[Her · The Nurse]
Lin Wan spotted Shen Zhixing while the elevated overpass was snarled into one big traffic jam.
She had taken a half-day off that day, slipping out of the ward to make it to a class reunion. If there is one thing a nursing career never runs short of, it is grinding it out—night shifts butting up against day shifts, a person wrung out like a rag. It had been ages since she had gone to such trouble to dress up for anything in her private life. The dress was newly bought, the lipstick reapplied twice, and before she left, standing in front of the fog-blurred mirror in the locker room, she had even smiled a little—smiling at herself for being thirty and still like a girl on her way to confess a crush.
The cab was stuck in the middle stretch of the expressway back into town, red brake lights on every side. Leaning against the window scrolling her phone, she caught, out of the corner of her eye, the black sedan drawn up alongside in the next lane; the profile in the back seat made her breath hitch for half a second.
Two years. She knew that jawline too well, knew the way his lips would purse without his noticing when he bent his head over his phone. It was Shen Zhixing.
Her first reaction was not a flutter of the heart—it was the urge to turn her face away. As someone who has to size up hundreds of faces fast every day at the ER triage desk, her eyes were more honest than most. She recognized him in an instant, and in the same instant recognized the thing in her chest that two years had failed to smooth flat, now surging upward.
[Him · Reunited Ex A]
Shen Zhixing was stuck on that same expressway. He was in this city on a business trip; his return ticket for early the next morning was already booked, and he had assumed the whole thing would be nothing more than a formality.
He and Lin Wan had met during his internship year, the last of college. Back then he did tech work in an office building next to the hospital while she rotated through the inpatient wards, and the two of them often crossed paths at the convenience store downstairs that always had a line. They dated the better part of a year; after graduation, work flung them to two different cities, and the long distance dragged on for a year before, in the end, he was the first to buckle and say the word: breakup.
After the breakup he had dated someone, and it went nowhere. Now and then afterward he would think of Lin Wan, and the way he thought of her was strange—not remembering how good she was, but wondering just why, back then, he had let go.
When he raised his head, the face in the next lane was looking straight over. In the instant their eyes met, both cars were still stuck, neither able to move, so all they could do was look at each other like this—across two panes of glass and one lane of traffic—awkwardly and scaldingly.
[Her · The Nurse]
He was the one who rolled his window down first. He called her name, the sound torn to tatters by the wind up on the expressway, but she heard it clearly.
She rolled hers down too, and across the meter-odd gap the two of them traded WeChat QR codes like a pair of middle schoolers—arms held up high, squinting to scan each other, three tries before it worked. The absurd scene of a traffic jam spared them, of all things, the hardest line to say out loud: “Want to swap contacts?”
Once they had each other added, the two cars finally slid apart. She watched his car merge onto an on-ramp headed the other way and vanish. On her phone screen, beneath that long-unseen profile picture, a line popped up: “Almost didn’t recognize you back there—you look better than before.”
She stared at that line for a long time. A nurse’s professional habit made her instinctively want to analyze the sentence—politeness, or a feeler? But she did not delete it, nor did she reply right away. She turned the phone face-down on her lap and watched the traffic outside inch forward one car-length at a time, while the thing two years had pressed down in her heart welled up, slowly and beyond her control.
[Him · Reunited Ex A]
That night, lying on the hotel bed, he scrolled her Moments feed over and over. It was set to show only the last three days—just one photo, taken on the hospital rooftop, captioned “Another night shift.”
He messaged her, and they talked from today’s traffic jam all the way back to that old convenience store, talked late into the night. She was not quick to reply, but she replied to every message. He could feel her restraint—every line reined in, unwilling to give away a single extra word—and it was precisely that restraint that plucked, ever so lightly, the string in his heart that had snapped two years ago.
What he did not tell her was that these two years had changed him. Exactly where he had changed he could not put into words himself; he only knew that certain thoughts had surfaced only in these two years, tucked away in the deepest place, thoughts even he did not dare examine closely.
[Her · The Nurse]
Over the next two months, they simply kept talking like this.
She knew what she was doing. She was not an eighteen-year-old girl anymore; she knew perfectly well what it meant for an ex to reappear two years after a breakup, and knew perfectly well why she was answering every one of his messages. In between, she had dated someone—a man named Zhou, two years younger, for a bit over a year, and that too had fizzled out without a clean end. This Zhou Jin would, later, reappear between her and Shen Zhixing in a way she could never have anticipated at the time. But that comes later.
Two months on, Shen Zhixing proposed meeting her. He put it very casually—said he had a project bringing him to her city, that it was on the way. She could of course hear the weight in those two words, “on the way.”
She took two days off. Time off is hard to get on a nurse’s roster; she had to swap two night shifts with a colleague to free up that weekend.
The day they met, they had a meal, then went for coffee. He sat across from her, fingers turning the cup without thinking, and said something that made her heartbeat skip: “Lin Wan, let’s… start over. What do you say.”
She did not answer at once. She looked down at the layer of milk foam slowly spreading across the surface of her coffee and, with the composure she had drilled into herself at the ER desk, gave real thought to every possible way this could go. Then she raised her head and said, “Give me a week.”
[Him · Reunited Ex A]
That week was the slowest one he had lived through in these two years.
He had even made a decision ahead of time—he quit his job. He did not tell her; he wanted to wait until she said yes, like a gambler shoving all his chips onto the table, betting she would nod.
A week later, she sent two words: “Okay then.”
He looked at those two words and smiled for a long time, and only then did he slowly type out the line: “I quit my job. Next month I’m moving to your city.”