The corridor Nakyung led him down was narrower than the main hallway, the wood underfoot worn into a gentle concavity at the centre of each plank. The runner rug was faded. A framed concert programme hung behind glass, and he didn't have time to read it before Nakyung's stride carried them past.
She didn't speak. He had already gathered that this was unusual for her. The silence coming off her now wasn't hostile, having lost the edge it had carried over the meal, but it had weight: the silence of someone who had made a decision and was still watching to see if it would prove to have been a mistake.
Jaemin didn't try to fill it. He instinctively knew that anything he said now would likely be unwelcome.
Back in the tea room, when Ji-young had mentioned the practice room, Nakyung had gone still.
It had lasted barely a second. The slight shift in her expression, the question that crossed it—something specific, stripped of her usual irreverence—as her eyes moved to her mother's face.
Ji-young had met it without blinking, and gave a single, small nod.
Nakyung had held her mother's gaze for one beat longer, then had looked away. When Jaemin's bowl had finally emptied, she had unfolded herself from her chair, stretching languidly.
"C'mon then," she had said to Jaemin, already moving toward the door.
It was only too clear that the room Nakyung was leading him to now was one of significance. Jaemin just didn't know exactly what that significance was yet.
The door at the end of the corridor was heavier than the others, its brass handle worn smooth at the top. Nakyung closed her fist around it without ceremony and pushed it open, stepping back to let him through first.
The room was south-facing. The afternoon light came in full and even, the kind musicians prized—clean, directionless. It fell across the shelves lining the far wall, shelves packed with scores: some bound in black, some loose-leafed and held together with rubber bands that had long since yellowed. Two folded music stands leaned near the window. Against the far wall, an upright piano.
Jaemin's gaze went to it the way it always did. Not by decision. He had crossed the room toward it before he'd even registered moving.
On top of the piano stood a photograph in a plain wooden frame. The man in the picture was on a stage Jaemin didn't recognise, violin resting lightly on his arm. He wasn't looking at the camera. His head was turned to the left, caught mid-sentence, and he was laughing: a real laugh, unguarded, creasing the corners of his eyes.
Jaemin's chest tightened with recognition. He had never seen Kang Han-sol before. But he knew the jaw. He knew the hands, fingers long and slightly squared at the tip, the left one already reaching to adjust the bow.
The smell of the room had registered on him gradually, but he inhaled it consciously now. Rosin. Old paper. And beneath both: something else. Faint, almost imperceptible, faded by years. Not alpha, not beta. The signature of someone who had spent a lifetime suppressed.
Turns out, my father was an omega. Jaemin still remembered the way Do-hyun's voice had been, hushed under the cold March sky as he'd held Jaemin's hands, grounding him away from the terror of glimpsing Choi Seungcheol for the first time in years. He lived his entire life in a world that wouldn't let him be who he was.
"That was from Appa's last European tour," Nakyung said from behind him. Her voice was level, but something in it was careful. "About two years before he died. He did one more season after this, before he had to retire."
Had to. The phrasing was deliberate and precise, the way a family learns to speak around a wound they have tended to for too long.
Jaemin nodded. "I'm so sorry for your loss," he said softly, setting down the photo frame. "Do-hyun told me about him, some time ago."
Nakyung had moved to sit sideways in the chair, one long leg dangling off the arm, observing him with unhurried attention. "He doesn't usually," she said simply. She gestured at the piano. "Why don't you play something?"
Jaemin moved to the piano bench and sat down, hands on his knees, not touching the keys. The late afternoon light filtered in steady and warm across the floor, casting the room in gold. He understood, distantly, why someone would come here to practise. Why someone might also come here just to be, removed from everything that demanded the performance of a self that they weren't.
Not freedom, just a lower dose of the burden of pretending. A fraction less of the weight.
"He loved this room," Nakyung said quietly. "And it seems you do as well." When Jaemin turned to her with a questioning look, she tapped her nose. "Alpha. I sensed you spike, back in the tea room, when you were telling us about… your past. But your scent has eased ever since you stepped in here."
Jaemin turned toward her. "Your mother…?"
"Omma's beta. And don't worry," she added. "Discriminating against omegas is the last thing anyone in the household approves of."
Jaemin let out a huff of a laugh, remembering how nasty Do-hyun had been when Jaemin had first joined the orchestra. "I don't know about that…"
"Why, did Oppa bully you?" Nakyung's gaze sharpened. "That guy developed some weird icky complex around it. You should totally tell Omma, she'll never let him live it down. She might be a beta, but she can really pack a punch. Verbally, I mean," she added quickly when Jaemin gave her a startled look.
When their laughter quieted, her eyes lingered on the photograph. "She found out when they were already serious. He told her himself. He must have been terrified she would leave. That that would be the thing that ended them."
"But she didn't."
"No. She did not." Then, quieter: "She spent their entire marriage, more than twenty years, helping him keep it. Sourcing the suppressants, managing the prescriptions, covering the paper trail. All of it.
"Her family didn't know. Nobody knew. That was the whole point. He spent his whole career—his whole life—making sure nobody would. And she helped him in every way she could."
She looked at Jaemin evenly. "The article the other day, that wasn't just Appa's secret. It was all of Omma's choices too."
Jaemin closed his eyes.
That was it, then, the thing had been sitting behind Ji-young's face all through lunch. Not grief, and not merely the clean worry of a legal problem. It was the look of someone who had built the entire structure of her family's safety on discretion, only to watch it come down overnight at the hands of someone else. Someone who had used it as a weapon against the very people she had been trying to protect.
And still she had sat across the table from him—a stranger, a complication, someone who had dragged her son and all the rest of them into this, leading unsympathetic strangers to exhume their family's most painful secret—and offered him juk and asked about his parents.
"I'm sorry," he whispered around the lump in his throat, and meant it for several things at once.
Nakyung looked at him for a long moment. Then she swung her leg off the armrest and sat forward, elbows on her knees, face cupped in her palms. "That man who's behind all this… Was he using your omega designation against you too?"
Jaemin stared down at the black and white keys. "He did," he admitted quietly. "He used it against me in… the worst possible ways. But he thinks that I'll still be his eventually, because…" His hands tightened in his lap, "...because he thinks I don't have any other choice."
Nakyung huffed. "Well, isn't he an egotistical prick. I'm sure if you'd wanted to be with him, you'd be with him already. No hiding in the mountains with us. My brother can be an idiot, but I'm sure he's miles ahead of that guy."
Jaemin couldn't help but laugh at the offended expression on her face. "He is. He really, definitely is."
A comfortable silence fell between them again, broken only when Nakyung murmured, almost to herself:
"He looks like him." Her eyes were back on the photograph. Jaemin didn't have to ask who she was talking about. "More and more every year."
It was not said with sadness, exactly. Instead, it carried the weight of someone learning to hold two things at once: how much had been lost, and how much remained.
Jaemin said nothing. He didn't think she needed him to.
For a while, neither of them spoke. The light lay warm and even across the shelves, across the piano. Across the photograph where a man stood, immortalised in laughter, a fleeting note of joy which no one would hear again.