Two months passed.
Long enough for seasons to shift.
Long enough for flowers outside the hospital to bloom and wither.
Long enough for life to pretend, just for a moment, that it wasn't slipping quietly from the edges of Joon-ha's fingers.
The hospital room had become something more than four pale walls and a sterile floor.
It had become a universe.
Their universe.
Filled with Areum's jasmine tea steaming softly in the mornings, with Min Joon's terrible jokes scribbled on sticky notes, with Ara's perfume lingering in the curtains, with the warm hum of music old enough to belong to someone's childhood.
It was a place where death paused outside the doorway, respectful, hesitant, watching.
Because inside, they were too busy loving.
Joon-ha's body was fragile, yes.
But his spirit?
It was a lighthouse.
Steady, glowing, refusing to dim even when the cold winds of reality tried to blow it out.
Then one morning, Areum sat beside him with a small envelope in her hands.
Her fingers trembled, not like fear, but like someone holding a fragile piece of tomorrow.
Joon-ha noticed immediately.
"Areum?" he murmured.
She didn't answer.
Instead, she opened the envelope and placed the paper between them.
Her eyes lifted to his, wide, trembling, almost disbelieving.
Her voice came out smaller than a breath
"I'm pregnant."
For a heartbeat, Joon-ha went completely still.
Then his lashes fluttered. His lips parted.
And slowly, beautifully, impossibly, he smiled.
A stunned, breathless, trembling smile that took every piece of sorrow in the room and turned it into light.
"You're… we're…"
Areum nodded, tears spilling soundlessly down her cheeks.
"You're going to be a father."
He didn't speak.
Couldn't speak.
He simply reached for her, weak arms, but fierce heart and pulled her against him.
His face buried into her shoulder, and there, without words, he cried.
Tears of joy.
Tears of fear.
Tears of a man who had believed his story was ending, only to discover a new chapter growing quietly beneath the ribs of the woman he loved.
Areum held him, whispering
"It's okay… we're okay… we're more than okay…"
And for the first time in a long time, the sky inside Joon-ha remembered how to brighten.
When they shared the news, it spread through their little circle like a flame through cold darkness.
Min Joon cried first.
Not a delicate tear, a full, messy sob that had him wiping his face with the back of his wrist.
Ara hugged Areum so tightly she almost crushed the ultrasound picture.
Detective Choi, pretending not to be emotional, brought cake lopsided, unevenly frosted, decorated like he'd fought the icing tube and lost.
Areum's mother's knees buckled as she wept with happiness.
Joon-ha's mother pressed her forehead to her son's and whispered:
"Now you'll live on. Even after the world forgets your footsteps."
The nurses hung paper stars from the ceiling.
The doctors cleared an entire afternoon so Joon-ha could go outside, breathe actual sunlight, feel actual wind, and hear actual birds.
It wasn't a party.
It was a miracle.
A last flash of brightness before the long-foreshadowed dusk.
That night, Areum slept curled against him, her breath warm on his arm, her hand resting softly on her small, still-invisible future.
Joon-ha didn't sleep.
Instead, he called Min Joon in a whisper.
"I want everything in her name. Kang Industries. The properties. Every account."
Min Joon sat up straight, alarmed.
"Joon-ha… she doesn't care about that."
A soft smile ghosted across Joon-ha's lips.
"I know. But our child might. And I want Areum to have more than memories. I want her to have power. Safety. A world she owns, not one she's surviving in."
Min Joon hesitated, then nodded through the phone.
With Detective Choi's help, the documents were arranged.
Signed.
Witnessed.
Sealed.
The empire, the thing he once feared would cage him, was now a gift.
A shield.
A promise.
He never told Areum.
Because some gifts are too heavy to give while you're still alive.
They're meant to be opened in the quiet after farewell.
A message from the other side of suffering:
"I loved you in every lifetime I never got to live."
Elsewhere, while one love story deepened toward its inevitable ache, another love sat shy and unspoken in a quiet corner of the city.
Choi and Ara sat across from each other in a dim restaurant where the lights were warm and the soup smelled like childhood.
Steam curled between them.
Choi stirred his noodles, pretending to focus on the food.
But his eyes lifted, soft and hopeful.
"Is the promise still here?"
Ara blinked, caught off-guard.
"What promise?" she asked, though she knew.
He offered a sheepish smile.
"That we'd get married if we turned thirty with no partners."
She sipped her tea, lips curving.
"Guess."
Choi leaned back, grinning.
"I'll take that as a maybe."
She didn't correct him.
She only smiled, a slow, warm, dangerous kind of smile, the type that said
"Hope isn't foolish. Not with me."
Their moment was quieter than Areum and Joon-ha's joy.
Smaller.
But threaded with its own sweetness, the kind of sweetness born from years of working side-by-side, protecting the same people, sharing the same battles.
Two love stories,
one nearing dawn,
the other remembering it.
Later that night, Areum returned to the hospital room.
The sky outside had gone black, but the stars, the paper ones the nurses hung, glowed softly against the ceiling.
She guided Joon-ha's trembling hand and placed it gently over her stomach.
"You're already part of us," she whispered.
"Even if you're not here to see it."
His eyes fluttered closed.
A tear slid down his cheek, not of sorrow, but of something deeper.
Something vast.
For the first time in weeks, he didn't feel like he was fading.
He felt like he was beginning again.
Not in the way he hoped.
Not in the way he dreamed.
But in the way life sometimes chooses:
Quietly.
Softly.
Through the heartbeat of someone he would never meet but already loved more than breath.
And Areum watched him breathe, watched his chest rise and fall, and thought:
Maybe dawn isn't something the sky remembers.
Maybe dawn is something we carry inside us.
Something we pass on.
Something that returns even when we don't.
Chapter 46 / 47
Note: My new novel "velvet devotion" is coming out on 17th November 2025
It's not the book 2 of this novel but it includes some characters from this novel which are, Kim Ara and Detective Choi.