Chapter 4

The drive home felt longer than it should have.

Not because traffic was bad. For once, the city moved around them with only the usual amount of reluctance, brake lights flaring and dissolving in an orderly river ahead. It was not even properly dark yet. Evening had only just started settling into the streets, the sky still carrying a little of the day in the windows of buildings and the wet shine of the asphalt.

Still, something in the car had gone too careful.

The radio played low enough to be ignored. Nayeon kept one hand on the wheel and the other loose over the gear shift, eyes fixed a little too steadily on the road in front of her. Beside her, Yunjin sat turned slightly toward the window, one leg folded under the other, her bag resting in her lap unopened. Usually by this point one of them would have said something. Something pointless, most likely. A complaint about a client. A story from class. A passing insult disguised as affection.

Now the silence sat between them with shape.

Not hostile. Not quite. Just present in a way that made even breathing feel too noticeable.

Nayeon told herself it was fine.

People were allowed to have strange evenings. Marriages did not crack open just because one email had arrived at the wrong time with the wrong name in it.

The thought would have been more reassuring if she believed it.

At a red light, she risked a glance sideways.

Yunjin was looking out at the passing storefronts, but not, Nayeon suspected, really seeing them. Her face was calm in the composed way Nayeon had learned to mistrust. Not closed, exactly. More like tidied. Whatever she was thinking had been folded away too neatly to reach without permission.

Nayeon hated that she knew the difference.

The light changed. She looked back at the road.

“You’re quiet,” she said, immediately annoyed with herself because it sounded like an accusation when she had meant it as an offering. Or maybe a test. She wasn’t sure.

Beside her, Yunjin shifted slightly and turned from the window. “You noticed?”

Nayeon let out a breath through her nose. “You make it sound rare.”

“It is, sometimes.”

“Not with me.”

The answer came too quickly. Too honestly.

Yunjin looked at her for a second, and Nayeon could feel it without looking back. Then Yunjin’s voice softened in a way that somehow made things worse.

“No,” she said. “Not with you.”

That should have eased something. Instead it lodged somewhere inconveniently deep.

Nayeon tightened her grip on the wheel and took the next turn a little more sharply than necessary. “You can say whatever you’re thinking.”

The offer hung in the air.

When Yunjin spoke, her tone was measured enough that Nayeon knew she had edited it before letting it out.

“I’m thinking it’s a little cruel that she would show up like this.”

Nayeon’s throat tightened before she could stop it.

Not because the sentence was dramatic. Because it wasn’t.

She glanced over then. “Cruel?”

Yunjin met her eyes briefly, then looked ahead again. “Maybe not intentionally.”

Nayeon laughed once, without humor. “That would be giving her a lot of credit.”

Yunjin didn’t answer immediately. “I just mean… after everything.”

The way she said it made the rest of the sentence unnecessary.

After everything.

After the years of not saying Mina’s name unless someone else dragged it into the room. After the way Nayeon had turned quieter without noticing. After the shell of routine she had lived inside before routine became something warmer and more survivable. After all the little pieces of her Yunjin had, apparently, been collecting from the edges while Nayeon hadn’t been paying attention.

Nayeon swallowed. “You don’t have to worry about it.”

There was a small pause.

Then Yunjin said, very gently, “That wasn’t what I said.”

Nayeon stared straight ahead.

No, it wasn’t. And that was the problem.

Yunjin had not made this about herself, not directly. She had not asked if Mina still mattered. She had not demanded reassurance. She had only looked at the shape of the thing and named its ugliness for what it was.

Nayeon found, absurdly, that this made defensiveness harder.

“I know,” she said.

The city slid past in slow-lit pieces. A deli with its neon beer sign buzzing in the window. A laundromat full of fluorescent light and people bent over folding tables. A couple arguing cheerfully on a corner as if the argument itself was keeping them warm.

Nayeon took the turn onto their street.

By the time they got upstairs, the apartment was dark except for the entry lamp Yunjin had left on in the morning.

Nayeon dropped her keys in the bowl by the door with too much force. Yunjin set her bag down on the chair and slipped off her shoes. The familiar motions of coming home unfolded around them automatically, but it all felt just slightly delayed, as though they were each a half-beat behind the life they usually moved through with ease.

“I’ll make dinner,” Nayeon said.

Yunjin looked up in surprise so mild it barely qualified, but it was enough.

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

The words echoed back at her from earlier, and Yunjin noticed. Nayeon could tell she noticed because the corner of her mouth moved, not into a smile, exactly, but into something softer and tired.

“Okay,” Yunjin said.

Nayeon headed for the kitchen before she could regret volunteering. Cooking was not beyond her, despite what Yunjin might say on less politically delicate evenings. It just required a level of follow-through she did not always find spiritually aligned with her. Tonight, though, standing over a cutting board and giving all of her attention to vegetables that needed to become smaller felt like a relief.

Behind her, she could hear Yunjin moving around the apartment. Coat hung up. Laptop set down. Water running in the bathroom sink. The low rustle of clothes changing. Ordinary sounds. Familiar sounds. Usually comforting sounds.

Tonight each one seemed to arrive with more weight than it should have.

Nayeon chopped too quickly and nearly took off the edge of her thumbnail.

“Careful.”

She hadn’t heard Yunjin come in.

Nayeon looked up. Yunjin had changed into softer clothes and was standing in the kitchen doorway with her sleeves pushed up, watching her with that same quiet concentration she gave to everything she cared about enough not to mishandle.

“I’m fine,” Nayeon said.

Yunjin’s eyes dropped briefly to the knife. “Clearly.”

Nayeon almost said something sharper. Instead she exhaled and passed the cut vegetables into the bowl beside her. “You’re allowed to gloat later if I lose a finger.”

“I’m not planning to gloat.”

“That’s because you’re kind and morally exhausting.”

Yunjin huffed a small laugh and stepped closer. “Move.”

Nayeon looked at her. “I said I’m fine.”

“And I said move.”

There was no edge to it. Just enough calm certainty to make resistance look childish.

Nayeon moved.

Yunjin took over at the stove with the ease of someone who had been doing this for long enough to know where every pan lived without opening the wrong cabinet first. Nayeon stayed beside her, rinsing herbs, measuring rice, handing things over when asked. The old rhythm found them again in pieces, not whole but enough to work with.

For a while, neither of them said anything about the email.

Steam rose. Oil hissed softly in the pan. Outside, somewhere beyond the kitchen window, somebody played music too loud for a Tuesday and got away with it because the song was good.

It might have stayed like that if Nayeon had not looked up at the wrong moment and found Yunjin already looking at her.

Not by accident. Not passing through. Looking.

There was no accusation in it. That was what made Nayeon’s chest tighten.

“What?” she asked.

Yunjin turned back to the stove. “Nothing.”

“That usually means something.”

A beat passed.

Then Yunjin said, “My mom used to tell my mom’s friends that heartbreak changes a person twice.”

Nayeon frowned. “That sounds ominous.”

“It was one of her dramatic days.”

“Your mother has many dramatic days.”

“That’s not the point.”

Nayeon leaned one hip against the counter, towel in hand. “Then what is?”

Yunjin kept her attention on the pan for a moment longer before turning down the heat. “She said the first change is obvious. Everyone sees it. You stop sleeping right, you stop eating right, you stop looking like yourself.” Her voice stayed level. “The second one happens later. Quieter. People think you’re better by then, but something about you has shifted and doesn’t shift back.”

Nayeon did not move.

Yunjin finally looked at her again.

“I saw both,” she said.

The kitchen went very still.

Nayeon had known, in some vague adult way, that Yunjin knew things. That family networks had ears. That her mother had probably spoken more freely in other people’s kitchens than Nayeon liked to imagine. But knowing it abstractly was one thing. Hearing Yunjin say it like this, not as gossip or pity but as memory, made something strange and uncomfortable bloom behind her ribs.

“You were a kid,” Nayeon said softly.

Yunjin gave a small shrug. “I was old enough.”

Old enough to notice. Old enough to remember. Old enough, apparently, to carry quiet anger for someone she had not even needed to love yet in order to resent.

Nayeon looked away first.

The camera charm on her bracelet knocked lightly against the edge of the counter as she set the towel down. The sound was tiny, almost nothing. Still, Yunjin’s eyes followed it.

For a moment Nayeon had the ridiculous sense that the whole room was made of things she had failed to understand properly.

“I’m not saying this to make you feel bad,” Yunjin said.

“That’s considerate, since I’m doing a pretty decent job on my own.”

That won her the briefest curve of Yunjin’s mouth.

Then it was gone.

“I know it’s a good project,” Yunjin said. “I know why you took it.”

Nayeon crossed her arms, then uncrossed them again because that felt defensive even when she was alone enough not to be judged for it. “Do you?”

“Yes.” Yunjin stirred once, then switched off the burner. “I just also know that she has already taken enough from you without getting to take your peace too.”

The sentence landed so gently that it hurt more than bluntness would have.

Nayeon looked down at the counter. At the fine scratches in the wood near the sink. At the bowl of cut scallions she had forgotten to pass over. At her own hand, still resting near the towel.

“I’m not going to fall apart over her,” she said.

Yunjin was quiet long enough that Nayeon almost regretted speaking.

When she did answer, her voice was soft. “That wasn’t what I was afraid of.”

Nayeon looked up sharply.

Yunjin didn’t say more.

She only plated dinner, set one dish in front of Nayeon and the other across from it, then reached past her for the cut scallions with fingers that brushed Nayeon’s knuckles for less than a second.

That touch, of all things, nearly undid her.

Dinner was mostly normal after that.

Not falsely bright, not theatrical. Just quieter than usual, with stretches of comfortable silence worn thin by the fact that both of them knew it wasn’t entirely comfortable tonight. Yunjin talked about a professor who had spent fifteen full minutes arguing with a student over whether color theory could be objective. Nayeon described a client who insisted “natural” editing meant erasing his wrinkles but somehow keeping the suffering in his eyes because that was where the soul lived.

Yunjin laughed at that, properly this time, and the sound loosened something small and desperate in Nayeon’s chest.

It would have been easier if things had stayed wrong.

Instead they kept brushing against almost-normal in ways that made Nayeon feel unsteady.

Later, while Yunjin showered, Nayeon stood in the living room with her laptop open and answered two non-urgent client emails she could easily have left until morning. Then she reopened the dance company thread. Then closed it. Then opened it again.

The project brief still sat there polished and professional and offensively neutral.

Ardent Dance Collective.

Major spring production.

Campaign concept references attached.

She scrolled through the materials as if the information might have changed in the last two hours. It had not. The mood boards were all lines and shadows and captured motion, dancers suspended in half-light like they had been taught how to haunt photographs on purpose. It was, irritatingly, exactly the kind of project she liked.

From down the hall, the bathroom door opened. Water shut off. A cabinet clicked.

Nayeon closed the attachments before Yunjin returned.

Why she did that, she didn’t know.

Yunjin came back with damp hair and one of Nayeon’s old T-shirts twisted loosely at the hip where she’d tugged it down. She looked at the laptop, then at Nayeon.

“Still working?”

“Pretending to.”

“Mm.”

Nayeon glanced up. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Make that sound like you’ve diagnosed me with something.”

Yunjin crossed to the couch and sat beside her, not too close, not far either. “Have you ever considered that maybe I’m just agreeing with you?”

“That would be new.”

Yunjin rolled her eyes. “You’re impossible.”

There it was again. The old shape of them. Easy enough to slip into for a moment. Dangerous because of how much Nayeon wanted to stay there.

Yunjin leaned back against the couch, tucking one foot under her. “What time are you going in tomorrow?”

“Early. I want to clear the morning before the florist call.”

“Okay.”

A few seconds passed.

Then Yunjin said, “I have lunch with someone after class.”

Nayeon turned before she could stop herself. “Someone?”

The word came out sharper than she intended.

Yunjin blinked once, then something unreadable passed through her face so quickly Nayeon almost missed it. “Olivia.”

The name meant nothing. Which irritated Nayeon on principle.

“From school?” she asked, aiming for casual and landing somewhere too near interested.

“Yes.”

Nayeon looked back at the laptop screen. “I didn’t know you had lunch plans.”

“I made them today.”

“Oh.”

Yunjin was quiet for just long enough to make Nayeon aware that she had, once again, said the least useful possible thing.

“She’s in my seminar,” Yunjin added after a second, maybe as explanation, maybe because the silence had gone odd. “We’re working on the same project.”

“Right.”

Another pause.

Then, very lightly, Yunjin said, “You sound thrilled for me.”

Nayeon glanced at her. Yunjin’s expression was composed, but there was the faintest edge of dry amusement there now, enough to let Nayeon know she had been read and found vaguely ridiculous.

“I don’t know Olivia,” Nayeon said.

“That’s true.”

“She could be terrible.”

Yunjin smiled then, unmistakably. “You’ve never met her.”

“That’s never stopped me from having instincts.”

“Your instincts are currently insulted by the existence of a girl sharing my lunch break.”

Nayeon stared at her.

Then she laughed, because the alternative was examining why the thought of Yunjin making a school friend had produced that ugly, immediate little twist low in her chest.

“That’s absurd,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

Yunjin tucked damp hair behind one ear. “Good. Then I’m sure it doesn’t matter.”

Nayeon hated the neatness of that.

She shut the laptop. “I’m going to bed.”

“It’s nine-thirty.”

“I’m starting early.”

“Coward.”

The word was affectionate. Light. Entirely too accurate in ways Yunjin could not have meant, or maybe could.

Nayeon stood and pointed at her. “You should be nicer to me.”

“I make your coffee.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“It’s better.”

Nayeon went to bed first, which almost never happened. She changed in the dark and lay staring at the ceiling while the city outside rearranged itself into night. A siren moved somewhere far away, then faded. In the apartment above them, somebody dropped something heavy and swore with feeling. The mattress shifted later when Yunjin climbed in beside her, careful and quiet as if Nayeon had already fallen asleep.

She hadn’t.

But she kept still anyway.

Yunjin settled on her side, leaving the small familiar space between them that had, over time, become less boundary than custom. Nayeon could feel the warmth of her there even without touching.

For a long time neither of them spoke.

Then, just as Nayeon was beginning to drift at the edges, Yunjin said softly into the dark, “I’m not mad at you.”

Nayeon opened her eyes.

The room was too dark to see much more than outline, but she turned her head anyway.

“What are you then?” she asked.

Yunjin took a breath that sounded almost like a laugh and not one. “Trying not to be worried before there’s actually something to worry about.”

Nayeon wanted to answer quickly. To say there isn’t. To say you’re overthinking it. To say something simple and clean and useless.

Instead she lay there with the truth of Yunjin’s words pressing softly against her ribs.

Finally she said, “I’m sorry.”

Beside her, Yunjin was quiet.

Then, after a beat, “For what?”

Nayeon stared into the dark.

That was the problem, wasn’t it? There were too many possible answers.

For the email.
For the silence in the car.
For not knowing what Yunjin was afraid of until she said it.
For feeling something ugly and possessive over a girl named Olivia while still refusing to properly examine the more obvious disaster sitting in the room.
For all the ways love was apparently making itself known to her sideways because she refused to let it come through the front door.

“For today,” she said at last.

Yunjin did not make her explain.

“Okay,” she murmured.

Nayeon fell asleep sometime after that with the weight of a half-finished apology still in her mouth.

By the time she got to the studio the next morning, she had convinced herself that work would fix the shape of things.

Work, at least, asked only to be done.

The front windows were still pale with early light when she unlocked the door. The studio smelled cold at first, then gradually like itself again once the machines started up and the coffee had been poured. Nayeon moved through opening tasks with the brisk efficiency of someone trying to outrun her own thoughts. Equipment check. Email sweep. Delivery confirmation. Printer calibration.

At nine-fifteen, Jihyo came in carrying two coffees and one expression that was trying very hard to pass as neutral.

Nayeon took one look at her and sighed. “Yunjin told you.”

Jihyo set the cups down on the desk. “No.”

Nayeon blinked. “Then how do you know something’s wrong?”

Jihyo gave her a long look. “Please. I’ve known you since your eyebrows were still making bad decisions.”

“That is so rude.”

“It is also true.” Jihyo dragged over a chair and sat backward in it, arms folded over the backrest. “So. Talk.”

Nayeon wrapped both hands around the coffee cup even though it was too hot. “A dance company reached out yesterday.”

Jihyo’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Okay.”

“It’s a big project.”

“Okay.”

“And Mina’s attached.”

The change in Jihyo’s face was small but instant, like a door locking somewhere inside it.

“Oh,” she said.

Nayeon looked down at the cup.

“Yeah.”

For a second Jihyo said nothing.

Nayeon knew that silence too. Jihyo at her most dangerous was rarely loud immediately. She got quieter first.

“Attached how?” Jihyo asked.

“Featured guest performer. It’s a campaign package. Portraits, rehearsal stills, the usual.” Nayeon kept her voice flat, professional, as if the language itself might dull the edges. “I answered the inquiry.”

Jihyo leaned back very slightly. “You said yes.”

“It’s a good project.”

“That is not what I asked.”

Nayeon looked up. “Would it have changed anything if it was?”

Jihyo held her gaze.

There was no condemnation in it yet, which somehow made Nayeon defensive faster. Jihyo knew too much about her to waste time pretending this was only about career.

“I’m just asking because,” Jihyo said carefully, “you look like someone hit you with your own desk.”

“That’s dramatic.”

“You’re dramatic.”

“I’m literally at work.”

“And apparently your ex is about to be too.”

Nayeon exhaled. “I know.”

Jihyo’s expression shifted then, some of the dry edge falling away into something more attentive. More cautious.

“How’s Yunjin?”

There it was.

Not how are you.
Not Mina.
Not even why would you do this.

How’s Yunjin.

Nayeon looked away toward the windows. “Fine.”

Jihyo made a sound that translated approximately to I am choosing, against all evidence, to keep being patient with you.

“Nayeon.”

“She’s fine,” Nayeon repeated, weaker this time because the word sounded less convincing each time she used it.

Jihyo rested her chin lightly on her folded arms. “Did she say that?”

“No.”

“Then maybe don’t say it like you’re her publicist.”

Nayeon pressed her lips together.

Jihyo waited a moment before speaking again, her voice quieter now. “I’m not telling you not to take the job.”

That surprised Nayeon enough to show on her face.

Jihyo noticed. “Don’t look so shocked. I know what this place costs to run, and I know what good exposure means for the studio.” She paused, eyes sharp again. “I’m just saying the last person who walked away from you in the name of her own ambition does not get to stroll back in and make you stupid.”

Nayeon huffed once in spite of herself. “You make such charming speeches.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.”

“And Yunjin?”

There it was again, not accusatory, just impossible to dodge.

Nayeon’s grip tightened slightly around the coffee cup. “What about her?”

Jihyo watched her for a second too long. “She looked at you like she was trying very hard not to tell you what to do.”

Nayeon looked up sharply. “You saw her?”

“I saw her this morning before she went to class. She didn’t say much. That’s how I knew.”

The knowledge landed strangely in Nayeon’s chest. Yunjin had called. Not texted. Called. And Nayeon, because she had been half-awake and shampoo-blind and trying not to think too hard about the shape of last night, had missed it.

“She doesn’t trust this,” Jihyo said.

Nayeon stared into the coffee. “I don’t think she trusts Mina.”

“No,” Jihyo said. “She doesn’t.”

The studio door stayed locked. Morning light climbed slowly across the floorboards. Somewhere in the back, the printer came alive with a mechanical sigh.

Jihyo drummed her fingers once against the chair, thinking.

Then, cautiously, “Do you?”

Nayeon laughed before she could stop herself. A short, humorless sound. “Trust Mina?”

“No. Trust yourself.”

That one hit harder.

Nayeon looked at her. Jihyo did not look away.

The answer should have been easy. Should have been obvious. She had built a life since then. A business. A home. A marriage with someone who knew where she kept her ruined batteries and which coffee mug meant don’t talk to me for three minutes. Mina was a person from a previous life, not an open door.

And yet.

And yet the sight of one name had shifted the atmosphere of an entire room.

And yet she had spent half the night half-awake, thinking about the way Yunjin had said I saw both.

And yet when Yunjin had casually mentioned lunch with a girl from school, something possessive and ugly had moved in her before she could stamp on it.

“I don’t know,” Nayeon admitted.

Jihyo’s face changed again, this time into something closer to sympathy than frustration.

That was almost worse.

“Okay,” she said.

Nayeon frowned. “That’s all?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know. Something annoying and wise.”

Jihyo smiled faintly. “Fine.” She sat up straighter and took a sip of her coffee. “You’re allowed to not know what Mina means to you now. You are not allowed to pretend that whatever happens because of that only happens to you.”

Nayeon went very still.

Jihyo’s gaze did not waver.

“That’s the annoying part,” she said. “The wise part is that Yunjin is trying very hard to trust you without making demands. Don’t make that into something she has to regret.”

For a long second Nayeon could not answer.

Then the front bell chimed, saving her from having to.

Minji arrived with a bagel in one hand and all the emotional timing of a raccoon breaking into a church. She stopped two steps inside, looked between them, and immediately lowered the bagel.

“Am I interrupting an intervention?”

“Yes,” Jihyo said.

Minji nodded solemnly. “Great. I’ll just be over here not helping at all.”

She drifted toward the front desk, successfully changing the air by at least five percent.

Jihyo stood, finishing the last of her coffee. “I have to go. A functioning adult somewhere is counting on me.”

“That sounds fake,” Nayeon said.

“It usually is.”

She paused beside the desk before leaving and nudged Nayeon’s shoulder once, not gently, not softly either. Just enough.

“I’m not saying this because I don’t trust you,” Jihyo said under her breath.

Nayeon looked up.

Jihyo’s expression was careful now. “I’m saying it because I watched what it took to put you back together. And I watched who stayed while you were being difficult about it.”

Then she left.

Nayeon sat very still for a while after that.

The studio resumed around her. Minji ate half her bagel and complained about a late invoice. Two clients called before noon. An order confirmation came in with the wrong shipping zip code. Life, in other words, kept insisting on itself.

By early afternoon, Nayeon had almost managed to sink into work deeply enough that her thoughts stopped clawing at the same corners.

Almost.

Then she opened the Ardent folder again.

There were still more attachments she had not looked through properly, and she told herself that was the reason. Not curiosity. Not self-harm in professional drag. Just diligence.

She clicked through the main documents first. Budget proposal. Preliminary timeline. Contact sheet. Mood board references. A production overview with language so carefully artsy it nearly became meaningless.

Then, in the bottom corner of the shared materials, she saw a label that made her pause.

Archive references / prior movement-based portrait work

Nayeon frowned.

She had not uploaded anything to them, which meant the folder had probably been auto-generated from a previous consultation request through a platform sync. She opened it out of habit, already preparing to be annoyed by whatever useless duplication had landed there.

Inside were three old folders.

One from a theater campaign two years ago.

One from a dance workshop she had shot for a university in Brooklyn.

And one with a name she had not seen in a very long time.

Mina_Promo_Drafts

Nayeon stopped breathing for a second.

It wasn’t even in the same project system. Just an old archive that had somehow remained nested in a storage export from before she had reorganized her entire server structure. A leftover digital ghost. Something she should have deleted years ago and never had.

Her cursor hovered over it.

There was no reason to open it.

She opened it anyway.

The first thing she saw was a contact sheet.

Mina in rehearsal clothes, years younger and somehow already half-gone in the eyes if Nayeon looked at it too long. Hair pinned back. Shoulders bare and tense with focus. One shot caught mid-turn, another stretching at the barre, another looking away from camera with a line of concentration between her brows that Nayeon remembered once thinking was beautiful.

There were file names underneath in Nayeon’s own old system. Final selects. Promo draft v2. Rehearsal monochrome test.

Nayeon’s throat went dry.

She clicked into the message log attached to the folder.

It opened into a saved thread from the old studio management software, back when she was still half-running the place out of a smaller room with unreliable heating and one light stand that leaned if you looked at it wrong. The thread started ordinarily enough.

Need these for the company site by Thursday.
Can you send the cropped versions too?
The second shot is my favorite. Use that one if you want.
I’ll be in rehearsal until late. Might not answer right away.

The messages kept going for pages.

Practical. Familiar. Easy.

A career being assembled in pieces.
A future that still thought it included both of them.

Then, farther down, the tone changed.

Hey. Are you done?
Call me when you can.
Mina?
This isn’t funny.
I’m serious, call me.
People are telling me different things and I need you to answer me.
Did you leave?
Please just tell me yourself.

After that, nothing.

No reply.

No explanation.

Just the blank white space of a thread that had ended without the decency to look like an ending.

Nayeon stared at it until the screen blurred slightly.

For one irrational, ugly second she was back in the old studio after closing, sitting alone at the desk with the overhead lights off and her phone bright in her hand, rereading the last conversation she’d had with Mina, half of it still about rehearsal photos and promo edits for a ballet career Nayeon had helped package for the world.

As if abandonment had needed a marketing plan.

The studio around her now was quiet enough that she could hear the faint buzz of the monitor.

She sat back slowly.

On the desk beside her hand, the little camera charm at her wrist caught against the wood with a barely audible tap.

Nayeon looked down at it.

Then back at the thread.

Onscreen, Mina’s silence remained exactly as she had left it years ago.

White space.
Black text.
A whole life split cleanly down the middle and archived under drafts.