fate has a way of giving you a little more just when you think things are already good enough.
One day, word came down from above.
There was a "special assignment." They needed to pull a few people from various units.
What kind of special assignment?
It turned out that several senior officers—all of them at least two stars—had bought houses in a residential community near the camp. Officers from different units and branches, each with their own place, scattered throughout the same neighborhood. These weren't their primary residences; they were vacation homes. Nobody lived there most of the time. Officers would bring their families for a night or two on weekends.
These houses needed someone to look after them.
Cleaning, weeding, checking doors and windows, making sure the utilities were working, occasionally accepting a delivery, getting everything in order before an officer came back. That was it.
Not many people needed. Two squad leaders, two enlisted men. Four total.
Ye Chen was selected.
To this day he doesn't know how. Maybe because his bunk was always squared away. Maybe because he was quiet and didn't cause trouble. Maybe because some officer pointed at a list at random. Either way, he was called into the office, told about the assignment, packed his things, and moved to the community.
The first day he arrived, Ye Chen wondered if he'd taken a wrong turn somewhere.
This didn't look like a military installation.
No assembly ground, no command platform, no flagpole. Just a normal neighborhood—a few detached houses with small front yards, flowers and plants in the gardens, cars parked along the road, the occasional neighbor walking a dog. Quiet enough that you could hear the wind moving through the leaves.
The four of them were housed on the ground floor of one of the buildings, which served as their duty room. It had beds, a table, a television, a refrigerator. The refrigerator had food in it—because they received a meal stipend and could buy groceries and cook for themselves.
A meal stipend.
When Ye Chen heard those words, he thought he'd misheard. A stipend for food? In the military? Wasn't it supposed to be cafeteria trays and mess lines?
But not here. No cafeteria, no mess hall, no lining up with a tray. You bought your own food, cooked your own meals, ate on your own schedule. The stipend came monthly—not a lot, but for someone in the service, it felt like a different world entirely.
The daily routine was simple: wake up in the morning, make a round of the houses. Unlock the door, check for leaks, check for insects, make sure the windows were latched, see if the yard needed weeding. If everything was fine, lock up and move to the next one. Finish the circuit, come back and write up the log.
And then—that was it. Nothing else.
The rest of the time was his own.
The first day, after finishing his rounds, Ye Chen sat down in the duty room, stared at the ceiling, and thought: Is this the military? This is a security guard job.
But he didn't complain. Who would complain about something like this?
He'd sit in the community pavilion and stare at the mountains in the distance, listening to the cicadas. Sometimes he'd take out a book and flip through it, doze off mid-page, and wake up to find the sun already tilting west, shadows stretched long across the ground. Sometimes he'd walk a loop around the neighborhood, counting how many colors of flowers grew along the road, then count them again, because there was more time than he knew what to do with.
Compared to the training center, compared to that week of disaster relief, this was paradise.
No—better than paradise. In paradise you at least had to play a harp. Here, not even that.
On weekends, the officers would come back with their families.
A day in advance, Ye Chen would go through the corresponding house one more time—mop the floors, wipe down the surfaces, check the bathroom, sweep the fallen leaves from the yard. When an officer's car pulled into the neighborhood, he'd be at the door to open it, help carry luggage, and confirm everything inside was in order.
The officers were all courteous to him.
Not the top-down kind of courtesy—more the kind that said, "You've been looking after my place, and I remember that." Sometimes an officer would bring him something to eat: fruit, crackers, and once an entire box of braised meats. Ye Chen still remembered the taste of those—the braised eggs so thoroughly seasoned they split the moment you touched them with chopsticks, the tofu skin dark and glossy, salty and rich.
"Good work, Xiao Ye." The officer would clap him on the shoulder.
Ye Chen didn't feel like he'd done any work at all. Compared to that week of disaster relief, what was this?
But he didn't say that. He just smiled and said, "Sir, it's nothing."
The officers' families were kind to him too. An officer's wife would sometimes cook extra and leave a container at the door when they left: "Xiao Ye, take this, you boys eat it." An officer's child would run over and grab his pant leg: "Mister, do you live here?"
Ye Chen crouched down and smiled. "Yeah, I live here. I look after your house."
The kid tilted his head and thought about it. "So you have a lot of houses. That's really cool."
Ye Chen laughed. He didn't explain.
That kind of life went on for about a year.
A year. In military time, a year is a long time. Long enough that Ye Chen had memorized the location of every tree in the neighborhood, long enough that he could walk to any house with his eyes closed, long enough that the place felt like his own.
But it didn't last.
One day, the squad leader called him over. "Xiao Ye, orders came down. You're being transferred back to the platoon."
Ye Chen blinked. "Why?"
The squad leader didn't answer directly. He just clapped him on the shoulder. "There's a junior guy coming in. He's taking your spot."
A junior guy.
Ye Chen found out later that this junior soldier's family had connections. What kind of connections? The kind that involved a certain number of stars. Getting an assignment like this—a paradise posting—wasn't luck. It was pull. That Ye Chen had lasted a year was already more than he'd had any right to expect.
When he packed his things, he stood in the duty room for a moment. He looked at the bed he'd slept in for a year, the television he'd watched for a year, the tree outside the window whose leaves he'd counted more times than he could remember.
Then he picked up his bag and walked out.
No complaints. He never complained about things like that.
Ye Chen wasn't sent back to the main building. He was transferred to the platoon post for duty.
The platoon post—the perimeter outpost he'd heard about earlier, where the platoon leader was the highest authority. Compared to the neighborhood assignment, it was a step down: guard shifts, traffic control, duty rotations. But compared to the main building, where you were watched and drilled every day, the platoon post was still pretty good.
Good enough, Ye Chen told himself.
Besides, when he did the math, he had less than six months left until discharge. Six months. You could get through six months. He'd learned how to wait during his time in that neighborhood. Six months was nothing.
Every day: guard duty, traffic control, log entries, meals, sleep. Days passed, calendar pages turned, the discharge date crept closer.
Should be smooth sailing from here, he thought.
Then, two months before his discharge date, orders came down to the battalion: everyone was being recalled for consolidated retraining.
Everyone.
That included all the men scattered across the various outposts, detachments, and cushy assignments. All of them pulled back in, concentrated for retraining.
When Ye Chen walked through the main camp gate with his pack on his back, it felt like returning from vacation to go back to work. The men who'd been at the main building the whole time—drilled every day without a break—watched this group coming in from the outside with a particular look in their eyes. Not hostility. More like: your turn now.
And sure enough, the men coming back from the easy assignments got special attention.
Harder PT than everyone else, more duty shifts than everyone else, stricter bunk inspections than everyone else. The squad leaders seemed to have been holding something back for a long time, and now they finally had the chance to work it out on this group of "vacationers."
Ye Chen kept his head down and ran, did push-ups, stood guard, swept floors.
Two months, he told himself. Sixty days. He counted.
On discharge day, Ye Chen took off his uniform, folded it, and placed it at the bottom of his bag.
Same motion as the day he graduated from vocational school. Fold up a chapter of your life, put it away somewhere you can't see it.
When he walked out through the camp gate, he turned and looked back once.
The characters above the gate caught the sunlight. The sentry at the post stood perfectly straight, exactly as they had the day he arrived.
He turned back around and kept walking.
After discharge, Ye Chen spent a few days lying around at home.
Not laziness—his body needed time to ease out of the military's rhythm. He still woke automatically at six-thirty every morning, lying in bed listening to birds outside the window, half-convinced for a moment that it was reveille, nearly jumping up to fold his blanket.
On the third day, a relative called.
"Chen, our company has an opening. You want to come in for an interview?"
The relative worked at a factory—warehouse operations. The factory was decent-sized, the benefits were reasonable, and most importantly: stable. For a young man who'd just finished his service, had no particular specialty, and just wanted a steady job, those three words meant more than anything else.
Ye Chen didn't think twice. "Sure."
On the day of the interview, he wore a white button-down shirt he'd bought at the camp commissary before discharge—cheap but clean. He sat in the interview chair and answered questions in a quiet voice, but every answer was straightforward. No exaggeration, no embellishment. They asked, he answered.
The manager looked at his file, then looked at him, and nodded.
"Start Monday."
Just like that, Ye Chen was at the factory.
Warehouse management. Receiving, counting, shelving, shipping, inventory. It sounded simple, but doing it well wasn't easy—knowing where everything was, keeping the counts right, maintaining first-in-first-out, cross-checking paperwork. Ye Chen was meticulous about it, the same way he'd been meticulous about checking those houses in the neighborhood.
His manager treated him well. Not in a deliberate way—more the kind of well that comes from trust: you do your job and I don't have to worry about it. Never yelled at anyone without reason. If there was a problem, he'd talk it through calmly, then give you a pat on the shoulder: "It's fine. Just fix it going forward."
Ye Chen had found another good person in his corner.
He'd had a lot of them in his life. The music teacher in elementary school. The homeroom teacher in middle school. The unknown officer who'd put him on that neighborhood assignment. And now this manager. Each one had appeared at some bend in the road and given him a small push.
Not a dramatic push. Just a light, almost offhand nudge—but always in the right direction.
The factory was full of people.
Assembly line workers, warehouse staff, quality control, administration—everyone moving through the plant floor every day, passing each other, nodding. Most of them Ye Chen acknowledged with a nod and a brief greeting, nothing more.
But there was one person he looked at a little longer.
Liu Ruping.
Line worker. She'd been at the factory longer than him—quick, efficient, easy to talk to with anyone. Her job involved preparing goods to hand off to the warehouse team, so she and Ye Chen crossed paths regularly. Every time she brought something over and passed the paperwork to him, he caught a faint scent—not perfume, but laundry detergent. Clean and light.
He didn't say anything. He took the paperwork, checked it, signed it, handed it back.
"Thanks." She smiled briefly and turned to go.
Ye Chen watched her walk away, and something shifted inside him.
But he didn't do anything. That was just how he was—a hundred things going on in his head, and not one of them making it out of his mouth.
Gradually they got to know each other. During breaks, people would pool orders for late-night food, and Liu Ruping would casually ask, "Hey, you want in?" He'd say yes. People would play cards, and he'd sit nearby watching, occasionally getting pulled in to make up the numbers, playing badly, but nobody minded.
Days went by like that. He figured he'd stay like this forever—watching from a distance, never getting closer, never saying a word.
Then one day off, Liu Ruping organized a trip with a few coworkers. Hiking, seeing the ocean, a whole group of people laughing and joking around. She mentioned it to Ye Chen offhandedly: "You want to come?"
This time he didn't hesitate.
"Sure."
That day they walked a long way, saw a lot of scenery, laughed a lot. In the evening, they happened to pass by the restaurant Liu Ruping's aunt ran, and the whole group went in for dinner.
That restaurant.
That door.
When Ye Chen walked in, his heart skipped a beat. But he didn't say anything.
The aunt was thrilled to see Liu Ruping, bustling around to take care of everyone. While the food was being brought out, the aunt leaned close to Liu Ruping and murmured something: "Is that your boyfriend?"
Liu Ruping's face went a little red. She shook her head. "Just a coworker."
Ye Chen was sitting across from them. He pretended not to hear.
But he heard.
After that trip, something inside Ye Chen felt like someone had struck a match.
Not a roaring fire—just a single match, small, but burning steadily, impossible to put out.
He wanted to pursue her.
But he was afraid.
He was too quiet. Quiet to the point where even the word "like" felt too loud to say out loud. He was afraid of being turned down, and even more afraid that after being turned down they wouldn't even be able to stay friends, that running into each other at the factory would become awkward.
He went back and forth for a long time. A very long time.
Eventually he talked himself into something: if you feel it, you have to say it. If you don't say it, you don't even get the chance to be rejected. If you do say it, at least you won't spend the rest of your life wondering.
Okay. Try.
He picked up his phone and typed something out. Deleted it. Typed something else. Deleted that too. He rewrote it several times, then took a deep breath and hit send.
Then he set the phone on the table and stared at the screen. Waiting.
One day. No reply. Two days. No reply. Three days. Still nothing.
It's over, Ye Chen thought. No chance.
He started keeping himself busy, not letting himself think about it. At work he focused on the job. After work he went running, ran until he was exhausted, came home, showered, went to sleep. He told himself: let it go. You weren't expecting anything anyway. Nothing to be disappointed about.
What he didn't know was that Liu Ruping's silence those few days had nothing to do with not wanting to reply. During that time, her mother's heart had stopped in the night. She was gone.
Liu Ruping was living through the darkest days of her life.
Then, one night when Ye Chen had nearly given up, his phone lit up.
Her name.
He stared at it, fingers trembling, and opened the message.
He read it once. Then again.
Then he smiled.
From that moment, the distance between them began to close, little by little.
After they got together, Ye Chen learned what Liu Ruping loved.
Hello Kitty.
Not the casual kind of love—the real kind. Her phone case was Hello Kitty. Her keychain was Hello Kitty. The throw pillows at her place were Hello Kitty. Even her water cup had that little white cat with no mouth printed on it.
He filed that away.
Her birthday was coming up. He wanted to do something that would surprise her.
Not just buy-a-gift surprise. The kind where she sees it and freezes for a second, then smiles so wide she can't stop.
He thought about it for a long time. Eventually he landed on something: a puzzle.
A Hello Kitty puzzle. Not just any one—the wedding edition. Five hundred pieces. Hello Kitty in a white wedding dress, Daniel standing beside her, the two of them holding hands, a backdrop of pink flowers.
He found it online, but only one store in central Taiwan had it in stock.
Without a second thought, Ye Chen picked a day off, got in his car, and drove.
Hours of driving, alone, to get to the store. He bought the puzzle. Five hundred pieces—the box was heavier than he'd expected. Walking out of the store with it in his arms, he thought: five hundred pieces. Can I even finish this by myself?
He called his cousin. His cousin happened to be studying nearby, living in a dorm.
"Hey, you free tonight? I need a favor."
His cousin asked, "What kind of favor?"
"Help me put together a puzzle."
Two seconds of silence on the other end. "…Are you serious?"
"Dead serious. Five hundred pieces. Has to be done before her birthday."
His cousin sighed. "Fine, fine. Come over."
That evening, Ye Chen brought the puzzle to his cousin's dorm room.
The room was small, the desk buried under textbooks and notes. His cousin shoved everything to one side, cleared a space, and dumped the puzzle out.
Five hundred pieces. They cascaded across the desk in a rush.
Every piece was tiny, and the colors all looked the same—pink, white, pale pink, even paler pink. Ye Chen stared at the pile and suddenly wondered if he'd been too impulsive.
"Start with the border pieces," his cousin said, already sorting through them.
Two grown men, hunched over a dorm desk, flipping pieces one by one, comparing edges. The light was dim, insects calling outside the window in waves. The cousin's roommate came back, took one look, and asked, "What are you guys doing?"
"Puzzle."
"…Oh." The roommate, sensing the situation, put on headphones and climbed into his bunk.
By the time the border was done, it was almost eleven. The interior was the real nightmare—all those pink pieces, each one looking identical to the last but fitting nowhere the same. Ye Chen picked one up, tried it here, tried it there, nothing. Swapped it for another, still nothing. Tried a third, still wrong.
"Are you sure this is five hundred pieces and not five thousand?" his cousin said, rubbing his eyes.
Ye Chen didn't answer. He stared at the puzzle and kept trying, piece by piece.
Hello Kitty's face came together first—white, easier to distinguish. Then the outline of the wedding dress, Daniel's bow tie, the flowers in the background. Filling it in section by section, like digging through mud one shovelful at a time. You couldn't rush it. You just had to work through it, piece by piece.
At two in the morning, his cousin gave out and fell asleep face-down on the desk. Ye Chen kept going.
By three in the morning, his eyes were blurring, but there was only one corner left. He placed the last few pieces one by one—click, click, click—each one locking in like a small victory.
The last piece.
He picked it up, lined it up, and pressed it gently into place.
Click.
Done.
Ye Chen looked at the finished puzzle on the desk—Hello Kitty in her wedding dress, smiling sweetly (even without a mouth), Daniel beside her, a sea of pink flowers behind them.
He smiled.
Then he put his head down on the desk and was asleep in seconds.
The next morning, Ye Chen carefully secured the puzzle, slid a piece of cardboard underneath it, and carried it to his car. On the drive back, he slowed down for every speed bump, afraid of shaking it apart.
But the puzzle was too big to keep in the car. He left it with his cousin for safekeeping and made a special trip back to pick it up a few days before her birthday.
Her birthday.
Ye Chen hid the puzzle behind his back and walked up to Liu Ruping.
"Happy birthday."
He brought it out from behind him and held it up in front of her.
The moment she saw it, her eyes lit up.
Not the polite kind of lit up—the real kind, coming from somewhere deep. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again, and then she was smiling so wide she couldn't stop. She reached out and took the puzzle, cradling it in both hands, looking down at Hello Kitty in her wedding dress, fingertips tracing lightly over the surface.
"Where did you find this?"
"Central Taiwan. Drove there to get it."
"You put it together yourself?"
"With my cousin. Took us all night."
Liu Ruping looked up at him.
That look—Ye Chen carried it with him for the rest of his life.
Not moved, not surprised. Something deeper than either of those. The look of one person seeing another person clearly and knowing: this one is serious.
She didn't say thank you.
She just smiled and held the puzzle against her chest, the way you hold something that matters.
Ye Chen stood beside her, watching her smile, and felt that every blurry-eyed hour, every stiff neck, every aching back from the night before had been worth it.
The military had taught him how to wait.
But Liu Ruping taught him something more important:
The things worth waiting for are worth giving everything you have.
Whether that meant driving for hours, staying up all night over a puzzle, or picking a muddy hundred-dollar bill up off the ground at three in the morning.
Those things that seemed like nothing—they turned out to be the most important markers of his life.