The dining table had always been the command center of the Seo family's most important decisions.
It was here that Jin-woo had first announced, at the age of fourteen, that he intended to study mathematics and computer science simultaneously.
It was here that his father had spread out university prospectuses like battle maps, debating the merits of KAIST versus SNU with the same rigor he applied to peer-reviewing research papers.
And it was here, on an ordinary Wednesday evening with the remnants of dakgalbi still fragrant in the air, that another chapter of their lives quietly turned its page.
Young-sook was the first to break the silence.
She had been looking at her hands, folded neatly on the table, the way she always did when she was thinking something through to its very last thread.
Jin-ho, for his part, had leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed, staring at the ceiling with the distant, calculating expression that his graduate students had once described as "the professor loading."
"London," Young-sook said finally, as though testing the weight of the word in her mouth. "I've never been to London."
Jin-ho said, without bringing his gaze down from the ceiling, "I was invited to a conference in Edinburgh once, back in time. Turned it down because you were seven months pregnant with Jin-woo."
Young-sook looked at her husband. "You never told me that."
"You would have felt guilty," Jin-ho said simply. Then he finally lowered his gaze to meet Jin-woo's. "Your mother worries about everything."
"I do not worry about everything," Young-sook said with the particular firmness of someone who absolutely worries about everything.
She turned back to Jin-woo. "How long are we actually talking about? Be honest with me. Not the diplomatic version. The real one."
Jin-woo had anticipated this question.
He set down the bowl he had been drying and returned to the table, pulling out his chair and sitting properly, the way he did when the conversation required his full posture.
"Realistically? The PhD alone is three to four years, depending on how the research develops.
But I don't intend to treat it purely as an academic exercise. I'll be running the UK expansion of A2 in parallel.
If everything goes well — and I mean genuinely well, not just on paper — I'd say we're looking at four to five years total."
Young-sook absorbed this. "Five years."
"At the most. And we'll come back for visits. It won't be a clean disappearance.
Ha-jun's situation also matters — I want to think about what works for him."
At the mention of Ha-jun, Jin-ho uncrossed his arms. "He's five. His Korean education—"
"There are Korean international schools in London," Jin-woo said. "I've already looked into it.
There are also several highly regarded British schools that have strong academic records and Korean student communities.
Either way, Ha-jun would be fine. Probably more than fine — exposure to that kind of international environment at his age would be good for him."
"He'll complain," Young-sook said, but there was a faint smile edging into her voice.
"He'll complain for about two weeks," Jin-woo agreed, "and then he'll find a group of friends and forget he was ever upset."
Jin-ho let out a quiet sound that was almost a laugh. "He gets that from your mother."
"I adapt quickly," Young-sook said with great dignity. "That is not a flaw."
The tension that had been quietly threading through the room began to loosen.
Jin-woo watched his parents settle into a slightly different energy — not convinced yet, but no longer braced against the idea either.
"Where would we actually live?" Young-sook asked, and Jin-woo recognized the shift in her question.
She was no longer asking whether. She was asking how. That was everything.
"Oxford is about an hour from London by train," Jin-woo said.
"The university itself has a city-like atmosphere. It's quieter than Seoul — much quieter — but it has everything you'd need.
And the greenery is genuinely beautiful. There are parks, rivers, and old buildings. You'd probably enjoy the bookshops, Mom."
Young-sook's eyebrows lifted with involuntary interest. "Old bookshops?"
"Entire streets of them. Blackwell's alone has something like three floors underground.
And the libraries — Dad, the Bodleian Library is one of the oldest in the world. It has manuscripts that predate the printing press."
Jin-ho was quiet for a moment. Then: "I've read about the Bodleian."
"I know you have."
Another pause.
"The mathematics department at Oxford," Jin-ho said, in the careful tone of a man gathering information while pretending to merely make conversation, "do they still have a strong faculty in number theory and computational mathematics?"
"Yes. And a growing group working on the mathematical foundations of machine learning, which overlaps directly with where my research is going. It's part of why I applied there specifically."
Jin-ho nodded slowly. Not a nod of agreement, exactly. More the nod of a man updating an internal ledger.
Young-sook had gotten up from the table and walked to the kitchen window, the one that looked out into the small garden where she kept her potted herbs and a persimmon tree that had grown too large for the space but which nobody had the heart to remove.
She stood there for a moment, and Jin-woo didn't rush her.
"I always imagined," she said quietly, to the window more than to either of them, "that when you finally settled into something — your career, your plans, Eun-soo — we would all be here. That I could have you nearby."
"Mom."
"I know," she said quickly, turning around. "I know that's not how life works.
I know you've already done so much on your own, and you've managed fine. I'm not saying I'm against it."
She paused. "I think I'm saying I want to be involved. Which is actually what you're offering, isn't it?"
"It's exactly what I'm offering," Jin-woo said.
Young-sook came back to the table and sat down. She looked at Jin-ho.
Something passed between them — one of those small, wordless exchanges that years of marriage had compressed into a single glance.
Jin-ho turned to Jin-woo.
"What kind of house are you thinking?" he asked.
Jin-woo felt the knot in his chest release. "Something with a garden," he said.
"Enough rooms for everyone to have their own space. Somewhere with good light.
I'll start looking at areas around North Oxford — the neighborhoods there tend to be quieter, more residential. Better than being right in the middle of the city."
"Will there be a proper kitchen?" Young-sook asked immediately.
"An entirely proper kitchen."
"Because I am not spending five years eating only English food," she said firmly.
"I will bring my own gochujang. I'll bring two jars."
"You can bring ten jars," Jin-woo said. "We can have anything shipped.
There are Korean grocery stores in London as well — I'll find the nearest one within the first week, I promise you."
Young-sook pressed her lips together, suppressing something. Then she laughed — a short, genuine sound. "Korean grocery stores in London. What a world."
"What about my books?" Jin-ho asked.
The question was delivered practically, but there was something almost shy underneath it.
His books were not merely possessions. They were, in a very real sense, the physical architecture of his intellectual life. "I'm not leaving my books."
"We'll ship them," Jin-woo said without hesitation. "We'll hire a proper moving company. Anything that matters comes with us."
Jin-ho considered this seriously. "Some of them are quite old. The packing would have to be done carefully."
"I'll make sure of it personally."
His father gave him a long, measuring look. Then he nodded — a different kind of nod this time. A closing nod.
The kind that meant a decision had been reached.
"Then let's do it," Jin-ho said.
There was no dramatic flourish to it, no grand declaration.
It was stated the same way he might confirm a theorem — quietly, after all the working had been done.
"It won't be forever. And if you're going somewhere significant, then we should be there to see it."
Young-sook reached across and covered Jin-woo's hand with hers. "We'll make it work. We always do."
Jin-woo looked at them both — his father already mentally cataloguing which books would need the most careful packaging, his mother already composing a mental grocery list of Korean essentials to bring — and felt something settle deep within him.
"We should tell Ha-jun tonight," Jin-woo said.
"He'll complain," Young-sook repeated, but she was already smiling.
"Two weeks," Jin-woo said. "Then he'll love it."
Outside, the persimmon tree rustled faintly in the night breeze, and the warm light of the Seo family home spilled out across the quiet Ilsan street — familiar, steady, and entirely ready for what came next.