The Letter That Changed Everything

Su Jingchen grew up in a farming village and did well enough on the university entrance exam to be admitted to one of the country's top schools. His wife, Shen Xue, took the admission letter before he ever saw it and gave it to the man she had loved first, who used it. Su Jingchen never learned this. He stayed in the village and worked forty years at nothing that went anywhere, and his own children came to look down on him for it. When Shen Xue died she left her property to that other man, and she said in as many words that she had never loved her husband. Then Su Jingchen wakes up twenty years earlier, on the day of the exam, knowing all of it. He decides he will not love Shen Xue this time. He goes after the admission letter, takes it back, and leaves for the university. Shen Xue, watching him stop caring what she does, starts to find she cannot get by without him.