Then November came.
The news didn't come from Jennie.
It came from a curt email at YG headquarters, cc'd to three different departments. The girls hadn't renewed their solo contracts. Jennie established Odd Atelier, her own company. Alison, and half the staff Y/N had worked alongside for years, were leaving with her.
Y/N sat frozen at her desk, the words blurring on the screen. Her pulse pounded in her ears, the air gone sharp and thin. She reread it three times, waiting for some kind of mistake to reveal itself. Something to explain why she was finding out like everyone else, in a memo, not from the woman who had whispered I love you into her chest two months ago.
By the time she realized her hands were shaking, she was already on her feet, already moving.
Jennie's apartment looked the same as it always had, soft lighting, candles half-burned, a throw blanket tossed over the couch. It smelled like her. It felt like home.
Except for the three massive suitcases lined against the wall. Silent, waiting.
Y/N's throat closed. Her steps faltered, but she forced herself inside, shutting the door with more force than she meant. Jennie appeared from the bedroom, hair damp, a sweatshirt hanging loose on her frame. For a split second, her face lit up at the sight of Y/N, then it shuttered, walls slamming down so fast it left Y/N dizzy.
"You're leaving," Y/N said. It wasn't a question.
Jennie didn't answer. She reached for a glass of water on the counter, eyes fixed anywhere but on Y/N.
The silence was unbearable. Y/N's voice cracked through it.
"Why didn't you tell me? Jennie, I had to find out from YG, from an email. After everything—" Her chest heaved. "Weren't we in this together?"
Jennie's jaw tightened, but her face stayed cold. She set the glass down carefully, like precision could make up for the wreckage between them.
"I can't do this anymore," she said.
Five words. Flat. Final.
Y/N blinked, the floor tilting beneath her. "What?"
Jennie's arms crossed over her chest, fingers digging into her sleeves. "Us. This. I can't."
The words landed like glass shattering inside Y/N's ribs. She took a step forward, desperate. "No. No, you don't get to say that. Not after everything. Not after you told me you loved me."
Jennie flinched, just barely, but didn't speak.
"Do you still—" Y/N's voice broke, tears burning hot at the corners of her eyes. "Do you still love me?"
Jennie's silence was the knife. Her lips parted like she might answer, but nothing came. Just silence, heavy and merciless.
Y/N's breath came fast, ragged. She tried again, softer, pleading. "Please. Look at me. Don't shut me out like this. We can figure it out, I don't care how hard it gets, Jennie, I don't care how messy—"
Jennie's eyes flicked up, and for the briefest heartbeat Y/N swore she saw it, the fear, the ache, the love that matched hers. But then it was gone, buried under steel.
Her voice was flat when she spoke again.
"It's over."
Y/N's chest caved. She shook her head, a sob clawing its way up her throat. "You don't mean that."
But Jennie didn't take it back. Didn't move. Didn't touch her. She just stood there, silence thick as concrete between them.
Y/N's knees nearly buckled. She pressed her hand to her mouth, fighting the scream threatening to tear free. Everything in her wanted to reach out, to grab Jennie by the shoulders and force her to explain, to fight, to try.
But Jennie's stillness was absolute.
Y/N swallowed the words burning her tongue. Swallowed the tears that blurred her vision. Finally, with a voice that didn't sound like her own, she whispered, "I don't understand."
Jennie closed her eyes. Just for a moment. Then opened them, blank again.
That was the end.
Y/N turned, each step a fracture, the door heavier than stone when she pulled it open. The last image seared into her memory. Jennie standing in the glow of her apartment, surrounded by the quiet warmth they had built together, and the suitcases that would take her away.
That night they'd shared in September replayed in Y/N's head as she walked out into the cold November air. Jennie's head on her chest, whispering I love you like it hurt, like it was the truest thing she'd ever said.
Now it felt like a cruel joke.
Outside, the city moved like nothing had changed. But for Y/N, everything had.
She'd spent the night folded into her sheets, body shaking with sobs that wouldn't stop, no matter how many times she told herself to breathe, to hold it together. Her mind spun in brutal loops. Replaying Jennie's voice, flat and final, I can't do this anymore. The way she hadn't even fought.
Every time Y/N's eyes closed, she saw it again. Jennie's face, blank where it used to be soft, lips pressed shut instead of saying what Y/N begged to hear. She turned her pillow over and over, damp with tears, but the ache only grew sharper.
By the time the sky began to pale, her body was raw, wrung out, eyes burning dry. Still, her hand groped for her phone on the nightstand, desperate for something, anything. Some fragile, foolish part of her still thought there might be a message waiting. An explanation. A correction.
She fumbled through call after call, each one bouncing back before the first ring could connect. Tried a message, then another, then another, all green, all dead ends. Every trace of their years together wiped in an instant, as if Jennie had simply decided Y/N had never existed.
She sat on the edge of her bed, phone clutched so hard her hand shook, vision blurring as the screen smeared through tears. For a moment, she thought she might actually crush the device in her fist, anything to release the storm burning inside her chest.
And then the sob came. Sharp, wrenching, unstoppable.
Y/N folded over herself, arms wrapped tight around her knees, face pressed into them as the sound tore out of her throat. It was too big for her body, this grief, too jagged to contain, too endless to silence.
Jennie had pulled away before. Gone quiet. Slammed walls so high Y/N had to claw at her own hands not to try climbing them. But this? This wasn't distance.
This was erasure.
A clean, surgical cut that left her bleeding out alone.
Next weeks blurred.
Mornings folded into rehearsals, into emails, into meetings that meant nothing and everything. Y/N went to work at The Black Label because she had to, because there was rent and schedules and people who relied on her, and because pretending was the only thing she could do. She answered messages with the mechanical calm she'd honed over years, booked fittings, solved problems before anyone knew they existed. She checked boxes like a ghost wearing her skin.
People joked in the hallways. Assistants compared notes over coffee, producers bumped into each other with clipped, professional affection, and staff laughed in the stairwell about a line someone had flubbed on a livestream. Y/N smiled at them all with the practiced ease of someone who'd done this a long time, but the smile sat on her face like a mask. Her eyes stayed hollow, glassy. The laughter around her sounded like it was happening underwater.
But the world outside refused to let her forget. It was worse than silence, it was a chorus of presence where absence should have been.
Jennie's face was everywhere, colossal and impossible to ignore .
A Calvin Klein campaign lit up the side of a building in Gangnam, perfect lighting turning Jennie's cheekbones into monuments. Storefront windows framed her in glossy paperbacks. Fan cams looped on phones. Jennie laughing, Jennie turning, Jennie moving through the world with the careless grace of someone who could still be adored. Clips of her at events, interviews from awards nights, each one spun by fans into endless replay. The sound of her laugh, the tilt of her head, the tonal cadence she used when she said something silly, all of it filled every corner Y/N tried to carve out for herself.
Everywhere Y/N looked, there she was. Omnipresent, untouchable, worshipped. The woman Y/N had loved with quiet, absolute ferocity was a public god, a bright thing everyone could hold up and adore, and yet she had erased Y/N from her private life with the same sweep. Jennie lived on a thousand screens and billboards, she lived in strangers' breath and in trending tags. But to Y/N, the phone that had been warm with whispered midnight confessions now sat cold and mute.
The nights were the worst.
When the city finally quieted and office lights shuttered, Y/N returned to an apartment that still smelled faintly of Jennie's perfume. She'd curl up on the couch, lights off, the TV doing a ghostly loop of product placements she might once have flagged in a schedule.
Her phone was a small bright altar in the dark. Her thumb hovered over Jennie's name as if it might still answer if she kept it there long enough. But there was nothing left to touch, no messages, no missed calls, no little memos of intimacy. Just an empty screen reflecting back her face, puffy from crying, pale from too many sleepless hours.
She replayed everything in the dark until the room rearranged itself into memory. The dorm floor where they'd shared late-night ramen, the bakery curb in Paris where they had fed each other macarons like kids, hotel hallways where they walked with their shoulders almost touching. Seoul nights when they had fallen asleep tangled in each other's arms, promising impossibly bravely that they would always try. Each image was a fresh cut, the scenes layered over one another until the past felt like a different life she could not reach.
Sometimes, most nights, she found herself whispering into the stillness because saying the words aloud made them less like a stone in her mouth and more like air she could breathe.
"I love you. I hate you. I miss you."
The phrases came out like prayer, like pleading, like a small animal trying to make noise in a world grown too loud. The words hit the walls and fell away. They found no answer. They landed and echoed back to her as nothing.
When she tried to sleep, exhaustion offered no mercy. Her brain refused to stop looping the last time Jennie's lips had formed the words she'd always wanted to hear. She kept seeing Jennie's last expression, cool, closed, the silence, the absence that felt deliberate. The grief wasn't a tide she could wait out. It was a constant weight, sitting on her chest and making breath a work of will.
The world had Jennie in every bright place. Y/N had Jennie in the raw, private places that no longer existed. The contrast felt like punishment, to carry someone through the worst of her life, to be the hand that steadied her in airports and backstage, only to be cut loose and left to watch her face become someone else's sanctuary.
Every night ended with the same quiet verdict.
The one person the whole world knew had become a stranger who haunted every street corner. And Y/N's only company was the echo of the last vow, the promise they had both failed to keep in action, if not in intention.
Her chest felt split open, ribs hollowed out. The world had Jennie. Everyone did. Everyone could see her, reach for her, worship her.
Everyone but her.
And in that moment, the truth crashed down, merciless and final.
Jennie had become a ghost she could never escape. A love so loud the world could hear it, so visible it wrapped itself around every corner of the city, except the one person who should have still had her.
The woman she loved was everywhere.
Everywhere, except with her.