She came home to find him on the couch.
For a moment, she just stood in the doorway, staring. Haneul was sitting in the dark, the television flickering blue light across his face, a beer in his hand. He was still beautiful, he would always be beautiful, but the beauty had become something sharp, something that cut instead of warmed.
He didn't look up when she came in.
"Sora," he said. Not a greeting. An acknowledgement. The kind of voice you used for someone you had to talk to but didn't want to.
She closed the door. Hung her coat. Put her bag down. Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat, but she kept her movements slow, deliberate. If she was careful, if she said the right things, maybe he would look at her. Maybe he would see her.
"I've been trying to reach you," she said.
"I know."
His voice was flat. Dismissive. He took a long sip of his beer and didn't look away from the screen.
"The wedding planner called. She said you haven't been responding to her emails. We need to finalise the guest list by Friday, and there's the menu tasting, and the florist needs—"
"Sora."
She stopped. His voice had sharpened. Not angry. Just impatient. The way you might speak to a child who was bothering you while you were trying to watch something.
"I'm busy," he said. "You knew what my job was when you said yes."
Her jaw tightened. "I know. But the wedding—"
"What about the wedding?"
He looked at her then, and she wished he hadn't. His eyes were flat. Cold. The eyes of a man who was looking at something he had stopped wanting a long time ago.
"You've been planning that wedding for a year," he said. "You've got everything under control. You don't need me to pick flowers."
"I need you to be present." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she hated herself for it. "I need you to answer my calls. I need you to come home at night. I need—"
"You need to stop."
The words landed like a slap. She stared at him, her mouth open, her heart splintering in her chest.
"What?"
He set his beer down. Sat forward. And for a moment—just a moment—she saw something flicker in his eyes. Guilt, maybe. Or pity. Or just the exhaustion of a man who had been pretending for too long.
"You want to know what's going on?" he said. "Fine. I've been trying to figure out how to tell you this, but since you won't let it go—"
He stopped. Looked at her. And for one terrible, hopeful moment, she thought he was going to tell her the truth. That he was sorry. That he loved her. That he would try harder.
Instead, he said "I need space."
The words didn't make sense. She blinked at him, waiting for the rest of the sentence, the part where he explained what he meant, where he told her it wasn't her fault, where he promised he wasn't leaving.
But he didn't.
"You're suffocating me, Sora." His voice was cold. Matter-of-fact. Like he was explaining something she should have understood a long time ago. "Every time I don't answer a text, you send three more. Every time I come home late, you're waiting up with questions. I can't breathe."
She stared at him. She had been alone in this apartment for months. She had cried herself to sleep more nights than she could count. She had carried the weight of their dying relationship on her shoulders while he was out living a life she wasn't part of.
And he was telling her she was the problem.
"I'm suffocating you?" Her voice came out higher than she intended, thin and brittle. "I'm the one who's been alone in this apartment for months. I'm the one who doesn't know where you are or who you're with. I'm the one who—"
"Maybe if you weren't so focused on me all the time, you'd have something else to think about."
He stood up. Grabbed his jacket from the back of the couch. The movement was practiced, smooth, like he had done it a hundred times before. And maybe he had. Maybe he had been leaving her for months, and she had been too busy holding on to notice.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Out."
"It's almost midnight."
"Yeah." He pulled on his jacket, not looking at her. "I know."
"Who are you going with?"
He finally looked at her. And the expression on his face, cold, dismissive, utterly without warmth, was the cruelest thing he had ever shown her.
"Does it matter?"
She opened her mouth. Closed it. She wanted to scream. She wanted to grab him and shake him and make him see her, really see her, the way he used to. She wanted to be thirteen years old again, when his eyes had been full of fire and fury and the absolute certainty that she was worth saving.
But the man standing in front of her wasn't that boy. And she didn't know when he had changed, or why, or if she had done something to make him stop loving her.
"Don't wait up," he said.
The door slammed.
She stood in the middle of the living room, staring at the closed door, and waited for him to come back. One minute. Two. Five.
He didn't come back.
She walked to the window and watched him walk down the street, his figure disappearing into the night. He didn't look back. He never looked back.
---
She sat in the dark for a long time.
The apartment was silent. The television had been turned off at some point, she didn't remember doing it, and the only light came from the streetlamps outside, casting long shadows across the floor.
She replayed the conversation over and over, picking it apart like a wound she couldn't stop touching.
You're suffocating me.
Maybe if you weren't so focused on me all the time...
Don't wait up.
She asked herself the question that had been circling her mind for months. Is he right?
She thought about her mother, who had walked out when Sora was thirteen and never looked back. She thought about her father, who had beaten her and her brother until there was nothing left to break. She thought about her brother, who had chosen death over staying with her.
Everyone left. Everyone had always left.
Maybe I'm the problem.
The thought came quietly, the way all the most damaging thoughts did. Not a revelation, but a confirmation. Something she had always known but never let herself believe.
Maybe I'm too much. Too needy. Too broken. Maybe I ask for more than anyone can give. Maybe I love too hard, hold too tight, want too much. Maybe I'm the reason everyone leaves.
She pulled out her phone. No messages. No missed calls. Nothing.
She scrolled through her contacts. Her mother's number was still there, even though she hadn't called in years. Her father's number was blocked. Her brother's number was disconnected, a ghost in her phone, a reminder of everything she had lost.
She pressed the call button before she could stop herself.
The phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times.
A man's voice answered. "Hello?"
It wasn't her mother. It was her mother's husband. The man her mother had chosen over her.
Sora hung up.
She sat there, the phone pressed to her chest, and let the tears come. Not the quiet, controlled tears she had been crying for weeks. The ugly, gasping sobs of a woman who had lost everything and didn't know how to find her way back.
She cried for the boy who had saved her. She cried for the girl who had believed she was worth saving. She cried for the sixteen years she had poured into a man who had stopped seeing her a long time ago.
And when she had no tears left, she lay down on the couch, she couldn't go into the bedroom, couldn't face the empty bed, and stared at the ceiling.
The water stain was still there. The crack near the light fixture was still there. Nothing had changed. And everything had changed.
She picked up her phone. Her fingers moved before her mind could catch up.
I'm sorry. You're right. I'll do better.
She sent the message before she could think about it. Before she could ask herself why she was apologizing for wanting to be loved. Before she could remember that she was the one who had been alone for months, who had been crying herself to sleep, who had been holding onto a man who had already let go.
The message sent. Delivered.
She waited for the three dots that would mean he was typing. One minute. Five. Ten.
Nothing.
She set the phone down and closed her eyes. Tomorrow, she would try harder. Tomorrow, she would be the woman he wanted her to be. She would give him space. She wouldn't call so much. She wouldn't ask so many questions. She would be less, smaller, quieter. She would make herself into someone who was easy to love.
Because if she didn't, she would be alone. And she didn't know how to be alone. She had never known.
---
The morning came the way it always did. Gray light. Empty apartment. Cold sheets on the side of the bed where no one slept.
Sora moved through her routine like a ghost. Shower. Coffee. Clothes. Her body knew what to do even when her mind was somewhere else, circling the same wounds, picking at the same scabs.
She left the apartment at six-thirty, earlier than she needed to, because she couldn't stand the silence. The photographs in the hallway blurred as she passed them. She didn't look.
The walk to the hospital was twenty minutes. She had done it a thousand times. She knew every crack in the sidewalk, every shop that opened early, every place where the streetlights flickered. She moved on autopilot, her eyes fixed on the ground, her mind somewhere far away.
She didn't notice the car.
It was black, nondescript, the kind of car that blended into the shadows. It was parked across the street from her apartment building, its engine off, its windows dark. It had been there all night.
She didn't see it. But if she had looked, if she had really looked, she might have noticed that it was the same car that had been there last week. And the week before that. And the week before that.
She walked past it, her breath misting in the cold morning air, her coat pulled tight around her. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, a message from the hospital, asking if she could come in early, and she pulled it out to respond.
She didn't see the figure inside the car. The tall shape behind the tinted glass. The blue eyes that watched her with the patience of a predator who had been waiting for months.
She didn't see the fingers tighten on the steering wheel when she wiped at her eyes, trying to hide the evidence of a sleepless night. She didn't see the jaw clench when she stumbled on a crack in the sidewalk, too exhausted to watch where she was going.
She didn't see any of it.
But he saw her.
He had seen her last night, through the window of her apartment, standing in the dark, crying alone. He had seen her send that message to a man who didn't deserve the apology. He had seen her break herself apart trying to hold onto something that was already gone.
His fingers were white on the steering wheel. His chest was tight with something he didn't have a name for. Something that felt like fury and hunger and a need so deep it terrified him.
Not yet, he told himself. The timing has to be perfect.
He watched her disappear through the hospital doors. He watched the lights come on in the trauma center. He watched the place where she had been standing, as if he could still see her there.
He had waited months. He could wait a little longer.
But when he thought about Kang Haneul, about the way he had looked at her last night, the words he had said, the door he had let slam behind him, something dark and violent stirred in Jack's chest. Something that had been caged for a very long time.
He started the car. Pulled away from the curb. Drove toward the part of the city where men like Kang Haneul thought they were untouchable.
He had a message to deliver. A warning. A reminder that Park Sora was not his to break.
She was his. She had been his from the moment her hands had closed around his heart.
She just didn't know it yet.