The apartment had become a tomb.
Sora stood in the middle of the living room, her arms wrapped around herself, and tried to remember when this place had felt like home. The photographs on the wall, her and Haneul at eighteen, at twenty-two, at twenty-five, seemed to mock her now. Smiling faces. A love that had been real once, or maybe it had never been real at all. Maybe she had been so desperate to be loved that she had imagined the parts that didn't fit.
She couldn't stay here. She knew that with a clarity that cut through the fog of exhaustion she had been living in for weeks. This apartment held too much of him. The couch where he used to hold her. The kitchen where they had cooked together in the early years, before his career had taken off and hers had consumed her. The bedroom where he had stopped touching her months ago, where he had turned his back to her night after night, where she had lain awake wondering what she had done wrong.
She needed somewhere else. Somewhere that was hers. Somewhere that didn't smell like his cologne, didn't echo with his silence, didn't remind her of sixteen years she was trying to unlearn.
She opened her laptop and started searching.
The listings blurred together after the first hour. Studio apartments in neighbourhoods she couldn't afford. One-bedrooms with security deposits that would eat through her savings. Rooms for rent in shared houses with roommates she didn't know and didn't want to know. Everything felt wrong. Everything felt like a compromise she wasn't ready to make.
She found a small place in Mapo-gu that didn't make her chest tighten. A studio, cramped but clean, with a window that faced east and a kitchenette that would fit exactly one person. The rent was reasonable. The pictures showed white walls and empty floors, a blank canvas she could fill with things that belonged to her.
She bookmarked it. She would call tomorrow. She would schedule a viewing. She would start building a life that didn't revolve around Kang Haneul.
Her phone buzzed. She glanced at it, her heart lurching despite herself, but it was only the hospital. Another stabbing victim had been brought in. They needed her. They always needed her.
She closed the laptop, grabbed her coat, and walked out the door. The photographs in the hallway blurred as she passed. She didn't look at them. She couldn't.
---
The stabbings had been coming in waves for weeks.
It started with a gang dispute in Itaewon that sent six young men to the trauma bay in a single night. Then a domestic violence case that left a woman with fourteen stab wounds and a husband who claimed he didn't remember picking up the knife. Then a street fight in Hongdae, then a robbery in Gangnam, then another, then another. The city was bleeding, and Sora was the one they called when the bleeding wouldn't stop.
She worked eighteen-hour shifts. Twenty-hour shifts. She stayed late, came early, volunteered for the hardest cases, the ones that required steady hands and a clear mind. She needed the chaos. She needed the noise. She needed the way the world narrowed to the essentials airway, breathing, circulation because when she was in the trauma bay, she wasn't Park Sora, the woman whose fiance had left her for another woman. She was Dr. Park, trauma surgeon, the woman who held dying hearts in her hands and refused to let them stop beating.
But the exhaustion was catching up with her.
She felt it in the way her hands trembled after a long surgery, the way her vision blurred when she tried to read charts, the way her body ached with a heaviness that sleep couldn't cure. She was running on coffee and willpower, her appetite gone, her sleep fractured, her mind always circling the same thoughts no matter how hard she tried to drown them out.
He's in LA. He's with her. He left you. He didn't even say goodbye.
She pushed the thoughts away. She had to push them away. There were patients to save, wounds to close, lives to piece back together. She couldn't afford to fall apart. Not now. Not ever.
"Sora."
She looked up from the chart she was pretending to read. Minjun was standing in the doorway of the break room, his face creased with concern. He had been watching her for days, she knew. Watching her work herself to the bone, watching her skip meals, watching the shadows under her eyes grow darker with each passing shift.
"When was the last time you ate?" he asked.
"I had coffee."
"Coffee isn't food."
"It has calories. It counts."
Minjun walked over and sat down across from her. He didn't say anything for a moment, just looked at her with those kind eyes that saw too much. She looked away first.
"You're going to collapse," he said quietly. "You've worked fourteen shifts in the last twelve days. You've lost weight. You're not sleeping. And you're pretending you're fine when we both know you're not."
"I'm fine."
"You're not." His voice was gentle but firm. "Sora, I know what happened. I know Haneul—"
"Don't." The word came out sharper than she intended. She saw him flinch and immediately regretted it. "I'm sorry. I just... I can't talk about it. Not right now."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he reached across the table and took her hand. His grip was warm, steady, the grip of someone who had been her friend for five years and wasn't going to let her disappear.
"You don't have to talk about it," he said. "But you have to eat. You have to sleep. You have to stop running yourself into the ground because you're afraid of what happens when you stop moving."
She stared at him. The words hit something inside her, something she had been trying to ignore for weeks.
You're afraid of what happens when you stop moving.
He was right. She was afraid. Afraid that if she stopped, if she let herself rest, the grief would swallow her whole. Afraid that she would look at her life and see nothing but the wreckage of a future she had been building since she was thirteen years old. Afraid that she would finally admit that Kang Haneul had taken something from her that she might never get back.
"I'll eat," she said. "I promise."
Minjun squeezed her hand and let go. "Good. There's a new cafe around the corner. Their pastries are supposed to be amazing. Go after your shift. Sit down. Breathe. You don't have to figure everything out today."
She nodded. She didn't tell him that she had been searching for apartments between shifts, that she was trying to figure out how to move out of the apartment she had shared with Haneul, that she didn't know how to be a person who lived alone because she had never been one.
She didn't tell him any of it. She just smiled, a small, tired smile, and went back to her charts.
---
Her shift ended at seven in the evening. The sun was setting, the city lights flickering on, the streets filled with people heading home to dinners and families and lives that made sense. Sora walked out of the hospital with her coat pulled tight around her, her body heavy, her mind numb.
She remembered Minjun's words. Go to the cafe. Sit down. Breathe.
She turned toward the new cafe on the corner, a small place with warm lights and the smell of fresh bread drifting through the open door. It was the kind of place that should have been comforting. The kind of place where normal people went to do normal things like drink coffee and read books and not think about the men who had broken them.
She ordered a latte, her usual, the one she used to order before she started drinking everything black, and waited at the counter. The café was busy, filled with the low hum of conversation and the hiss of the espresso machine. She let the noise wash over her, let it fill the spaces in her mind that were too quiet, too empty, too ready to fill with thoughts of him.
And then she heard it.
"He's so gorgeous, isn't he? I mean, have you seen his new campaign? Those cheekbones could cut glass."
Sora's hand tightened around her coffee cup. She didn't turn. She didn't need to. She knew that voice. The blonde woman from the apartment. The one whose arms had been wrapped around Haneul. The one whose mouth had been on his.
"You're so lucky," the friend was saying. "How did you even meet him?"
"At a shoot. He was so cold at first, you know? But I could tell he was interested. He kept looking at me. And then one night he just... showed up at my place."
Sora's vision tunnelled. The sounds of the cafe faded, replaced by the roaring of blood in her ears. She could see it, Haneul showing up at that woman's apartment, Haneul kissing her, Haneul choosing her over the sixteen years Sora had given him.
"What's he like?" the friend asked.
"Amazing. But complicated. His ex is apparently losing her mind right now. He says she's been calling him nonstop, acting crazy. He had to go to LA just to get away from her."
Sora's hand was shaking. Coffee sloshed over the rim of her cup, burning her fingers, but she didn't feel it.
His ex. Acting crazy. Had to get away from her.
She was the ex. She was the one he was calling crazy. She was the one he had to escape from. Never mind that he had been the one to leave. Never mind that he had been the one to cheat. Never mind that she had spent sixteen years loving him, building her life around him, believing that he was the one thing in her world that would never break.
He had rewritten the story. He had made her the villain. And this woman, this woman who had been in his bed, who had kissed him, who had taken him without caring what it would do to Sora, was laughing about it like it was a joke.
She had to get out. She had to get out now.
She threw money on the counter, more than enough to cover the coffee, and walked out without looking back. She heard the woman's voice behind her, still talking, still laughing, still living a life that Sora was supposed to have had.
She didn't look back.
---
The street was crowded, but Sora couldn't breathe.
She stumbled away from the cafe, her chest tight, her lungs burning, her heart pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat. She pressed a hand to her chest, trying to slow her breathing, but the panic was already there, a vice around her ribs, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.
In. Out. In. Out. She knew the technique. She had talked patients through panic attacks a hundred times. But knowing how to stop it and being able to stop it were two different things.
She needed air. She needed space. She needed to get away from the cafe, away from the woman's voice, away from the words that were playing on a loop in her head.
His ex is losing her mind. Acting crazy. Had to go to LA to get away from her.
She stumbled to the side of the street, her hand finding the rough surface of a building wall, and she leaned against it, her head bowed, her breath coming in ragged gasps. People passed her on the sidewalk, their faces blurring, their voices distant. No one stopped. No one asked if she was okay. She was invisible, a ghost in a city that had never belonged to her.
She forced herself to look up. To focus on something, anything, that wasn't the sound of that woman's voice.
And then she saw it.
Across the street, on the side of a bus, a massive advertisement. Haneul's face, larger than life, his jaw sharp, his eyes cold, his lips curved in the smile that had once made her feel like the luckiest woman in the world. He was leaning against a car, his shirt unbuttoned, his hair perfect, his gaze directed at something the viewer couldn't see.
He looked like a stranger. He looked like someone she had never known at all.
The panic rose again, stronger this time. Her vision swam. Her knees buckled. She pressed her palm flat against the wall, trying to ground herself, trying to remember who she was, where she was, what was real.
You are Park Sora. You are a trauma surgeon. You are standing on the corner of Yulgok-ro and Samil-daero. You are having a panic attack. It will pass. It always passes.
But it wasn't passing. Her heart was beating too fast. Her lungs weren't filling. Her body was sweating despite the cold, her shirt clinging to her skin, her hair sticking to her forehead. She was falling, or the world was falling, or maybe she was already on the ground and she just couldn't tell anymore.
She shook her head. She had to move. She had to get back to the hospital, back to the one place where she knew who she was, where she had control, where she wasn't the woman who had been left behind.
She pushed off from the wall and stepped toward the crosswalk. The light was green. The cars were stopped. She could cross. She could make it.
But her legs weren't working the way they should. Her vision was blurring at the edges. The street seemed to tilt beneath her feet, and she stumbled, catching herself on the curb, her hands scraping against the concrete.
Move. Move. Just move.
She stepped into the crosswalk. She didn't look. She didn't check. She just needed to get across, to get back to the hospital, to get somewhere safe where she could fall apart in private and no one would see.
The horn came out of nowhere.
She turned. The headlights were blinding, two suns bearing down on her, growing larger, growing brighter, growing closer. The screech of tires was deafening, a sound that cut through the fog in her mind, a sound that told her everything she needed to know.
She had stepped into traffic. She hadn't looked. She hadn't checked. And now a car was coming, and there was no time to move, no time to run, no time for anything except the sudden, sharp clarity of a woman who had spent her whole life running from something and had finally run into something she couldn't escape.
She closed her eyes.
The screech of tires filled the world. The horn blared. And somewhere, in the split second before impact, she thought of blue eyes. Cold. Depth less. Watching. The last thing she saw before the darkness.
The car kept coming.
The screech of tires was the last thing she heard before the world stopped.