Hold her tight. Never let her go.
Synopsis
Lian Yu once believed that love was patient—that the people who loved him would always be there, waiting, no matter how long he stayed away.
He was wrong.
On a rain-soaked afternoon in May 2024, the world he built collapses at a funeral. The coffin being lowered into the earth carries Ciao Ren—his fiancée, his anchor, the woman he failed when it mattered most. The day meant to be their wedding becomes her burial. While others mourn in silence, Lian Yu stands drenched and broken, despised by the living and abandoned by the dead.
Her death is not an accident without blame.
On the night Ciao Ren lay unconscious in a hospital bed, fighting for her life after a brutal assault, Lian Yu was elsewhere—celebrating at a baby shower, choosing politeness and convenience over urgency and love. He never signed the consent form in time.
He never made it back.
By morning, she was gone.
Grief becomes his sentence. For a year and a half, Lian Yu lives like a ghost among the living—praying before her photograph each morning, offering incense and fruit she once loved, tending her grave with obsessive devotion until it becomes the neatest in the cemetery. He keeps promises she can no longer hear. He refuses alcohol. He refuses comfort. He refuses forgiveness—even from himself.
Ciao Ren’s mother cuts him off completely. To her, he is not a grieving man but the embodiment of betrayal.
Her only daughter had once saved her from despair after a broken marriage, only to be lost to the negligence of the man who claimed to love her. No apology can erase the image of Lian Yu choosing another woman’s celebration while her daughter died alone.
Lian Yu does not seek absolution.
He believes suffering is the least he deserves.
Haunted by memories, he slowly realizes the truth he had refused to face while Ciao Ren was alive: she was suffocating. Left alone night after night, waiting for a man who always returned—but never stayed. She had hoped he would change. She had believed in him until the very end.
And he failed her.
Then, without warning, the world fractures.
Lian Yu awakens in a sunlit bedroom to the impossible sight of his mother—alive, warm, scolding him for oversleeping. The home he hasn’t seen in years stands intact. The calendar reads May 2021, the day he is meant to leave for university.
Five years before the tragedy.
At first, he believes he is dreaming—another cruel illusion born of guilt and longing. But the evidence is undeniable. The past has opened its doors, and Lian Yu has been given something he never asked for and does not deserve: another chance.
This time, the people he lost are still alive.
Ciao Ren has not yet been abandoned. His mother has not yet died. The irreversible has not yet occurred.
Caught between disbelief and terror, Lian Yu realizes the weight of what he holds. This is not simply a second life—it is a reckoning. A test. Perhaps a punishment, perhaps mercy.
He remembers every mistake. Every absence. Every choice that led to blood, rain, and regret.
And this time, he swears it will be different.
No matter how painful it is to stay. No matter what he must give up. No matter what fate demands in return.
Because if love once failed due to neglect, then this time, Lian Yu will fight—against habit, against destiny, against himself—to protect the people he once buried.
Even if it costs him everything.
This is a rebirth novel about reckoning and redemption.
There're secrets that led to another. And fate, bringing back all that is lost.
it's now left for him to decide...
To let the tragedy repeat himself or to fight with his all to keep that he had lost.
