The flight was a blurred window of grey clouds and silent tears. Seo-yoon didn't sleep; she couldn't. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the hospital's cold white tiles instead of the warm lanterns of Suzhou.
When the plane touched down at Gimhae Airport, the familiar scent of the Busan sea—salty, sharp, and humid—hit her like a physical blow. But it didn't feel like home. It felt like a reminder of everything she was terrified to lose. She didn't wait for the shuttle; she ran for the first taxi, her voice trembling as she gave the name of the municipal hospital.
The hospital was a stark, sterile world of beeping monitors and hushed whispers. Seo-yoon sprinted through the lobby, her suitcase wheels screaming against the polished floor. When she reached the third-floor waiting area, she saw him.
Her father looked ten years older. He was sitting in a hard plastic chair, his head buried in his hands, still wearing the apron from the café.
"Appa..."
He looked up, his eyes bloodshot and hollow. For a moment, he just stared, as if he were seeing a ghost. Then, he stood up and pulled her into a crushing embrace. Neither of them spoke. The silence told her everything—her mother was still behind those heavy double doors, fighting a battle they couldn't help her win.
Seo-yoon sat beside him, the beige coat she had worn in Suzhou now stained with the grime of travel. She stared at the "ICU" sign, her heart feeling like a lead weight. She was back in Busan, but she had never felt more lost.
Two days passed in Suzhou like a slow-motion film.
In the Architecture Lab, the air was thick with the scent of sawdust and glue. Yan-chen had finished the structural frame of his bridge. He had stayed up for forty-eight hours, his body fueled by nothing but caffeine and the expectation that today, the Film department students would be back.
He kept looking at the door. He had rehearsed a cold, indifferent greeting in his head—something about her being late or her notes being messy. But as the hours ticked by, the door only opened for younger students or professors.
Finally, the lab doors swung open with a bang. Wei stumbled in, his face pale, his usual grin nowhere to be found.
"Yan-chen," Wei panted, his voice cracking.
Yan-chen didn't stop sanding the balsa wood. "You're late. Where are the others?"
"She's gone, Yan-chen. Seo-yoon... she's gone back to Korea."
The sandpaper stopped. The silence that followed was so heavy it felt structural. Yan-chen didn't move. He didn't even look up. "What do you mean, 'gone'?"
"Her mom. A heart attack. She found out at the station in Hangzhou and took the first flight out. She didn't even go back to her apartment to pack properly." Wei walked over, dropping a small, folded piece of paper onto the drafting table. "Lin told the professor. She didn't leave a message for anyone. Just... ran."
Yan-chen's grip on the sandpaper tightened until the wood snapped. He looked at the piece of paper. It was a copy of the department's emergency leave notice.
For the first time in three years, the "Ice Prince" felt the cold. Not the artistic, distant cold he was famous for, but a hollow, biting chill that started in his chest and moved outward. He looked at his bridge model—perfect, symmetrical, and completely empty.
"She left her things?" Yan-chen asked, his voice dangerously quiet.
"Most of them. Lin has the key to her studio. Why?"
Yan-chen didn't answer. He stood up, grabbing his coat. He didn't look at the bridge. He didn't look at Wei. He walked out of the lab with a stride so fierce that students moved out of his way in fear.
He headed straight for the Pingjiang district, to the door he had walked her to only nights before. He stood in front of the heavy wooden entrance, the bridge nearby reflecting the moonlight in the water. She was gone. The girl who challenged his math, the girl who wore his muffler, the girl who made the stone city feel like it was breathing—she had vanished into the salt air of a city he didn't know.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the silver "Blue Waves" bracelet. The metal was warm from his skin. He looked at the Korean characters he still couldn't read and realized that he had built a bridge, but he had let the only person worth crossing it for slip through his fingers.