Jae-min sat up. "What happened?"
She was staring so hard at the phone it looked painful.
The apartment was suddenly too quiet. Even the TV from the living room sounded far away now, muffled under the blood rushing in Jae-min's ears.
"Seo-yeon?"
She stood up so fast her chair legs scraped violently against the floor.
Jae-min flinched.
Seo-yeon picked up the phone. Her fingers missed it the first time. The second time they closed around it, tight enough to whiten at the knuckles.
She didn't look at him.
Didn't answer.
She just turned and walked out of the kitchen.
Jae-min stared after her, mouth half open.
Her bedroom door shut a second later.
Not hard. Just final.
He stayed like that for a moment, listening to the silence she left behind.
Then he looked at her untouched bowl. At the spoon still half-sunken in rice. At the glass of water with her lipstick faint on the rim.
He stood up.
Took one step toward the hallway.
Stopped.
Maybe she needed a minute.
Maybe it was something private.
Maybe—
He scrubbed a hand down his face and looked back at the table.
The food was still warm.
Steam still rose from the soup.
He sat down slowly.
Stared at her empty chair for a few seconds longer.
Then, because he didn't know what else to do, because the apartment still looked exactly the same even though something had shifted under it, he reached over and pulled her plate toward himself.
The meat had gone a little cold.
He ate it anyway.
He cleaned the dishes alone.
The water ran too loud in the sink. The TV kept talking to nobody. Once, halfway through rinsing a plate, Jae-min found himself glancing down the hallway, expecting her door to open and her voice to drift out with some annoyed comment about him splashing water everywhere but nothing.
Her light stayed on under the crack of the door.
That, more than anything, made him uneasy.
Seo-yeon always came back out eventually—if not to nag him, then at least to grab water or ask if he'd left his socks in the living room again or remind him to take his vitamins like he was eighty years old.
Tonight, nothing.
Jae-min dried his hands on a dish towel and stood there for a while, listening.
No footsteps.
No movement.
Just the low hum of the refrigerator and the TV hosts laughing at something neither of them were watching.
He almost knocked.
Almost.
But in the end he didn't.
She was twenty-five, not five. She was allowed to have bad nights. She was allowed to not explain everything the second it happened.
That was what he told himself, anyway.
By the time he went to bed, the light under her door was still on.
Jae-min woke sometime after midnight with a dry throat and one arm hanging off the side of the bed.
The room was dark. His blanket had twisted around his legs. He reached automatically toward the nightstand for his phone and came up empty.
Right.
The couch.
He swore under his breath, pushed himself upright, and shuffled out into the hallway, still half asleep.
The apartment was black except for the weak glow of streetlight leaking in through the living room curtains. The TV had turned itself off. The air felt cooler now, the kind of quiet that belonged to very late hours—thick, unmoving, as if the whole place were holding its breath.
Jae-min rubbed at one eye and passed Seo-yeon's door.
Then stopped.
At first he thought it was the pipes.
Or the wind.
Something small. Easy to dismiss.
Then it came again.
A broken sound from the other side of the door.
Not loud.
The kind of sound someone made when they were trying very hard not to let anyone hear them.
Jae-min's hand fell away from his face.
"Noona?"
No answer.
The sound came again—shaky this time, wet, torn out halfway through.
His stomach dropped so hard it hurt.
He pushed the door open.
The lamp by Seo-yeon's bed was on. Not bright, just enough to stain the room in a weak amber light.
She was on the floor.
For a second, his mind refused to understand what he was seeing.
Seo-yeon was sitting beside the bed in her pajamas, one shoulder pressed to the mattress like she'd slid down it instead of choosing to sit. Her hair was hanging in her face. Her breathing was jagged and uneven, the kind that scraped on the way out. One hand was over her mouth, fingers digging into her own skin hard enough to leave marks.
The other hand held a piece of broken glass.
There was another shard near her knee.
And another by the leg of the chair.
Jae-min felt every bit of sleep leave his body at once.
"Noona!"
He crossed the room so fast he nearly slipped.
Seo-yeon jerked at the sound of his voice, eyes huge and wet and glassy with shock. The shard shifted in her hand.
Jae-min grabbed her wrist.
Hard.
Too hard.
The piece of glass fell and hit the floor with a sharp crack.
"What are you doing?" The words came out wrecked, dragged over panic. "What the hell are you doing?"
Seo-yeon looked at him.
Really looked at him.
And whatever had been holding her together broke.
She made a sound Jae-min had never heard from her before—small and wrecked and so full of pain it turned his stomach—and folded into him.
He caught her on instinct.
Her whole body was shaking.
Violently enough that he could feel it in his own bones when she grabbed fistfuls of his shirt and buried her face against his chest. The first sob tore out of her so hard it bent her forward, and after that there was no stopping it.
Jae-min dropped to the floor with her, one arm locked around her back, the other at the back of her head as if he could somehow hold her together by force.
"It's okay," he heard himself saying. His voice didn't sound like his own. "It's okay. I'm here. I'm here, noona, I'm here."
She couldn't answer.
Every breath hitched. Every attempt to breathe only seemed to make the sobs worse. Her fingers twisted tighter in his shirt, then tighter still, as if she was trying to hold on to something solid and couldn't find it.
Jae-min held her harder.
Her tears soaked through the front of his shirt almost immediately. He could feel the heat of them on his skin. Feel the sharp knock of her shoulder against his ribs every time her body convulsed with another sob.
He looked over her head and saw the room.
A glass shattered near the bed.
Her phone face-down on the blanket.
A pillow on the floor.
One of the drawers in her nightstand hanging open.
His throat closed.
If i had slept longer—
He couldn't finish the thought.
Seo-yeon cried until there was nothing graceful left in it. Until it became ugly, breathless, almost soundless with exhaustion. Jae-min stayed there on the floor and let her. He kept one hand over the back of her head and the other around her shoulders and whispered nonsense every few seconds because silence felt unbearable and he didn't know what else to give her.
At some point she stopped crying and just clung to him, limp with it, her breaths stuttering weakly against his chest.
Then even that quieted.
He looked down.
Her eyes were closed.
Jae-min stared for a moment, not quite trusting it. But her grip had loosened. Her face had gone slack with exhaustion where it pressed against his shirt.
She'd fallen asleep.
His hands were shaking.
Carefully—carefully, like one wrong move might shatter something all over again—he shifted and slid an arm under her knees. He lifted her onto the bed and tucked the blanket around her. She stirred once, brow pinching faintly, but didn't wake.
Jae-min stood there breathing through his mouth.
Then his gaze dropped to the phone lying near her pillow. His mind drifting to the dinner. The message. The look on her face.
His jaw tightened.
He reached for the phone and unlocked it.
The message thread was already open.
At the top of the screen was a name.
Jihan
Jae-min frowned.
Then he read the message.
And something cold slid under his skin.
«Seo-yeon, I've thought about it enough. Let's stop here.
You haven't done anything wrong, so don't ask that. This just isn't working for me anymore.
I kept trying to ignore the feeling because I know how much this relationship means to you, but the longer it went on, the more obvious it became that we're not right for each other.
You're kind, and you've been good to me, but I don't think you're the person I see beside me in the future.
Dragging this out any longer would only be cruel.
Please don't call me. Don't come over either. I don't want to make this harder than it already is.»
Jae-min read it twice.
The second time, his grip on the phone tightened so much his knuckles ached.
You haven't done anything wrong, so don't ask that.
As if she'd already started apologizing before he'd even sent it. As if he knew exactly what she would do the second she saw it.
Jae-min scrolled up.
Below Jihan's message were Seo-yeon's replies.
One after another. No gaps. Barely any time between them.
The first few were coherent.
«What do you mean stop here?
Jihan, what happened?
Why are you saying this all of a sudden?
Did something happen? Please just tell me what happened»
Then they started to break.
«You were fine yesterday
If I said something wrong I'm sorry, I really am, but please don't do this like this
Please answer me
Can we talk first? Just once. Please
I don't understand
Jihan please
Please don't do this over text
Please answer me
I'll come over if you don't answer
Jihan please
Please
Please just tell me what I did
I can fix it
Please
Please answer me
Please»
The last message had been sent forty-three minutes ago.
There was no response after it.
Not even a single word.
Jae-min looked up from the screen to the bed.
Seo-yeon was curled on her side beneath the blanket, face turned toward the wall. Even asleep, her brow was pinched, the skin under her eyes swollen and raw. There were still tear tracks drying along her cheeks.
Hours ago she had been sitting at the table, ears pink because her little brother was teasing her about being in love.
He's the first person I've been with who makes things feel quiet.
Safe.
Jae-min looked back at the phone.
Something hot moved through him, fast and ugly.
Not just anger. This felt meaner than that.
Because Jae-min could see it now, all of it, layered one over the other until it made him sick—the way Seo-yeon had smiled into her glass at dinner. The way she'd gone shy when she talked about the future. The way she'd defended Jihan without him even having to be there.
And then this.
A message.
A neat, careful little execution.
Not even enough decency to say it to her face. Not enough humanity to answer after she begged. Just a handful of lines and then silence, while she sat in her room coming apart piece by piece.
Jae-min set the phone down on the mattress so abruptly it bounced once.
His hands were shaking now.
He turned away and crouched to gather the broken glass from the floor before he accidentally put his foot through it. One larger shard caught the light when he picked it up, bright and thin and sharp at one edge.
He stared at it.
On the bed behind him, Seo-yeon shifted in her sleep and made a small, wounded sound.
That did it.
The anger inside him settled.
Not gone.
Just changing shape.
It dropped lower, colder, turning from heat into something with weight.
Something deliberate.
He thought of Jihan's name at the top of the screen. Of the text. Of Seo-yeon's messages stacked one after another like bruises.
I can fix it.
Jae-min's jaw clenched.
No.
She shouldn't have had to fix anything.
She shouldn't have had to beg.
She shouldn't have had to sit on the floor with broken glass in her hand because some bastard had decided she was no longer useful in his future.
Jae-min tightened his grip around the shard until the edge bit into his palm.
He barely felt it.
"I'll make you regret this," he whispered.
The room stayed quiet.
Only Seo-yeon's uneven breathing answered him.
Jae-min turned and looked at her one last time. At the shape of her under the blanket. At the tear-stained pillow. At the phone still glowing faintly beside her hand.
Then he looked down at the shard in his palm and made himself a promise.
He would find Kang Jihan.
He would learn what mattered to him.
And then he would destroy it.
Not quickly.
Not kindly.
The thought should have horrified him.
It didn't.
Standing in the middle of his sister's room with broken glass in his hand and her grief still wet on the front of his shirt, Han Jae-min made his decision with terrifying ease.
And somewhere beneath the anger, beneath the panic, beneath the ugly certainty of what he was about to become, one thought beat steadily in the back of his mind—
Jihan had broken the wrong person first.