That night, in her student's arms, she shed her t…

Bai Yuqing sat dazed in an office piled high with exam papers, clutching a red pen. Her boyfriend of four years, Lin Yuan, had vanished completely after leaving the words "You're too serious"—without so much as a goodbye text. She was a Chinese literature teacher at a prestigious high school, thirty-five, with twelve years of teaching behind her, yet at this moment she felt like shattered porcelain. Tucked in her drawer was half a bottle of red wine, which she’d planned to drown her sorrows with, never suspecting that her most fatal vulnerability right then wasn’t her fragility—but the student who had been watching her all along, about to push open that door left slightly ajar.