Chapter 3

“Nayeon?”

Yunjin’s voice came again, closer this time.

Nayeon blinked once, hard, and looked up from the screen like she had only been reading too carefully, like her pulse had not just stumbled into something jagged and old.

Yunjin stood a few feet away with a stack of invoices in one hand and a faint crease between her brows. Behind her, the studio had gone gold with late afternoon, light stretching long over the floor and the edges of the front desk. Minji was still near the sample albums, humming under her breath and pretending not to watch them while obviously watching them.

Nayeon cleared her throat. “What?”

It came out almost normal.

Almost.

Yunjin’s eyes flicked over her face, then to the monitor, then back again. “You went quiet.”

“I’m working.”

“You usually complain when you’re working.”

“That’s because I’m generous and let other people share the experience.”

Yunjin did not smile.

Nayeon hated how quickly she noticed that.

For half a second, she considered turning the monitor slightly away, absurdly late and equally pointless. Instead she shifted in front of it in a movement that probably would have been invisible to anyone else.

Yunjin saw it.

Of course she did.

“What is it?” she asked.

Nayeon looked back at the screen because not looking would make it worse. The name was still there. Clean, black, final. As if it had not spent the last five years somewhere inaccessible and half-rotted in the back of her chest. As if it had every right in the world to show up in her inbox at 5:53 on a Tuesday.

Featured guest performer.

Myoui Mina.

For one irrational second, she was back in the old studio after closing, staring at a dead-bright phone screen and the last conversation she’d had with Mina, half of it about rehearsal photos and promo edits for a career that had apparently mattered more than warning her before disappearing. Then the moment passed. The studio returned. The radiator clicked somewhere in the back. Minji laughed too loudly at something on her screen. Yunjin was still standing there, waiting.

Nayeon inhaled carefully. “A commission inquiry.”

“That’s all?”

The question was light. Too light. It landed like fingertips against glass.

Nayeon moved the mouse just to have something to do with her hand. “A dance company.”

Yunjin’s gaze sharpened with interest despite herself. “That sounds good.”

“It might be.”

“But.”

Nayeon hated that word when Yunjin used it in that tone, all quiet accuracy and no room to hide in.

She reached for the coffee cup beside the keyboard, found it empty, and set it down again because apparently even her attempts at distraction were humiliating her now.

“There’s a name attached to it,” she said finally.

Yunjin did not speak at once.

Nayeon could feel, physically feel, the second in which understanding had not yet arrived and might still fail to. Then Yunjin’s expression changed by almost nothing at all. Just a stilling. A narrowing so slight anyone else would have missed it.

“Mina?” she asked.

Nayeon looked up.

Not because she wanted to, but because hearing the name spoken aloud, here, in the studio, in Yunjin’s voice, felt stranger than seeing it on the screen.

“Yes.”

The word sat between them like a dropped object neither of them had expected to hear break.

Minji was still in the front. The city was still outside. Somewhere downstairs, somebody rolled a cart over tile. The world, offensively, had not paused for this.

Yunjin’s fingers tightened once around the invoices.

Nayeon saw it and wished she hadn’t.

“The same Mina,” Yunjin said.

It was not really a question. Not with that old family-friend network wrapped invisibly around it. Birthday parties. Glimpses. Rumors carried in adult voices from one room to another. The sort of knowledge that never belonged fully to you and still stayed.

“The same one,” Nayeon said.

Yunjin lowered the invoices to the desk beside her with careful precision, aligning the edges that did not need aligning. “I didn’t know she was back.”

“I didn’t either.”

That, at least, was plain truth. The first sign. Not a social media post, not a mutual acquaintance, not the accidental mention of a city shared too closely. Just a line in an email and a clean black name where no name should have been.

Yunjin looked at the monitor now, not directly enough to read every detail, but enough to understand what it represented. A project. Repeated contact. The past walking into present-tense rooms with a client brief in hand.

Nayeon wished suddenly and with unreasonable force that Jihyo were still there. Jihyo would have said something blunt and stabilizing and impossible. Jihyo would have turned this into practical damage control. Jihyo would have called Mina at least three insulting things before getting to the useful part.

Instead there was only Yunjin, calm in the way that meant she was trying very hard to remain so, and Nayeon, whose thoughts had gone thin and disorderly as exposed wire.

From the front, Minji rose halfway from her chair.

“Do I need to vanish?” she asked cautiously.

Both of them looked at her.

Minji sat back down. “I’m going to vanish.”

She vanished with admirable speed into the supply room.

The silence she left behind was worse.

Yunjin was the one who broke it. “Are you going to take it?”

Nayeon leaned back slowly in her chair.

It was the question, of course. The real one. Not just whether it was good business or interesting work or a chance to expand the studio’s profile. Those things were true enough. The inquiry was good. More than good. It was exactly the kind of campaign she would normally want.

But there was a name at the center of it now.

She looked again at the email. Promotional portraits. Rehearsal stills. Campaign imagery. Tight timeline. High visibility.

All things that would require her involvement.

All things that would put Mina in front of her lens.

The idea made her stomach pull strangely, not with longing, which might have been easier, or at least simpler to understand, but with something harder to pin down. Resistance. Old hurt. Curiosity sharpened by anger. And underneath all of it, an unpleasant awareness that if she declined too quickly, if she recoiled too visibly, she would be admitting the name still had the power to rearrange her.

She hated that thought more than she hated the email.

“I don’t know,” she said, and despised the weakness of it immediately.

Yunjin’s expression flickered. Not disappointment exactly. Something quieter and harder to defend against.

“You usually know.”

“That’s because my exes don’t normally return as featured collaborators.”

The moment the sentence left her mouth, she wished she could call it back. Not because it was untrue, but because the word exes felt ugly and misplaced in the room. Too blunt. Too historical. Too revealing.

Yunjin looked away first.

“Right,” she said.

Nayeon sat up. “That’s not what I meant.”

Yunjin gave a small nod that meant very little and somehow too much. “I know.”

Which, in Nayeon’s experience, was sometimes the worst possible answer.

She pushed her chair back and stood because remaining seated felt impossible under that tone. “Do you?”

Yunjin folded one arm across her middle, the other hand resting lightly against it. Not closed off exactly. Just holding herself more carefully than before.

“You got weird the second you saw the email,” she said. “I asked what was wrong and you tried to act like it was just another job.”

“It is a job.”

“And it’s Mina.”

Nayeon opened her mouth, then closed it again.

Because yes.

Because that was the problem.

Because no matter how much she hated it, Mina was not neutral, not forgettable, not only a line in a client brief. Mina was absence in human form. A wound that had stopped bleeding long enough to scar and now stung under weather it should have outgrown.

The worst part was that even thinking this made Nayeon angry. At Mina. At herself. At the fact that the air in the studio had changed around one name and would not change back.

Yunjin watched her for a second longer. “I’m not asking you not to take it.”

Nayeon looked up sharply.

Yunjin held her gaze. “I’m asking whether you want to.”

The question landed somewhere much softer than the previous one had. Softer, and therefore more dangerous.

Nayeon turned toward the desk again, as if the answer might be in the email rather than in the hollowed-out, restless place under her ribs.

Did she want to?

Professionally, yes. The project was strong. The brief was thoughtful. The visual possibilities were already unfolding in her head in spite of herself.

Personally, she wanted several contradictory things with enough force to make honesty annoying. She wanted Mina gone. She wanted to know what kind of face Mina wore now. She wanted not to care. She wanted proof that she didn’t. She wanted the whole thing never to have arrived. She wanted, with sudden sharp clarity, to go home with Yunjin and close the day behind her and pretend people from old lives did not know how to find new doors.

None of those feelings were useful.

“I should take it,” she said at last.

Yunjin was silent.

Nayeon heard how the sentence sounded a beat after she said it. Not I want to. Not I don’t. Not even I can handle it.

Should.

Professional. Defensive. Cowardly in a fresh and different shape.

She almost laughed at herself.

Yunjin’s gaze dropped briefly to the bracelet on Nayeon’s wrist where it rested near the desk edge, the little camera charm turned inward against her skin. Then she looked back at her face.

“Because it’s a good opportunity?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And because you don’t want a name to scare you out of your own work.”

Nayeon blinked.

That one landed too precisely.

Something in Yunjin’s mouth tightened, almost a smile and not one. “I know you too.”

The line should have echoed warmly from this morning. Instead it brushed against something raw.

Nayeon crossed her arms loosely, more to keep from fidgeting than from defensiveness, though she suspected she was failing at both. “You say that like it’s a flaw.”

“I’m not saying it’s anything.”

But there was something under it. Not accusation, not exactly. More like caution wrapped around resignation before it had fully earned the right to exist.

The realization made Nayeon restless.

She reached for the mouse and scrolled back to the top of the email, pretending to reread information she already knew. “If I say no because of her, then she still gets to matter in ways I didn’t choose.”

The room was quiet enough that she heard Yunjin inhale before answering.

“That’s not the same thing as not mattering.”

Nayeon looked up.

Yunjin stood where she was, one hand resting lightly on the desk now. Her expression had gone composed again, but not the easy kind. The careful kind. The one Nayeon had learned meant there was more underneath than she was being shown.

It struck her suddenly, absurdly, that she did not know what Yunjin had heard about Mina over the years. Which details had reached her through parents and glances and old birthday-party aftertalk. Whether she knew about the silence after. Whether she knew how ugly it had been to wait without dignity. Whether she knew enough to imagine what this name had just done.

Probably not. Or maybe too much in all the wrong outlines.

“Nayeon,” Yunjin said, quieter now, “you don’t have to prove anything.”

The kindness of it hit harder than if she’d said don’t do it.

Nayeon hated herself a little for the flare of irritation that followed. Because it was not really irritation. It was shame, dressed quickly in something sharper.

“I know that,” she said.

Yunjin’s eyes stayed on her face for a beat too long.

Then she nodded once. “Okay.”

And that was worse too.

Because Nayeon knew that tone. It was not surrender, not agreement, not even hurt made obvious. It was Yunjin stepping back from a place she had almost entered. A small, practiced withdrawal. The kind that left the surface of things smooth while changing the depth beneath them.

Yunjin reached for the invoices again. “Do you want me to finish these?”

There was no accusation in the question. No audible shift. If anything, she sounded almost exactly like she had half an hour ago.

That nearly undid Nayeon more than anger would have.

“You don’t have to,” she said.

“I know.”

“I can do it.”

“I know.”

There it was again. That terrible little phrase.

Nayeon dragged a hand down her face. “Yunjin.”

This time Yunjin did smile, but only faintly, and not in a way that reached the rest of her. “You should answer the email before they assume you’re not interested.”

The professional truth of that was infuriating.

Nayeon turned back to the screen because there was nowhere else to put her eyes.

The cursor blinked in the reply field once she opened it, patient and mechanical. Words arranged themselves with insulting ease once she let them. Thank you for reaching out. We would be very interested in discussing the project further. Available for a call later this week. Looking forward.

Her fingers hovered over the keys after the first line.

Very interested.

What a ridiculous phrase.

Behind her, she could hear Yunjin moving papers into order, hear the soft scrape of a chair, hear Minji returning from wherever she had hidden and wisely deciding not to speak. The studio had resumed its shape around them. If someone had walked in just then, they would have seen exactly what they expected: people at the end of a workday, finishing up, preparing to leave.

Not the strange new distance that had settled into the room like a draft from under a closed door.

Nayeon typed the rest anyway.

Her reflection floated faintly in the darkened part of the monitor now that evening had started to lean against the windows. For one stupid second, she imagined saying no. Closing the laptop. Going home. Letting the inquiry die unanswered in some other studio’s inbox.

But the thought curdled almost instantly into resentment. At Mina for existing. At herself for flinching. At the fact that there was no version of this that felt clean.

So she finished the email and hit send before she could think better of it.

The whoosh of it leaving was small, almost polite.

Final.

Nayeon stared at the screen a second longer.

Then she closed the message window.

When she turned around, Yunjin was watching her.

Not openly. Not in a way Minji or anyone else would have clocked. But enough.

Enough that Nayeon knew she had seen the moment the decision was made, and the fact that it had cost something.

Enough that Nayeon wanted to say something that would restore the room to what it had been before five fifty-three.

Nothing came.

Yunjin was the one who looked away first.

“I’m going to finish in the back,” she said.

Nayeon swallowed. “Okay.”

Yunjin nodded and picked up her laptop. She passed close enough for Nayeon to catch the faint scent of her shampoo again, the same one from this morning, and for one reckless second Nayeon thought of reaching out. Catching her wrist. Saying wait.

But she did not.

Yunjin disappeared into the editing room.

The door stayed open, but not all the way.

Minji, proving once again that she had the survival instincts of a very observant raccoon, did not say a single word.

Nayeon turned back to her desk.

At the bottom of the sent email, beneath the reply she had just chosen and the company’s polished inquiry, Mina’s name remained exactly where it had been.

Black type on a white screen.

As if it had not already begun to alter the light in the room.