You’d both silently decided the bar didn’t count. It belonged to some emergency exit version of yourself, the one who shows up when everything falls apart and then sensibly disappears by morning. Two strangers, one terrible night, and then back to real life, like it never happened. That was supposed to be the whole story.

For weeks you’d told yourself he didn’t exist. No last name, no number, just a blurry memory getting less real by the day. And then there he was. Not imaginary, not gone, just three feet away in a room that smelled like antiseptic instead of whisky, looking at you like he was doing the same impossible math you were.

It still didn’t add up.

You didn’t move. You didn’t speak. The chart in his hand had gone slack, like whatever clinical purpose it once held had dissolved the second recognition hit his face. You watched him swallow. Watched his jaw work, like he was searching for some professional footing and coming up with nothing.

You weren’t doing any better. Your pulse was in your throat, your fingertips, that strange hollow drop in your stomach that had nothing to do with the pregnancy and everything to do with him. A month of telling yourself this was impossible, and here it was anyway, undoing every careful assumption you’d built your new life on.

When he finally spoke, the composure was gone from his voice. He took a slow breath, like he needed it just to stay upright.

“Is the baby mine?”

This time it was quieter. Just him, stripped back down to the same person who’d sat beside you in that bar a month ago, asking a question he already knew the answer to but needed to hear anyway, like saying it out loud might keep the ground steady under him.

You closed your eyes for a moment. “Yes,” you said. The word barely made it past your throat, smaller than you meant it to be.

He didn’t say anything right away. When you opened your eyes, he was still watching you, something delicate moving behind his expression. Not quite fear, not quite relief, but some confused tangle of both, like a man standing at the edge of a life he hadn’t planned for and couldn’t make himself walk away from.

“Okay,” he said, so quietly the hum of the lights above almost swallowed it.

You recognised that it was precisely the same word you had muttered to your bathroom mirror a month prior. You both had no idea how much that one tiny syllable was going to demand of you.

For a brief moment, his hands just hovered in the space where the chart had been, uncertain, as if every professional instinct he had spent years honing had suddenly stopped responding. He set the chart down hard enough that it slid slightly across the counter.

“I can’t examine you.” What remained sounded jagged and unsteady. 

“What?” 

“Conflict of interest.” He said it like the words hurt on the way out.

You went very still. You already knew. You’d known before he said it, really, but hearing it made it land differently.

He ran a hand through his hair, and for the first time, you saw his composure completely crumble. It was not the cautious, contained way it had earlier cracked, but rather clearly and painfully, as if he were witnessing the disintegration of every assurance he had relied upon throughout his adult life.

"I don't know what to do," he said in a rough voice.

You just stared at him for a second. Then something inside you quietly folded in on itself. 

Sure. 

Why did you expect anything else?

You’d told yourself you didn’t need to know the father. You’d cried over the impossibility of it before it was even real, before there was anything to be impossible about. You’d accepted that you’d raise this child alone, because that was just how it was going to be. Strangers didn’t become families. One extraordinary night didn’t rewrite an ordinary life

You'd come to terms with it. Or at least you thought you did. But here he stood now, and he saw the doubt in his face, and that studied acceptance began to crack. Not because he actually rejected you, but because your heart already decided what his hesitation meant.

"Right," you said, speaking in a more flattering tone than you meant to, and you were already grabbing the armour you had developed over the previous month. "There is nothing for you to figure out. I told you that I had nothing to ask of you.”

He scowled.

"What?"

"I said there's nothing for you to figure out."

You could no longer bring yourself to look at him. Rather, you occupied yourself with smoothing out imperceptible wrinkles on the paper that was spread out on your lap.

"I wasn't looking for you." You took a swallow. "I wasn't trying to find you."

The words had a false flavour. Everything was different. Saying it out loud hurt more than you expected. You hated that some part of you had already filed Jungwon under the same heading, hated how quickly and completely your body had braced for the same ending, as though you had never once been given a reason to expect anything else from anyone.

Jungwon was watching you. He'd seen patients recoil before. The woman who had stopped crying because she had made up her mind it was no good. The overly polite husband after receiving a terminal diagnosis. The parents who resorted to talking about parking validation because to face reality would destroy them. Some people didn't fall apart loudly. Sometimes they were unbearably controlled. That's what you were doing.

“You think I’m trying to go?"

The sentence slipped out before he'd fully decided to say it. Your fingers paused. For the first time since you'd looked away, you met his eyes.

The words hit home visibly. You saw something flicker behind his eyes, not defensiveness, something more like recognition, as though he knew precisely which wound he'd just stepped on without meaning to. You didn't expect that from him. This wasn't something he had asked for. Even if he wanted nothing to do with you or the baby, you told yourself that made sense. 

The bar surfaced again, whether you wanted it to or not. That ring around your glass. The way you’d kept twisting it on your finger instead of just taking it off, because taking it off would have made it final in a way you weren’t ready for. You remembered what you’d said that night, loose enough with drink to be honest, past caring who might overhear.

"I think he stopped choosing me long before he ever said it out loud.”

You looked away first this time, blinking hard at the poster on the wall, the one you'd deliberately avoided studying earlier. Your throat had gone tight enough that breathing normally took actual effort. You pressed your lips together, willing yourself to hold it. 

That did not work.

One single tear escaped before you could stop it. Hot and humiliating, sliding down your cheek at the worst possible moment, in front of the worst possible person. You wiped it away quickly, angry at your body for betraying you in this way.

“I have to go,” you said, your voice cracking halfway through the sentence. You slid off the exam table too quickly, the paper crinkling loudly in the small room, and reached for the door before you could change your mind, before you could let yourself fall apart any further in front of him.

You didn’t get far. His fingers wrapped loosely around your wrist, warm, hesitant, like he wasn’t sure he had any right to hold on but couldn’t quite make himself let go either. Just enough to stop you. You went cold.

“Don’t,” he said quietly. “Please. Don’t walk out like this.”

“I—” Your voice gave out completely, and the tears came without permission.

His hand hovered between the chart, the exam table, and finally settled against his own chest.

"You don't have to say anything," you continued, quieter now, the bitterness folding into something more tired than sharp. "I wasn't going to ask you for anything. I didn't come here looking for you." 

He opened his mouth, then closed it. Whatever he'd been about to say didn't survive that.

"I'll get someone else to take my file," you said, before he could. "You don't have to be involved in any of it. Really. It'll be easier that way. For both of us."

"That's not what I want," he said quietly.

"You don't know what you want yet," you said, not unkindly, just certain. "That's okay. You don't have to. I stopped expecting anyone to figure that out on my timeline a long time ago."

You picked up your bag from the chair, not looking at him now, because looking at him made it harder to keep the walls up, and the walls were the only thing keeping you standing.

"I can manage this myself," you said, quieter. "I've been managing everything myself. This isn't any different."

He didn't say anything as you walked past him, though you felt his eyes on you the whole way to the door, uncertain and unresolved in a way that you told yourself, firmly, was not your problem to fix.

The hallway outside the exam room felt longer than it had on the way in.

You kept your eyes forward, one foot in front of the other, the way you'd taught yourself to walk out of rooms that had just quietly ended something. It would've been easier if he'd been cruel about it. If he'd looked at you the way you'd braced yourself for. 

But he hadn't been cruel. He'd looked lost. Standing there in his white coat with a stethoscope around his neck and no idea what to do with his own hands. And somehow that was worse. Because lost meant he hadn't decided yet. Lost meant there was still a version of this where he tried, and failed, and you had to watch it happen up close instead of guessing at it from a distance. 

You couldn't do that again. You didn't have it in you to hope for something and then watch it quietly dissolve a second time in the same year. So you'd decided for him before he could make it for himself. It felt almost merciful, in a strange, aching way. If you didn't let yourself need him, there was nothing left for him to take away. 

You didn't need him. You'd meant that.

But walking away from a room where someone had, for one brief second, looked like he might actually want to stay. That took more out of you than you let yourself admit. Because some small, foolish part of you, had wanted to be wrong about him. Just once, for someone to prove your worst assumptions weren't the safest bet.

You got in your car, hands steady on the wheel the way they'd been steady the night everything else fell apart, and you didn't cry until you were three streets away, safely out of sight of anyone who might feel obligated to ask if you were alright. 

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Jungwon didn't move for a long moment after the door clicked shut.

The room felt too quiet without you in it. He was still holding a pen he didn't remember picking up, and when he looked down at his own hand, it took a second longer than it should have for the object to register as familiar.

A baby.

The word sat in his chest like something he'd swallowed wrong, lodged and unmoving. He'd delivered dozens of them. He knew what the next nine months would look like on a chart. He did not know what it meant that one of them might have his name attached to it.

He sat down heavily on the stool you'd left empty, the vinyl still faintly warm, and stared at the door like it might open again and make the last ten minutes make sense. It didn't.

He realised, that he didn't even know your first name. Not really, he'd seen it on the chart, glanced at it in that first frozen second before recognition hit, but it hadn't stuck, buried under everything else crashing through him at once. He didn't know where you lived. What you did for a living, though, something about you had felt like you spent your days around people who needed patience. He remembered that much from the bar, vaguely, the way you remember the shape of a feeling more than the words that caused it. He didn't know if you had family nearby. Friends. Anyone who'd sit with you through this the way he clearly wasn't being let anywhere near it.

He didn't know a single real thing about the woman who had just told him, flatly, that she was carrying his child and didn't expect anything from him because of it. That last part kept snagging on something in his chest, sharp and unpleasant, like a wire he kept running his thumb over without meaning to.

He didn't know what that meant, not exactly, but he knew enough to recognize the shape of it. The practiced ease of someone who'd said some version of that sentence before, to someone else, about something else. You hadn't sounded angry when you said it. That was the part that unsettled him most. Angry, he could have argued with. Anger gave him something to push against. But you'd sounded certain, the way people sound when they've simply stopped being surprised by disappointment, when they've built their whole footing around expecting less so the ground never has anywhere lower left to drop.

A knock at the door pulled him upright before he could sit with it any longer. Nurse Park leaned her head in, brow raised at the empty room, the abandoned chart, him sitting there like he'd forgotten how exam rooms worked.

"Dr. Yang? Your two o'clock is—"

"I need you to reassign a patient," he said, before she could finish. His voice came out steadier than he felt, which surprised him almost as much as everything else today had. "Transfer her file to Dr. Kim. Today, if you can."

Nurse Park's brow rose further, curiosity plain on her face, but she didn't ask. That was one mercy, at least. "Sure. Everything okay?"

"Fine," he said, too quickly. "Just a conflict of interest."

She left it at that, ducking back out, and he was alone again with the abandoned chart and the too quiet room and the sound of his own pulse suddenly very loud in his ears.

He didn't go find you. He told himself it was because you'd asked him not to, because chasing you down the hallway would have looked exactly like the kind of scene neither of you needed in a hospital full of patients. He told himself a lot of things in the next several minutes, none of which made the unease in his chest sit any easier.

He didn't know you. You'd made that painfully, deliberately clear, like it was a wall you needed built between the two of you before either of you said something you couldn't walk back. But you were going to have his child. And he was going to spend the rest of the day, and probably several after it, turning over the unbearable fact that a woman whose last name he'd only just learned had already decided, quietly and completely, that he wasn't someone worth hoping for.

He picked the pen back up. Set it back down.

Somewhere down the hall, his next patient was waiting, and he had absolutely no idea how he was supposed to walk in there and be anyone's calm, steady doctor when his own life had just come apart at a seam he hadn't known was there.

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Three days.

That was all it had been since you walked out of that exam room, and already your body seemed determined to make you regret every ounce of composure you'd held onto in front of him. It was as if some cruel switch had been flipped the moment you'd said the word yes out loud, made it real to someone other than yourself. Like your body had been waiting for a witness.

You woke Wednesday morning already nauseous, the ceiling swimming faintly overhead before you'd even tried to sit up. You'd read that morning sickness typically started later, that this was early even by the worst case scenario timelines, but apparently your pregnancy hadn't read the same pamphlets you had.

By the time you managed to get upright, the room tilted sharply enough that you had to grip the headboard and breathe through it, slow and deliberate, before attempting the short, treacherous walk to the bathroom.

You didn't make it in time to feel dignified about it. Afterward, you sat on the bathroom floor with your back against the cold tub, forehead damp, waiting for your stomach to stop staging its rebellion. This was becoming routine faster than you wanted to admit. Not once, but twice already this week you'd called your department to push back your morning lecture, voice pitched carefully steady, blaming a stomach bug going around campus. You'd never missed lectures before. Not once. It unsettled you more than you let yourself dwell on.

The apartment was silent except for the tap still running in the sink. No one to hand you water. No one to notice you'd barely eaten since yesterday, that the crackers on your nightstand had gone untouched because even the smell of them turned your stomach some hours. You'd gotten good at being invisible to everyone, including yourself.

You didn't know if this was normal. You didn't know if you should be worried, if this level of sick warranted a call to whoever your new doctor was going to be, or if this was simply what your body intended to do to you for the better part of the coming months. You had no one to ask. No one who'd sit on the edge of your bed and tell you this part was supposed to be hard, that it would pass, that you weren't failing at this before it had even really begun.

You  pulled yourself back onto your feet using the edge of the sink, rinsed your mouth, and studied your reflection for a moment. Pale, hollow around the eyes, nothing like the woman who used to stand in front of a lecture hall like she had her whole life figured out.

"You're fine," you told her, quietly, the way you'd told yourself countless small lies over the past month that had somehow, collectively, kept you upright. "You've done harder than this alone."

You believed it most days. Today, curled back into bed twenty minutes later with a bucket close enough to reach without standing, the blanket pulled up to your chin against a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room, you weren't entirely sure you believed it at all.

But there was no one there to notice the difference. So you closed your eyes, and let the silence hold you instead, and waited, the way you always did, for the worst of it to pass on its own.

You should have called in sick. You knew that the moment you stepped out of the car, the parking lot tilting faintly at the edges in a way that had nothing to do with the morning sun.

But you'd already missed two lectures this week, and a third would mean questions you didn't have answers for, sympathetic looks from your department head that you didn't think you could survive without your composure cracking down the middle. So you'd taken two crackers and a sip of ginger tea you couldn't taste, told yourself you'd manage, and gone in anyway.

You almost did.

The lecture hall was half full, forty some students scattered across the tiered seats, laptops open, the low hum of a Thursday morning. You'd made it through the attendance. Through the first ten minutes on developmental milestones in early childhood, your voice steady even as your stomach had begun its slow, familiar climb somewhere around slide four.

You kept going. 

"—and by eighteen months, most children can typically identify two to three body parts when asked, which becomes important later when we discuss—"

The room tilted.

The front row of desks sliding sideways in your vision like the whole hall had been picked up and set back down at a slight angle. You gripped the edge of the podium, hard, waiting for it to right itself the way it usually did if you just breathed through it, counted to ten, kept your face neutral.

It didn't right itself. Cold sweat prickled along your hairline. Your vision narrowed at the edges, the way it did right before things went dark, a sensation you recognized now with a distant, clinical horror even as your body refused to respond to anything you told it to do. You heard your own voice trail off mid sentence. You saw, as if from very far away, several students look up from their laptops.

"Professor?"

You tried to say I'm fine. Give me a second. The words didn't make it out. The podium seemed to tilt away from your hand, or your hand slid off it, you couldn't tell which, and the last clear thought you had was a strange, absurd flicker of worry that you were about to fall in front of forty students and there'd be no graceful way to explain any of this afterward.

Then the floor came up to meet you, and everything went white, then gray, then nothing at all.

You came back to fluorescent light and unfamiliar voices, the particular antiseptic smell that your body had apparently decided to associate with catastrophe now. Someone's hand was wrapped around your wrist, fingers pressed lightly, counting.

"Ma'am? Can you hear me?"

You blinked, the ceiling swimming into slow focus, a stranger's face hovering above you, kind and unfamiliar. Not him. You didn't know why some small, useless part of you had braced for it to be him.

"You fainted," the nurse said gently, once she saw your eyes track her properly. "You're in the ER. One of your students called it in. You went down pretty hard in the middle of a lecture."

Fainted. In front of your entire class. You closed your eyes again, mortification arriving even before you'd fully processed the rest of it, a hot wave of embarrassment layering itself over the nausea that hadn't actually gone anywhere.

"I'm fine," you said, or tried to. Your voice came out cracked, thinner than you meant it to. "I just need to go home. I have another class at—"

"You're not teaching anything today," the nurse said, not unkindly, but with the particular firmness of someone who dealt with stubborn patients for a living. "You're pregnant and dehydrated and you haven't been keeping food down. We're keeping you a few hours at least, getting fluids into you."

There was someone whose opinion mattered now, whether you liked it or not, and he worked three floors up in this exact building. 

A resident you didn't recognize came by twenty minutes later to check your IV line, young, unfamiliar, entirely uninterested in anything beyond your vitals and your chart. You almost laughed at the relief that gave you. 

By the time they discharged you late that afternoon, an IV bruise blooming faintly on the inside of your elbow, a stack of printed pamphlets about hyperemesis gravidarum tucked under your arm.  You called a cab instead of your own car, since you didn't trust your hands on a wheel yet, and sat in the back seat with your forehead against the cool window, watching the hospital shrink behind you. 

You told yourself that was fine. You told yourself that a lot, lately. It didn't make the ride home feel any less quiet.

The cab dropped you off just as the sky was starting to dim, and by the time you'd climbed the two flights of stairs to your apartment. The elevator was broken again, of course it was. Your legs were shaking badly enough that you had to stop twice, palm flat against the wall, waiting for the stairwell to stop tilting.

You made it inside. You didn't make it much further than that. The pamphlets slid out of your grip and scattered across the entryway floor as your knees gave out, not dramatically, just a slow, graceless folding, your back sliding down the front door until you were sitting on the cold tile with your knees drawn up and your whole body trembling like something had come loose inside it.

The nausea came back within the hour, worse than it had been that morning, worse than it had been at all this week. It didn't announce itself gently. It arrived in one violent lurch that had you crawling toward the bathroom, not trusting your legs to carry you upright.

You didn't make it to the toilet in time. You barely made it to the bathroom at all, retching over the edge of the tub instead, your whole body seizing with the force of it long after there was anything left to bring up, dry, wrenching heaves that left your ribs aching and your throat raw and scraped, tears streaming down your face less from sadness than from the sheer physical violence of it.

You stayed like that for a long time, forehead pressed against the cool porcelain, saliva and bile stringing from your lips, your hands braced shaking against the tub's edge. Your stomach cramped hard, a deep muscular ache that radiated up into your ribs and down into your pelvis, and for one sharp, terrified second you pressed a hand low against your abdomen, holding your breath, waiting to feel something wrong.

Nothing. No blood. No new pain beyond the exhaustion of your body trying to turn itself inside out. You allowed yourself a single shuddering breath of relief before the next wave hit and you were retching again, nothing left to give it, just your body insisting anyway.

By the time it finally, mercifully passed, you were slumped sideways against the bathtub, cheek against cold tile, drenched in a cold sweat that had soaked through your shirt. Your pulse fluttered too fast and too thin at your wrist when you pressed two fingers there, checking, the way you'd learned to over the past week. Your mouth tasted of bile and copper. Your lips had gone dry and cracked at the corners.

You should call someone. The thought arrived distantly, muted, the way thoughts did when your body had spent everything it had. You'd just been hospitalized for exactly this, hours ago, and here you were on your bathroom floor doing it again, alone, with no one so much as aware it was happening.

Your hand found your phone in your pocket, more out of habit than intention. The screen lit the dim bathroom, too bright, and you had to squint against it. You didn't call anyone. You didn't have the strength to hold the phone to your ear, let alone explain, let alone hear the worry in someone's voice and have to manage that too, on top of everything else.

You set the phone down on the tile beside you instead, and simply lay there, curled loosely on your side, waiting for enough strength to return to your limbs that you could drag yourself the six feet to your own bed.

It took nearly twenty minutes. You slept in your clothes that night, on top of the covers instead of under them, too exhausted to manage even that small effort, a glass of water you couldn't bring yourself to drink from sitting untouched on the nightstand, condensation sliding slowly down its side in the dark, and no one in the world aware that you'd spent your evening on a bathroom floor, alone, quietly and privately falling apart.

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Karina almost didn't come by that morning.

She'd meant to call first, the way she usually did, but you hadn't answered your last two texts, and something about the silence. Three days of it now, uncharacteristic even for you at your most withdrawn, had sat wrong in her chest all week. She'd told herself she was being paranoid. She came anyway.

She still had the spare key, back when you'd both lived two buildings apart and traded keys the way close friends did. She let herself in calling your name, expecting to find you buried in lesson planning, embarrassed to have worried.

She found you on the bedroom floor instead, half collapsed beside the bed like you'd tried to stand and simply hadn't made it, your skin gray pale, lips cracked, one hand still curled weakly against the carpet like you'd been reaching for something.

"Oh my god— hey. Hey!" Karina dropped to her knees beside you, hands shaking as she checked for breath, for pulse, for anything. You stirred faintly at her voice, eyes fluttering half open, unfocused. "Stay with me, okay? I'm calling an ambulance."

"I'm fine," you managed, barely a whisper, the words slurring together. "Just need—"

"You are not fine." Her voice cracked, fear bleeding through the command in it as she fumbled her phone out of her pocket, thumb shaking too hard to hit the numbers cleanly the first time. "You look like you're about to die on your bedroom floor, so don't you dare tell me you're fine."

She got the address out between breaths she didn't remember taking, one hand still gripping yours the entire time, too tight, like letting go might mean losing you to whatever this was.

She rode in the ambulance with you, refusing to be left behind when a paramedic suggested she follow in her own car. She sat in the hospital waiting room for forty five minutes that felt like four hours, knee bouncing, phone clutched uselessly in her lap because she didn't know who else to call, didn't know if there was anyone else to call, and that realization alone made something in her chest ache almost as much as the fear did.

When a nurse finally came to update her, Karina was on her feet before the woman had finished her sentence.

"Family?" the nurse asked, glancing at her chart.

"Might as well be," Karina said, voice tight. "She doesn't have anyone else listed, does she."

The nurse's hesitation was answer enough.

"She's stable," the nurse said instead, gently. "Severe dehydration, malnutrition. She's been dealing with hyperemesis, it looks like, and it seems like she's been managing it alone for weeks. We're keeping her a few days to get her properly stabilized."

Karina pressed a hand over her mouth, equal parts relief and fury rising in her chest. Relief that you were breathing, steady, alive, and fury that you'd let it get this bad without telling a single soul, without telling her, after everything the two of you had been through together.

She sat by your bed for the rest of that afternoon, watching the slow rise and fall of your chest, IV fluid dripping steadily into the back of your hand, and made a silent, furious promise that the moment you were lucid enough to argue with her, she was going to give you an earful about doing this alone.

You stirred sometime near evening, eyes fluttering open slowly, disoriented, focusing first on the ceiling and then, gradually, on her.

"Karina?" Your voice came out cracked, confused.

"Yeah." She leaned forward, gripping your hand, blinking back tears she refused to let fall in front of you. "Yeah, it's me. You scared the absolute hell out of me."

You blinked at her, at the IV in your hand, at the hospital room slowly coming into focus around you, and something in your face crumpled, the exhausted collapse of someone who'd been holding a wall up for too long and had finally, involuntarily, let it fall.

"I didn't want to bother anyone," you whispered.

"You're pregnant and you were dying on your bedroom floor," Karina said, voice thick, somewhere between a sob and a laugh. "I don't care how much you didn't want to bother me. You're stuck with me now. No more doing this by yourself."

You didn't have the strength to argue. For once, some small, exhausted part of you was almost grateful you didn't have to.

.

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.

.

Jungwon told himself it would fade. That was the whole premise he'd been operating on for two and a half weeks now. That time would do what time was supposed to do, sand the edges off something sharp until it became just another fact of his life instead of the thing that occupied every quiet moment he wasn't actively filling with something else.

It hadn't worked. He caught himself doing it again during a lull between patients, staring at a blank spot on the wall of the break room, coffee going cold in his hand, his mind somewhere else entirely. 

He'd requested her file be transferred to Dr. Kim, exactly as he'd promised. He hadn't looked at it since. He told himself that was the responsible thing to do. He told himself that every time his hand hovered a half second too long over the patient database before he made himself close it, unopened.

He didn't know if she'd made it to her next appointment, if the nausea she'd looked faintly gray with even standing in that exam room had gotten better or worse, if she was eating, sleeping, managing any of it the way she'd insisted, with such brittle certainty, that she would.

He hated that he thought about it as much as he did. Hated it, and couldn't stop. 

“You've been doing it for weeks." Sunoo took a sip, watching him over the rim of the cup. "Still thinking about the peach dream? Told you it meant something."

"It's nothing," Jungwon said, too quickly, and made himself take a sip of his own coffee just to have something to do with his mouth besides say anything further. "Just tired. Long week."

"It's been a long week for three weeks running, then." Sunoo didn't look convinced, but he let it sit for a moment, watching him with the kind of patience that usually meant he was waiting for a crack to widen on its own rather than trying to force one. "You'd tell me if something was actually going on, right?"

"There's nothing going on." The lie came easier than Jungwon expected it to, flat and practiced, though it sat wrong in his chest the second it left his mouth. "I'm fine."

Sunoo studied him a beat longer, clearly unconvinced, but he shrugged eventually and let it go, the way he usually did when Jungwon's tone made it clear a door had been shut. "Alright. Suit yourself."

The conversation moved on to something else and he was grateful for it, grateful that Sunoo hadn't pushed harder, because he didn't know what he would have said if he had. There wasn't a version of the truth he could hand over that didn't sound absurd out loud. 

He didn't know how to explain that he'd meant to let it go, and instead had spent nearly three weeks failing to stop thinking about a woman whose last name he'd had to read off a chart to remember, whose entire life outside of that one night and that one appointment remained a complete blank to him.

He didn't know how to explain, least of all to himself, why some part of him refused to accept that blank as permanent. He finished his coffee in silence, and when his pager went off a few minutes later, he was almost relieved for the excuse to leave the thought behind, if only for the length of his next shift.

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The consult request landed in his queue a little after four. It was one of a dozen routine notifications that came through on any given shift. He almost skimmed past it. He didn't work in obstetrics anymore, not since he'd handed his own patient list over to Dr. Kim weeks ago. He'd made an effort to stop looking at those cases.

But this one came through internal medicine, not OB. It was flagged as severe dehydration and malnutrition, possible hyperemesis. They wanted a second opinion on fluid management before admitting the patient properly.

He opened the summary out of habit more than curiosity.

Female, thirty two years old. About eleven weeks pregnant. She'd been found unconscious by a friend. Severe dehydration. She'd lost eight percent of her body weight in two weeks. Her heart rate had been dangerously high on admission. There was no record of any follow-up appointment since her first OB visit three weeks earlier.

He frowned at that last part. Three weeks was a long time to go without monitoring, especially with symptoms this severe. Someone had fallen through the cracks. It bothered him, the same way it always did when a patient's file showed the system failing someone who should have been caught sooner.

He looked for the name of the doctor overseeing her care. He found only Dr. Kim listed, with no other notes attached besides an old transfer memo from a few weeks back. He didn't think twice about that memo. He'd written it himself, but his mind was somewhere else, moving through the facts the way he always did, quickly and clinically.

The patient's name was cut off in the quick view screen, an old glitch in the hospital's software that had annoyed him for years. He never thought to be grateful for it before.

He typed up his recommendation. Slow rehydration. Anti nausea medication. Closer monitoring, given the gap in her care. He added a note asking social work to check in, since it looked like she didn't have much support. It was clinical and short, the way he wrote every consult note, and he sent it back through the system without a second thought.

Something caught at the back of his mind for a moment. Eleven weeks. The number surfaced, then sank again before he could think about why it mattered. There was another patient waiting.

He didn't open her full chart. There was no reason to. It wasn't his case anymore, and nothing in the short summary gave him any reason to connect this exhausted, malnourished woman to the one who still, somehow, took up more space in his thoughts than she had any right to.

He moved on to the next consult. But the uneasy feeling stayed with him for the rest of his shift, quiet and shapeless, like a name he almost remembered but couldn't quite reach.

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Jungwon didn't remember falling asleep. He remembered lying in the dark for a long time, staring at his ceiling, exhaustion finally pulling him under sometime past midnight.

And then he was dreaming.

The garden came back to him, the same one from weeks ago, though he knew almost immediately that something about it was wrong.

The trees were still there, heavy branched, familiar in shape. But the leaves had gone brittle at the edges, curling inward like paper too close to a flame. Some had already fallen, scattered thin and brown across ground that should have been soft with grass and instead felt dry and cracked underfoot, like it hadn't seen rain in a long time.

He walked through it the way he had before, searching without knowing exactly what he was searching for. The fruit trees that had once bent low with ripeness now held branches that looked stripped and empty, a few withered pieces of fruit still clinging on that looked more rotten than ripe.

The woman was there again. He still couldn't see her face clearly, the way dreams sometimes blurred the details that should have mattered most, but he recognized her outline, the same as before, standing beneath the same tree where she'd once handed him a peach warm with sunlight.

This time she wasn't holding anything out to him. She was kneeling at the base of the tree instead, one hand pressed against the trunk like she needed it to stay upright. Her shoulders looked thin. Her head was bowed low enough that he couldn't see any of her expression, only the slow, careful way she was breathing, like even that took effort.

"Wait," he said, or tried to. His voice didn't seem to carry the way it should have.

He moved toward her, and the ground beneath his feet seemed to stretch further with every step, the way distances do in dreams, refusing to close no matter how fast he moved. The leaves kept falling around them, one after another, drifting down slow and silent, until the branches above her were bare.

He reached her at last, or thought he did, and knelt down in front of her, and reached out to touch her shoulder. She looked up at him then. He still couldn't make out her face. But he could feel, somehow, in the strange logic dreams operated by, that she was exhausted. Depleted. Something in her had been quietly draining away, day after day, and no one had noticed in time to stop it.

She simply closed her eyes again, her hand still pressed to the trunk of the dying tree, and the last of the leaves let go overhead, falling around both of them like something quietly ending.

He woke with a start, heart pounding, sheets damp beneath him, the ceiling of his own bedroom swimming slowly into focus in the dark.

It took him a long moment to remember where he was. Longer still to shake the feeling that had settled deep in his chest, heavy and wrong, like his body understood something his mind hadn't caught up to yet.

He sat up, pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, and told himself it was only a dream. Stress, probably, or guilt finding a strange shape to wear while he slept. But he didn't fall back asleep for a long time after that. He lay in the dark instead, staring at the ceiling, turning the image over and over, the garden gone bare, her kneeling beneath it, exhausted in a way that had felt far too real to belong only to a dream.

He was distracted the whole next day, in a way that didn't sit well with him at all.

It started small. He mixed up the order of two consults, something he never did, and had to double back and apologize to a nurse who'd been waiting on him. He found himself staring too long at a patient's chart during rounds, words on the page not quite registering, his mind circling back again and again to a garden that didn't exist and a woman whose face he couldn't see.

He told himself it was just a dream. He'd told himself that all morning, on repeat, like saying it enough times might finally make it true. It didn't help. The image kept surfacing anyway, uninvited, in the quiet spaces between tasks. The leaves falling. Her shoulders, thin and bowed. The way she hadn't answered him.

And underneath the dream, tangled up with it so tightly he couldn't separate the two anymore, was her. The real her. The woman from the exam room, weeks ago now, sitting there in a paper gown telling him flatly that she didn't need anything from him.

He hadn't seen her since. He didn't know if she was alright. That fact, which he'd been quietly carrying around for weeks, suddenly felt heavier today, pressing somewhere behind his ribs in a way he couldn't explain and didn't like.

He caught himself, twice, opening the hospital directory with every intention of searching her name, only to close it again before he could type more than a letter or two. He had no reason to look. No professional reason, and telling himself there might be a personal one felt like admitting to something he wasn't ready to say out loud, not even to himself.

His chest felt tight in a way that had nothing to do with his own health. It was an uncomfortable, restless feeling, like something was wrong and he didn't have enough information to know what, or where, or how to fix it. He hated not knowing. He'd built his whole career around being someone who found answers, who didn't let uncertainty sit for long before chasing it down. And here he was, useless, sitting with a feeling he couldn't name and no way to act on it.

By the time his shift ended, he'd barely eaten, his coffee long since gone cold and forgotten on his desk. He sat in his car in the hospital parking lot for a while before starting the engine, hands resting on the wheel, staring out at nothing in particular.

"It's just a dream," he said out loud, to the empty car, like hearing it might finally settle something.

It didn't. If anything, saying it out loud only made the discomfort in his chest more obvious, more real, refusing to be reasoned away just because he didn't have a name to put to it, or a face, or any real claim to worrying about her at all.

He drove home in silence, the radio off, the same restless unease sitting with him the whole way, quiet and persistent, like it had no intention of leaving until he did something about it.

He got as far as his apartment door before he stopped fighting it.

He stood there for a moment, keys still in hand, and then, almost against his own better judgment, pulled out his phone instead of going inside. He told himself it was just to check. Just to see that she was fine, that the dream had been nothing, that the tight feeling behind his ribs was simply exhaustion wearing a strange shape. Just this once, and then he'd stop.

He let himself back into his own hallway, sat down heavily on the bottom step of the stairwell instead of climbing them, and opened the hospital's internal system on his phone. His thumb hovered over the search bar longer than it should have. He typed her name.

The system took a second to load, longer than he wanted, his knee bouncing while he waited, and then a list of results filled the screen. Not many. It was an uncommon enough name that there was really only one match that mattered.

He tapped it before he could talk himself out of it. The file loaded slowly, and for a moment his eyes just skimmed without absorbing anything, too much information arriving too fast. Then it started to land, piece by piece, and his stomach dropped further with each line.

Admitted three weeks ago. Severe dehydration and malnutrition. Discharged same day, no documented follow up. Readmitted two days ago. Hyperemesis gravidarum, ketones present, found unconscious by a third party.

Found unconscious. He read it twice, like the words might rearrange themselves into something less alarming the second time. They didn't. He scrolled further, hands not quite steady now, and found the consult note attached to the more recent admission. His own name was on it. His own handwriting, in a sense, typed out clinically weeks ago, recommending fluid management for a patient he hadn't realized was her, flagging her case for social work because something in the chart had told him, even then, that no one was checking in on her.

He'd been right there. He'd read her chart and not known it was her. He'd written notes about her condition and closed the file without a second thought, because the software had cut off her name and he hadn't looked hard enough to notice.

Eleven weeks. The number that had been surfacing in his mind for days finally made sense, horribly, completely, and he felt something in his chest cave in around it.

She'd been sick. Really sick. Alone in an apartment somewhere, collapsing, hospitalized twice, and he hadn't known. He'd been having dreams about dying gardens while she was on a bathroom floor somewhere, or worse, and he'd told himself it was nothing, told himself it wasn't his place to look.

He was on his feet before he'd fully decided to move, keys still in his other hand, phone still lit with her chart, his pulse loud enough in his ears that it drowned out every reasonable argument his own mind tried to raise about boundaries, about what she'd asked for, about whether he had any right at all to show up.

None of it mattered right now. He needed to see her. He needed to know, with his own eyes, that she was alright. He was already moving toward the door before he'd let himself think through what he'd even say when he got there.

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The room had gone dim sometime after the nurses' evening rounds, the overhead lights dimmed low, the machines beside your bed humming their steady, indifferent rhythm into the quiet. Karina had left an hour ago, only after you'd insisted, only after you'd promised you'd call if you needed anything, a promise you both knew you probably wouldn't keep.

You lay there now, IV taped to the back of your hand, the thin blanket pulled up to your chest, and let yourself, finally, stop pretending you were fine.

It came slowly at first. A tightness in your throat you tried to swallow down out of habit. Then your eyes stinging, then blurring, until the ceiling above you dissolved into a soft, watery smear of white. You pressed the back of your free hand against your mouth, an old reflex, quiet, don't let anyone hear.

There was no one to hear. That was the whole problem, wasn't it.

You thought about the last two weeks. About crawling to the bathroom in the dark. About lying on your own bedroom floor, alone, until your body simply gave out and someone else had to find you before it was too late. You thought about how close that had actually been, closer than you'd let yourself admit even to Karina, who'd cried in the waiting room while you were unconscious and hadn't fully stopped being afraid since.

You thought about the tiny, stubborn thing growing inside you that you hadn't even properly begun to plan for, that you were supposed to be strong enough to carry through all of this alone, and some exhausted, honest part of you finally admitted, in the dark, in the quiet, that you didn't know if you could.

"I don't know if I can do this," you whispered, to no one, to the empty room, your voice cracking apart on the last word.

The admission scared you more than anything else had in weeks. You'd built your whole life, especially these last two months, around the belief that you could handle anything alone if you just gritted your teeth hard enough. You'd told Jungwon that, practically to his face. You'd told yourself that every single day since. And here you were, hooked to fluids in a hospital bed for the second time in a month, and the belief was cracking right down the center, and you didn't know how to hold it together anymore.

The tears came harder after that, silent at first, then not silent at all, your shoulders shaking with the effort of trying to keep it quiet even though there was no one there to disturb. You curled onto your side as much as the IV line would allow, one hand drifting to rest low against your stomach, the way it always did now without your permission.

"I'm sorry," you whispered, to the tiny life you couldn't see or feel yet, only imagine. "I'm trying. I promise I'm trying."

It didn't answer, of course. There was only the quiet hum of the machines, and the faint hallway light bleeding in under the door, and the terrible, hollow ache of being so completely alone with something this big.

You cried until you didn't have much left to cry with, until your eyes burned and your chest ached and exhaustion finally started pulling you down toward sleep despite everything. You didn't wipe your face before you let your eyes close. There was no one there to see it anyway.

That was what you told yourself, right up until the moment sleep finally took you under, and you never heard the soft, hesitant knock that came at your door several minutes later, too tentative to wake you, from someone who'd been standing in the hallway for a long moment before he found the nerve to lift his hand at all.

Somewhere between the crying and the exhaustion pulling you under, one thought kept circling back, quiet and unanswerable.

Is it supposed to be this hard?

You didn't know. That was the worst part of it, in a strange way. You'd spent years around children, around the after of pregnancy, the finished product of it, toddlers with sticky hands and easy laughter, and never once had you stopped to ask their mothers what the nine months before had actually cost them. You'd assumed, vaguely, the way people assume things they've never had to live through, that it was hard but survivable, uncomfortable but manageable, something women simply got through with the right amount of patience and ginger tea.

You hadn't expected this. The bathroom floors. The fainting. Two hospital admissions in less than a month, your body seeming to fight the thing growing inside you rather than simply carry it. You wondered, in the dim, half formed way exhaustion allowed for, whether other women went through this too, quietly, alone, and never talked about it because talking about it felt like admitting they weren't handling something that was supposed to come naturally.

You thought of your own mother, briefly, the offhand thing she used to say. Hardest thing I ever did alone. You'd always assumed that meant the raising, the late nights, the years after. You were starting to wonder if she'd meant this part too, the very beginning, the part nobody warned you about because by the time you were far enough along to tell anyone, you were already too deep in it to turn back.

You didn't know if this was normal. You didn't know if other women lay awake at night wondering if their body had simply chosen the wrong person to do this to, someone without the reserves for it, someone already worn thin from everything that came before. You didn't have anyone to ask. Not really. Karina had been wonderful, had sat by your bed for hours, but Karina didn't know what this felt like from the inside, the particular loneliness of a body doing something enormous while the rest of your life went on expecting you to be fine.

You pressed a hand lightly against your stomach again, feeling nothing yet, no movement, no proof beyond the exhaustion and the IV and the doctor's clipped, worried tone from earlier that day. Just an idea of a person, still. A hope, and a fear, tangled together so tightly you couldn't separate them anymore.

Is it supposed to be this hard?

You didn't have an answer. You only had the ache in your chest, and the too-quiet room, and the slow pull of sleep finally dragging your thoughts apart before you could find one.

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Jungwon didn't remember most of the walk from the parking garage. He remembered running at some point, badge bouncing against his chest, breath tearing ragged in his throat by the time he hit the stairwell instead of waiting for the elevator, two steps at a time, his pulse louder in his ears than anything else around him.

He found your room number on the floor directory and moved toward it without slowing, weaving past a cart, muttering an apology to a nurse he nearly collided with. He didn't bother knocking. He pushed the door open, chest still heaving, and froze.

You were still awake.

You'd curled onto your side, one hand pressed against your mouth, shoulders shaking with the effort of crying quietly in a room that had no reason to expect anyone would walk in on it. Your eyes were red, your cheeks wet, the IV line taped awkwardly to the back of your free hand. You looked up at the sound of the door, startled, and every part of you went rigid.

Disbelief bleeding through the exhaustion. You pushed yourself up slightly against the pillows, swiping a hand roughly across your face, some old reflex to hide what he'd just walked in on, even though it was far too late for that. "What are you— how did you—"

He didn't answer right away. He was too busy staring at you, chest still rising and falling too fast, his own shock plain on his face. He hadn't let himself picture this, not really, not the reality of it. How small you looked. How hollowed out. How clearly you'd been crying alone for a while before he arrived.

"I read your chart," he admitted, voice rough, still catching his breath. "I didn't know it was you until an hour ago."

"You shouldn't be here," you said, though it came out weaker than you meant it to, your voice still thick with tears.

"I know." He didn't move toward you yet, like he was afraid of doing the wrong thing, afraid of taking up space you hadn't offered him. "I know I shouldn't. You told me you didn't need me. I heard you. I've been trying to respect that for weeks, and I have no right to walk in here and undo it just because I'm scared."

"Then why did you come?" Your voice broke on the question, quieter than you meant it, more honest than you meant it too.

He took a step closer, slow, like he was asking permission with every inch. "Because I've been dreaming about you for weeks and I didn't even understand what I was dreaming about," he said, voice unsteady now, none of his usual composure left in it. "Because I read a chart today and didn't know it was yours until it was almost too late to know at all. Because the thought of you lying somewhere alone, going through this by yourself, is unbearable to me. I can't explain why. I've tried to talk myself out of caring this much about someone I barely know, and I can't do it. I've tried for weeks."

You stared at him, tears still slipping down your face, unable to find any words to answer that with.

"I'm not asking you to let me fix this," he went on, quieter now, closer, close enough that you could see how badly his hands were shaking at his sides. "I'm not asking you to trust me, or to need me, or to believe I'll be different from whoever taught you to expect nothing. I know I haven't earned any of that yet." His voice cracked, raw and unguarded in a way you'd never heard from him. "I'm just asking you to let me sit here. Just for tonight. Please. I don't want you to be alone in this room anymore."

You pressed the back of your hand against your mouth, a fresh wave of tears rising, not entirely sure anymore if they were from exhaustion or grief or something dangerously close to relief.

"I don't know… I… ," you admitted, voice cracking apart. 

"One night. That's all I'm asking for right now. Just let me stay."

He reached out, slow and hesitant, and rested his hand near yours on the blanket, not quite touching, close enough that you could close the distance if you wanted to. You did. Your fingers curled weakly around his, and for the first time in weeks, neither of you were entirely, completely alone.

Tuesday was supposed to be ordinary.

The kind of day that disappeared as quickly as it arrived. You finished your morning lecture, replied to a few student emails, stopped by the grocery store on your way home because you'd promised to cook dinner. Nothing remarkable. Nothing that hinted your life was quietly approaching a fault line.

The apartment was supposed to be empty.

You remembered that detail clearly later. He'd told you that morning, half asleep, mumbling something about a meeting running until six. You had the whole afternoon to yourself, or so you'd thought, planning the pasta you'd make, the wine you'd open, the ordinary comfort of a Tuesday night at home. 

You unlocked the front door as quietly as always, balancing a paper bag of groceries against your hip. Then you heard laughter. A woman's laugh, low and familiar, drifting down the hallway like something out of a memory you couldn't quite place. For one suspended heartbeat, your mind simply refused to process it 

Then it did. Your best friend.

You took another step down the hallway. The bedroom door wasn't completely closed. It didn't need to be. Some truths don't ask to be witnessed completely. You already understood, before your conscious mind caught up, that whatever was happening in that apartment wasn't meant for your ears. 

The quiet intimacy of two people who had forgotten the rest of the world existed. Neither of them heard it. Or maybe they did. You didn't stay long enough to find out. There were no questions. No tears. No dramatic confrontation worthy of a movie scene. Because what explanation could possibly undo what you'd already seen?. You turned around before they could notice you. The front door clicked shut behind you with barely a sound. 

Two years of engagement, gone.

Two years of wedding plans scattered across your dining table. Two years of apartment hunting, shared grocery lists, lazy Sunday mornings, and conversations about children you thought you'd have someday. 

You don’t remember the walk to your car. You remember sitting behind the steering wheel with the keys in your hand and staring blankly at the windshield as the city morphed into streaks of bright light. It was just a blur of street lamps, head lights, and everything moving around you while your world was standing still. For a brief moment, you noticed that your hands weren’t shaking. You thought that was strange too. The way that your body had just suddenly gone still and cold and you were just as motionless as your body, like a state of shock had frozen you just outside of the situation.

You couldn’t say how long it was, but what you knew was that you suddenly found yourself standing in front of your closet. Your eyes were drawn to what was at the very back and hidden from view, your black dress. You hadn’t seen it for years.

"It's a little too much," he'd once said with an easy laugh.

"Too short."

"Too noticeable."

You remembered smiling then, folding the dress away because it hadn't seemed important enough to argue about.

You pulled it from the closet and let it fall over your body, the fabric cool and unfamiliar against your skin, hugging you in ways you'd forgotten you were allowed to be seen. It felt like putting on a stranger. Someone who wasn't trying to be agreeable anymore. Someone who had nothing left to protect and nothing left to lose.  You left the engagement ring where it was.

After leaving your phone in your purse, you grabbed your keys for the second time and stepped into the dark. You had no idea where you were headed but felt a certainty in your chest about leaving the life you had. You felt like you could not spend one more moment inside the life that no longer felt like it belonged to you.  

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Tuesday hadn't given him any warning either.

Jungwon's shift had ended late. A delivery that ran longer than expected, hours stretched thin by complications that weren't anyone's fault, just the unpredictable nature of the job. By the time he clocked out, his scrubs still smelled faintly of antiseptic, his feet aching in a way that had become so routine he barely registered it anymore. All he wanted was his own bed, maybe food he didn't have to think about. 

He let himself into her apartment with the key she'd given him two years ago, the metal worn smooth from years in his pocket, attached to a keychain shaped like a tiny stethoscope. A joke gift from early in their relationship, something she'd laughed about giving him, something he'd kept clipped to his keys ever since without really thinking about why. 

The shower was running. Her tablet was face up on the kitchen counter, screen still lit from a notification. He hadn't meant to look. He told himself that for weeks afterward, though it stopped mattering fairly quickly whether he'd meant to or not.

A name he recognized. A string of messages that didn't need much context. Photos that answered questions he hadn't known to ask. He stood there in his work clothes, badge still clipped to his coat pocket, and read enough to understand that ‘residency's exhausting’ had been covering for something else entirely for months, maybe longer.

He didn't move at all, actually, just stood there in the kitchen with his hands loose at his sides, feeling something inside his chest go very still and cold. He didn't throw the tablet. 

She stepped out of the bathroom in a towel, damp hair pushed back, and stopped short in the doorway when she saw Jungwon standing there. Badge still clipped to his coat pocket, tablet lying face up on the counter exactly where she'd left it. Something in his stillness told her immediately that the evening wasn't going to go the way she'd planned.

"Jungwon?" Her voice came out careful, testing. "You're back early."

He didn't answer right away. He just looked at her, and she followed his gaze to the tablet, and whatever color was left in her face drained out of it in an instant.

"How long," he said. Not a question. A statement in the shape of a question.

"I—" She pulled the towel tighter around herself, a reflexive gesture, like modesty mattered now, of all moments. "Jungwon, it's not—"

"Don't." His voice remained quiet and level, the same tone he used when he had to tell a patient's family something they didn't want to hear. "Don't tell me it's not what it looks like. I read enough."

Her mouth opened, then closed. For a long moment, the only sound in the apartment was water still dripping somewhere in the bathroom behind her.

"How long," he said again.

She sat down slowly on the arm of the couch, like her legs had stopped being reliable. "Since spring," she said quietly. "Maybe a little before that."

"Spring." He turned the word over like he was checking it for a fracture. "Daeun, that's eight months."

"I didn't plan for it to happen." Her voice cracked slightly, and he almost hated how convincing it sounded, how rehearsed and unrehearsed all at once. "We were just–we started as friends, and then residency got so heavy, and you were always working, and he was just there, and I don't know, it just…"

"I was working," he repeated flatly. "Right. Because I have a job that saves lives, and that's the excuse."

"That's not what I meant."

"Then what did you mean?" His voice finally rose. "Because from where I'm standing, you've had eight months to tell me. Eight months of me asking if you were okay, if something was wrong, and you telling me it was just residency. Eight months of me believing you."

She didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer that would have helped her.

"Six years," he said, quieter now, almost to himself. "Six years, and I find out like this. Off a notification on your tablet."

"I was going to tell you." Her eyes were wet now, genuinely, and some old, tired part of him almost felt sorry for her, which made him angrier at himself than at her. "I've been trying to figure out how, for weeks, I swear—"

"Don't," he said again, softer this time, because he didn't have the energy left to argue about her intentions. "It doesn't matter anymore. You could've told me in June. You could've told me in September. You didn't." He stopped, pressed the heel of his hand briefly against his eyes, then dropped it. "That's the part that matters."

"Jungwon…"

"I have to go." He was already reaching for his coat.

"Can we at least talk about this properly? Please. Don't just walk out,"

He paused at the door, hand on the frame, and looked back at her.  Tear streaked, still somehow looking for a version of this conversation that ended somewhere softer than where it actually was.

"There isn't a version of this where I stay, and we talk it through.”

"So that's it?" Her voice cracked properly now. "Six years, and you're just leaving? No fighting for it?"

He almost laughed, though nothing about it felt funny. "You didn't fight for it either," he said quietly. "Not for eight months."

He didn't wait for her response. The door closed behind him just shut, quiet and final, the same way the whole relationship seemed to be ending: without the drama it probably deserved, just a soft, ordinary sound marking something enormous coming apart.

He drove without any destination in mind, the radio off, the city sliding past in a blur of red lights, he stopped out of habit rather than attention. Six years. He kept circling back to the number like it might rearrange itself into something smaller, something easier to hold.

He ended up parking outside a bar he'd never been to. Not his usual place near the hospital, where someone always seemed to know his face even without the coat. Tonight, he didn't want to be recognized. He didn't want to be Dr. Yang, careful and composed, the boy faced physician everyone had to double take before trusting. He just wanted to sit somewhere dark and stop being anyone in particular for a while.

He loosened his tie in the car before he went in. Small, useless gesture. It didn't make him feel any less, as something had just been quietly taken from him.

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The bar was louder than you expected for a Tuesday, but you didn't care. Noise was better than silence. Silence gave you room to think, and thinking was the last thing you wanted tonight.

By the time the bartender slid your fourth glass across the counter, the sharp edges of the evening had softened. The ache in your chest hadn't disappeared; it had simply become distant, like hearing thunder several miles away.  You shifted on the barstool, crossing one leg over the other. The black dress rode a little higher against your thigh, and for the first time in years, you didn't bother tugging it back down.

He would've hated that. The thought came uninvited. You emptied the rest of your drink before it could linger. 

That's when he sat down beside you. Close enough that you noticed before you even looked. He was handsome. That was your first thought. Your second was that he looked far too young to be sitting alone in a place like this. His white dress shirt was neatly pressed except for the loosened tie hanging around his neck, as though he'd started the evening trying to hold himself together and abandoned the effort somewhere along the way. His sleeves were rolled to his forearms, exposing tired hands wrapped loosely around a glass he barely touched.

His gaze remained fixed on the amber liquid, unfocused, like he expected answers to settle at the bottom if he waited long enough. There was something strangely familiar about the way sadness sat on him. You almost didn't say anything. Almost.

You looked away. It wasn't your business. You weren't here to notice strangers. You were here to forget yourself. A minute passed, or maybe two. The bartender asked if either of you wanted another round. Neither of you answered. Without thinking, you let out a quiet breath.

"You look like you got dumped."

The words escaped before you could decide whether to keep them. Your voice came out flatter than you'd intended, stripped of humor, carrying more exhaustion than wit.

He turned toward you. Not offended, just surprised. For a heartbeat, neither of you spoke. His eyes searched your face, lingering there with quiet curiosity, as though he couldn't decide if you were teasing him or speaking from experience. Then his gaze drifted lower to the diamond still resting on your left hand. A ring that caught the warm bar lights just enough to betray you. One corner of his mouth lifted into something that wasn't quite a smile.

"You still have your ring on," he said softly.

You followed his gaze, staring at the diamond as though you'd forgotten it was there. For a long moment, you simply twisted it around your finger.

"I forgot to take it off."

It wasn't entirely true. You hadn't forgotten. You just hadn't found the courage. His eyes met yours again.

"You look like you got dumped too."

A laugh escaped you before you could stop it.

"I did."

He gave a slow nod.

"So did I."

The words settled between you with the quiet understanding that only strangers could sometimes share. Neither of you asked for details or explanations. For tonight, it was enough to know that the person sitting beside you understood exactly what heartbreak looked like.

He glanced at your empty glass. "Another?"

You shook your head. "I think I've had enough of pretending a drink is going to fix anything."

Something about that made him almost smile, the first real one you'd seen from him all night, small and tired but genuine. "Yeah,me too."

The bartender came by again, and this time Jungwon was the one who waved him off, reaching instead for his wallet. You didn't argue when he paid for both of you. Some nights, you didn't have the energy left to insist on independence.

Outside, the air was cooler than you expected, sharp enough to cut through the haze just slightly. Neither of you moved toward a taxi right away. You just stood there for a moment under the bar's dim sign, the city noise a distant hum around you, both of you clearly aware that the night hadn't decided yet what it wanted to become.

"I don't usually do this," you said, not quite looking at him.

"Do what?"

"Any of this. Bars. Strangers. Standing outside at midnight, not knowing what I'm doing."

"Neither do I," he said. Then, after a pause, quieter, "I don't want to go home yet, though."

You understood exactly what he meant, because you felt the same thing sitting heavy in your chest. Home wasn't home anymore. Home was an apartment with echoes you couldn't bear to hear. Home meant seeing the engagement ring still circling your finger. Home meant admitting that tomorrow would arrive whether you wanted it to or not. For the first time that evening, you really looked at him.

He couldn't have been much younger than thirty, though his face carried an unmistakable softness that made him seem younger than he probably was. His tie still hung loose around his neck, his hair slightly disheveled, exhaustion written plainly across features that were almost unfairly handsome. 

He looked as though someone had reached into his life that morning and quietly removed the future he'd expected. That may be why he looked familiar.

"There's a hotel two blocks from here," you said.

He didn't ask if you were sure. He just nodded, like he'd been waiting for someone to say it first.

Neither of you filled the silence with questions about names, jobs, or the people who had broken your hearts. Some things felt strangely unimportant. Inside the elevator, your shoulders brushed for the first time. Neither of you moved away. 

The door had barely clicked shut before the tension that had been simmering between you in the elevator boiled over. There was no slow buildup, no romantic preamble; there was only a desperate, starving need to feel something other than the hollow ache in your chests.

Jungwon turned to you, his face flushed from the alcohol and the heat of the moment. He looked so young, almost innocent, but the look in his eyes was raw and hungry. He reached out, his hand cupping the back of your neck and pulling you into a kiss that tasted of whiskey and grief. It was a collision, teeth clashing, breaths hitching as you both clung to each other like survivors of a shipwreck.

You groaned into his mouth, your hands sliding up his chest to grip the fabric of his shirt, pulling him closer until there wasn't a sliver of air between your bodies. He backed you up against the door, the thud of your back hitting the wood echoing in the quiet room. His tongue pushed past your lips, claiming your mouth with an urgency that made your toes curl.

"Please," you whispered against his lips, though you weren't even sure what you were asking for.

He didn't answer with words. His hands slid down to your hips, lifting you effortlessly. You wrapped your legs around his waist, your skirt riding up to your hips as he carried you toward the bed. He dropped you onto the white linens, his body following immediately, pinning you down with a weight that felt grounding and necessary.

Jungwon’s hands were frantic, stripping away the barriers of clothing. He pulled your dress over your head and tossed it aside, his eyes scanning your naked body with a mixture of awe and desperation. When he stripped off his own clothes, you saw the lean, toned muscles of a man who didn't look his age, his cock already hard and pulsing, straining against the air.

He didn't waste time. He moved between your thighs, his fingers sliding down to find your pussy. You were already soaking, the friction of the night and the emotional turmoil making you ache for him. He slid two fingers inside you, stretching you open, while his thumb worked your clit in a rhythmic, punishing pace. You arched your back, a loud moan escaping you as you neared the edge.

"Look at me," he murmured.

You opened your eyes to see him watching you, his expression a mask of longing. He positioned the head of his cock at your entrance, pausing for a heartbeat before thrusting deep inside you in one heavy, seamless motion.

You gasped, your nails digging into his shoulders as he filled you completely. The sensation was overwhelming. The stretch, the heat, the sudden fullness that silenced the noise in your head. He began to move, his thrusts deep and rhythmic, driving into you with a primal intensity. Each hit of his pelvis against your ass sounded like a wet slap in the quiet room.

"Fuck," he groaned, burying his face in the crook of your neck, his breath hot against your skin. "You feel so good… shit, so tight…"

You wrapped your arms around his neck, pulling him down for another bruising kiss as he picked up the pace. He wasn't being gentle; he was fucking you with a desperation that mirrored your own, as if by driving himself into you, he could push out the memory of the woman who had betrayed him. You met every thrust, tilting your pelvis up to take him deeper, wanting to feel every inch of him.

The friction built, a coil of tension tightening in your lower belly. Jungwon’s movements became shorter, faster, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He shifted his grip, grabbing your thighs and pinning them back toward your chest to open you up even more. The angle allowed him to hit your cervix with every plunge, sending sparks of pleasure shooting through your spine.

"I'm close—" he choked out, his muscles straining.

You felt your own climax rushing toward you, a tidal wave of release. You gripped his biceps, your voice breaking into a series of high-pitched whimpers. As you peaked, your pussy walls clamping tight around him in rhythmic spasms, Jungwon let out a low, guttural growl. He gave one final, deep thrust, burying himself to the hilt, and shuddered violently as he came.

You felt the hot, thick jets of his cum pumping deep inside you, filling your womb with a warmth that felt almost spiritual in its intensity. He stayed buried inside you for a long time, his forehead resting against yours, both of you panting, your hearts beating in a synchronized, frantic rhythm.

As the adrenaline faded, the silence returned, but it was different now. The loneliness was still there, but it had been blunted. Jungwon slowly withdrew, the wet sound of his cock leaving your body echoing in the room. He didn't pull away completely; he rolled onto his side and pulled you into his arms, tucking your head under his chin.

Neither of you spoke. There were no names exchanged, no promises of a second meeting. You just lay there in the dim light of the hotel room, two broken strangers sharing a bed, clinging to the fleeting comfort of a night that neither of you would ever forget.

.

.

.

A month passed by.

Long enough for the memory of that night to start to blur at the edges. Sometimes you thought you invented some of it.

You remembered the warmth of whiskey better than you remembered his face. His tie, loosened. How he’d just listened, without asking questions. A pair of tired eyes that had looked at you as if they knew something that nobody else knew.

All else had blurred, melting into the sort of memory that belonged to another version of you. You never came back to the bar. If he did, you wouldn't know it. And if he hadn’t, you wouldn’t have known that either. That was maybe how it was always supposed to be. Life went on, as indifferent as ever. 

Life had moved on, in its own stubborn manner. You got out of the apartment. You’d gone and blocked your ex-fiancée’s number. You weren't going to speak to your ex-bestfriend, and you hadn't. It was a mercy in itself. Your students didn't know that anything was different. They looked at you like you were just their lecturer. Untroubled. Unbreakable.

You could almost pretend your life hadn’t fallen apart. For three hours at a time. That was enough. Until it wasn’t. It began on a Thursday. Not with nausea or vertigo. Only a date. 

You were standing in your kitchen, waiting on the coffee machine to finish brewing, when the thought came unbidden. Your monthly. Your brow wrinkled. You counted backwards, almost absentmindedly. Then you counted again. The answer was the same. It's late.

This was not normal.

Your body was always predictable, almost stubbornly so. Even in college, when your roommates complained about irregular cycles and surprise cramps, yours came like clockwork, and you didn’t bother tracking it anymore. You put your coffee mug down, untouched. 

"It's the stress," you whispered to the empty apartment. It must have been. 

It made sense, didn't it? The breakup, the move, months of your nervous system running on fumes. Bodies did strange things under pressure. You'd read that somewhere, or maybe you just wanted to have read it somewhere. 

You gave it a few more days. Then a week. The coffee you'd started craving black suddenly turned your stomach. Smells you'd never noticed before. The neighbor's cooking, the detergent in your own laundry, sent you running for air that didn't feel like it was choking you. 

One day a co-worker came into your office with take out. The smell alone would have you running for the nearest bathroom. You said it was the flu. Food poisoning.  Anything.  All of it. Except for that one possibility that’s silently trailing you from room to room.

By the time you found yourself standing in the pharmacy aisle staring at a shelf of boxes you never had reason to buy before, some quiet part of you, dreading, already knew. 

You stood in front of the shelf longer than you needed to. So many different brands. Different promises. Different prices. As though any of them could deliver a different answer. You bought two.

As soon as you were home, you didn't wait long to do. Sat on the side of the bathtub, phone timer ticking away before you began to look at your hands and realise they weren't even yours.

Two lines. Then two more.

You sat there for a long time after that, the tile cold beneath you, your mind doing the math it didn't want to do.  The date, the timeline, the one night that had blurred into something you'd tried hard to forget. There was only one night it could have been.

Your heartbeat stumbled.

"No..."

The word escaped before you realized you'd spoken aloud.

You remained there for what felt like hours, staring at the tests resting in your hands as though they belonged to someone else. 

There was only one person. One night. One stranger, with tired eyes and a loosened tie and a sadness that had looked so much like your own it hadn't frightened you. You didn't even remember his name. You didn't know his address. What was his work. If you'd ever see him again.  You pressed the heels of your hands against your eyes. A man who existed in your memory as nothing more than tired eyes and a loosened tie, and you look like you got dumped, too.

You didn't know how to find him even if you'd wanted to.

A baby.

The words refused to settle. They hovered somewhere just beyond understanding, too large to fit into the quiet routine you'd been stitching back together over the last month. You were thirty two. Recently single. Still learning how to sleep in an apartment that echoed because there was no one else in it.

You'd spent years building a career you loved, teaching future educators how to nurture children with patience, consistency, and kindness. Ironically, you'd never decided whether motherhood belonged in your own future. You always assumed there would be time to figure it out.

You thought you had more time to decide that. You thought, if it ever happened, it would happen with someone you trusted, someone who'd chosen it with you, not a stranger from a bar whose last name you didn't even know. 

You thought about how easy it would be to end it before anyone had to know it happened at all. No one would ask questions. No one would even know there was something to ask about. You could keep moving forward exactly the way you'd planned, pick your life back up, untangled, unremarkable, the way it was supposed to look after a breakup like this. Clean. Simple.

You sat with that thought for a while, testing its weight, waiting to feel relief.

It didn't come.

Instead, you found yourself thinking about your own mother, who used to tell you that she'd never once regretted having you. Even though your father had left before you turned three. Hardest thing I ever did alone, she'd said once, and still the only decision I never doubted. You'd never fully understood what she meant by that until this exact moment, sitting on a bathroom floor with a truth in your hands you hadn't asked for.

You thought about the years you'd spent in classrooms full of small kids who trusted easily, loved easily, hadn't yet learned that people could hollow you out from the inside without warning. You'd built a career around believing children deserved good beginnings. You wondered, cruelly, whether you were about to fail that belief the moment it became personal.

Then you thought about the alternative. The quiet, empty version of your future you'd have to live with either way. A yes, you might regret, or a no, you were fairly sure you would.

You pressed a hand flat against your stomach, feeling nothing yet, nothing you could point to, and still somehow feeling everything.

A slow breath escaped you.

"I don't need him."

The words were barely louder than a whisper. You said them again.

"I don't."

You weren't trying to convince yourself. You already knew they were true. You didn't need a husband. You didn't need a wedding. You didn't need promises made by someone else to make this decision for you. If this child entered the world, it would be because you chose them. Not because of guilt.

You knew exactly what waited beyond this bathroom door. Questions, whispers and mostly it would be judgment. Forms with blank spaces labeled Father. A future that would be more difficult than the one you'd imagined for yourself. None of that disappeared simply because you'd made a decision. But neither did your resolve.

For the first time since walking into that apartment on Tuesday afternoon, you realized your future no longer felt defined by something that had been taken from you. It was being shaped by something you had chosen. You slowly pushed yourself to your feet and looked at your reflection in the mirror. You looked exhausted. Your eyes were swollen, your hair a mess, your expression still carrying traces of the woman who'd had her heart broken.

But beneath all of that, there was something new. Resolve. You rested your hand over your stomach once more.

"Okay," you whispered to the tiny life only you knew existed.

A faint smile tugged at your lips despite everything.

"It's you and me now."

The words sounded impossibly small in the quiet apartment. Yet,  somehow, they were enough.

.

.

.

The dream came to him three nights in a row.  Always the same, dissolving the moment he woke, leaving only fragments behind the way real dreams rarely do.

In it, he stood in a garden he didn't recognize, thick with fruit trees heavy enough that their branches bent low toward the ground. A woman he couldn't see clearly handed him a single peach, round and impossibly ripe, still warm like it had just been pulled from sunlight rather than a branch. 

He always woke up right after that. Nothing more happened. It didn't need to.

He didn't think much of it, not really. After all, dreams rarely made sense, and he'd learned a long time ago not to chase meaning where there probably wasn't any. Still, on the fourth morning, he found himself mentioning it to Sunoo over coffee in the hospital break room, mostly out of the strange, itching need to say it out loud to someone.

"I keep having this dream," he said, staring into his cup. "Same one, a few nights now. There's a garden, and someone hands me a peach. That's it. That's the whole dream."

Sunoo lowered his own cup slowly, staring at him with an expression somewhere between disbelief and barely contained excitement. "A peach?"

"Yeah."

"Ripe? Whole? Someone handed it to you directly?"

Jungwon blinked at him. "Yes? Why does that matter?"

Sunoo set his coffee down entirely now, leaning forward like Jungwon had just handed him the best gossip of the year. "Do you seriously not know what that is?"

"It's a dream about fruit?"

Honestly, Sunoo never wanted to face palmed himself, but hearing the dumb answer Jungwon gave him got him a reason to. 

"It's a taemong." When Jungwon only stared blankly back at him, Sunoo let out a groan of disbelief. "A conception dream. My grandmother used to talk about these constantly. Fruit, animals, sometimes fire or water, show up in a dream right before someone in the family finds out they're having a baby. Whole ripe fruit like that, handed directly to you? That's about as classic as it gets."

Jungwon huffed, unimpressed, turning his cup slowly between his hands. "You can't be serious."

"I'm completely serious. It's not just some old wives' thing.  Half the moms I know still swear by it. My cousin dreamed about catching a fish barehanded, and two weeks later, she found out she was pregnant. My aunt dreamed about a dragon curling around her arm and had twins."

"That's confirmation bias," Jungwon said flatly. "People remember the dreams that match and forget the ones that don't."

"Sure, sure, very scientific of you, Dr. Yang." Sunoo waved a hand, entirely unbothered by the skepticism. "But you're not the one who usually has these dreams, that's the funny part. It's not always the mother. Sometimes it's the father, or a grandparent, sometimes even a close friend if the dream's strong enough. But if it's the father dreaming it..." He trailed off, grinning now, clearly enjoying himself far too much. "That usually means it's already happened. The universe is just running a little behind on paperwork."

Jungwon rolled his eyes, though something in his chest had gone strangely tight at the words, an unease he couldn't quite explain rationally. "I don't believe in that stuff."

"You don't have to believe in it for it to be true," Sunoo said, entirely too pleased with himself. "That's kind of the whole point of a folktale, isn’t it?"

Jungwon didn't have a response for that. He just sat there, turning his coffee cup slowly in his hands, telling himself it was nothing. Probably just stress, exhaustion, and an overactive mind conjuring strange images after too many back to back shifts. He didn't have a girlfriend anymore. There was no one in his life the dream could reasonably be about.

He didn't let himself finish that thought all the way through.

"It's nothing," he said again, mostly to convince himself. "Just a weird dream."

Sunoo shrugged, tossing his empty cup toward the trash with practiced ease, clearly unconvinced but willing to let it go. "Sure. Just a weird dream."

Jungwon didn't think much more of it after that. Not consciously, anyway. But the image stayed with him regardless, lingering somewhere quiet at the edges of his following days.  A garden, a peach, and a stranger's hands offering him something he hadn't known, yet, that he was already holding.

.

.

.

The clinic wasn't one you'd been to before.

A coworker had recommended it months ago, so excited about the obstetrics department that you'd written the name down without a second thought. It was near campus, near enough to squeeze in an appointment between lectures without sacrificing half your day to traffic.

You wish. That was it. Comfort. Distance from your former life. A doctor who didn’t know your story. Somebody who would see one more first time patient. That's all.

You sat, one leg bouncing under your chair, fingertips tracing the edge of the bracelet wrapped loosely about your wrist. You'd practiced the appointment on the drive over. If they asked about the father, you would tell them as you have been rehearsing it in your mind. 

We're not together.

If they pressed further, then—

I'd rather not discuss it.

Simple.

"Y/L/N?"

A nurse called your name, and you followed her down a hallway that smelled like antiseptic and lavender hand soap, into a small exam room with a poster of a fetal development chart on the wall that you deliberately didn't look at too long.

"Dr. Yang will be with you in just a moment," the nurse said, and left you there with your paper gown and your racing thoughts.

You didn't think anything of the name. Yang wasn't uncommon. You sat on the edge of the exam table, hands folded in your lap, running through the questions you wanted to ask — due dates, next steps, whether the exhaustion you'd been feeling was normal or something to worry about.

Then the door opened.

"Good afternoon, I'm Dr. Yang Jung—"

The sentence didn't finish. It just stopped, cut clean in half, the way a record scratches when the needle's yanked away too fast.

You looked up. And your whole body went cold.

He remained frozen in the doorway, one hand still curled around the handle like he'd forgotten how to let go of it. The patient chart in his other hand slipped slightly in his grip, not enough to fall, just enough that you noticed his fingers had momentarily stopped remembering their one job. Recognition moved across his face almost instantly, undisguised, unrehearsed, nothing like the practiced composure a doctor was supposed to walk into a room with.

The overhead lights were full on him now. Clinical, unfriendly, not like the dim gold haze of that bar a month ago. No booze to take the edge off. No shadows to hide the details And you couldn’t miss him. Same face. Same eyes that witnessed you break against a hotel room door. Quiet and searching, in a way that had seemed to him that night the only honest thing left in the world. Except the face was on a man in a white coat. A stethoscope draped around his neck. His name stitched in careful navy thread over his heart.

Yang Jungwon.

Neither of you said anything. The seconds stretched, thin and unbearable, the fluorescent hum of the room suddenly deafening in the silence. As if hoping he was mistaken. He wasn't.

"...You?"

It barely qualified as a word. More breath than voice. Your mouth had gone completely dry. The sentence never got a chance to finish. Neither of you needed it to.

You weren't doing much better. Your hands had grown cold, and sat in your lap, fingers pressed together hard enough to leave imprints. The paper gown crackled a little with each too-quick breath. You’d spent a month talking yourself into believing that night belonged to some other you, reckless and grieving and gone by morning. And here he was, a white coat, a stethoscope around his neck, his name stitched over his heart, undeniably real, undeniably the same man.

Neither of you said anything. 

His gaze dropped. Not to the chart. To your left hand. The engagement ring was gone. Then, almost involuntarily, his eyes moved lower. To the file tucked beneath his arm. He looked at your name. Gestational age. Estimated conception date. The room became impossibly quiet. His jaw tightened. Not because he was calculating. Because he already had. He didn't need the dates. He remembered the night. The chart simply confirmed what he already knew.

Nothing Jungwon loved more than flowers. Ever since he was young, he had dreamed of owning a little flower shop of his own. Nothing too fancy nor shabby, just a warm place with color and life. After graduating with a degree in agriculture, he decided to turn his dream into a reality. His parents had been dismissive at first, doubtful that flowers alone could build a future, but after seeing how tirelessly their son worked for it, they finally chose to support him. 

Most people noticed Eden’s Garden by its flowers long before they noticed the man who tended them. Tucked between an old bakery and a tailor shop at the corner of a quiet street, the little florist was easy to miss. The flower shop originally was a greenhouse owned by an old man, then Jungwon decided to buy it and turned it into what Eden’s Garden is now. 

Jungwon stood behind the counter with his sleeves rolled neatly to his elbows, fingers moving with practiced ease as he arranged a bouquet for the old lady waiting patiently across from him. She had come in every Friday for the past three months, always asking for something ‘pretty enough to make an old man smile’. 

Today, he chose pale pink carnations, cream roses, and small sprays of baby’s breath, tying them together with soft brown paper and a ribbon the color of fresh milk. He adjusted the stem once, then twice, tilting his head as he examined the balance of it. 

“Your husband likes warm colors more,” he murmured, gently replacing one white rose with a peach one. 

The old lady chuckled. “You remember better than I do.”

Jungwon only smiled, shy and quiet, before offering the finished bouquet to her with both hands. 

The bell above the door chimed softly as morning sunlight spilled across the shop floor, catching in the glass jars and petals around him. For a moment, with flowers in his hands and laughter filling the room, Jungwon looked exactly where he belonged. 

.

.

.

.

The bell above the door jingled so violently that Jungwon barely had time to look up before someone stumbled inside. It was Doctor Jake from the hospital across the street. Still in his navy scrubs, his glasses a bit tilted on the side, hair a mess like he had run all the way here. He looked as though he had just escaped a medical emergency. 

“Jungwon,” he gasped, hands on his knees. “I need flowers.” 

Jungwon set down the ribbon in his hand. “Good morning, Doctor.” 

“My relationship is in critical condition.” 

Jungwon only hummed softly as he tossed the ribbon scraps into the nearby bin. 

“That sounds serious.” 

“It is serious,” Jake said, straightening up. “She said she needs space.” 

Jungwon glanced at him. “And what did you do?” 

“I gave her space.” 

A pause. 

“Physically?” 

“Yes.”

“No, I mean what did you do to make her say that?”

Jake blinked. “Oh.” He looked suddenly sheepish. “I forgot our anniversary.” 

Jungwon let out a quiet sigh, already walking toward the flower cooler. 

“Yesterday?” he asked over his shoulder. Jake’s silence was answer enough. 

“Mm.” Jungwon opened the glass door and scanned the rows of fresh blooms. “You came here instead of writing your will. Interesting choice.” 

“Can you focus?” Jake groaned. “I’m trying to save my future.” 

“I’m tough.” Jungwon reached for a bundle of tulips. “You’re the one panicking in my store before ten in the morning.” 

Jake dragged a hand down his face. “I had a night shift.” 

Another quiet sigh slipped past Jungwon’s lips. As if Jake had never worked a night shift before. Difficult as it must be, exhaustion was hardly an excuse for forgetting something like that. 

“You’ve had night shift before,” Jungwon said flatly, selecting a few cream roses next. “Yet somehow this is the first time you’ve sprinted in here looking divorced.” 

“I’m not divorced.” 

“Not yet.” 

Jake stared at him. “You’re unbelievably unsupportive for someone helping me.” 

Jungwon merely smiled to himself as he gathered cream roses, pale tulips, and sprigs of baby’s breath into his arms.

“No red roses,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because red roses say I panicked and stopped at the nearest flower shop.”

Jake frowned. “That is exactly what happened.”

Jungwon paused for a moment, then looked at him with mild disbelief. For someone trusted to make life-or-death decisions at a hospital, Jake could be remarkably foolish in matters of romance. 

“Well,” Jungwon said dryly, returning to his bouquet, “good thing you came to a professional.” 

Jungwon gathered the stems into one hand and began trimming them with sharp, efficient snips, his expression calm even as disbelief simmered beneath it. Honestly, he could not understand why this had somehow become part of his job. He had opened a flower shop because he loves flowers, not to clean up after an irresponsible boyfriend with poor memory and worse planning. Yet here he was, at nine in the morning, barely sipping his coffee in peace, repairing damage caused by a grown man. 

Jake hovered nearby, watching every moment like an anxious intern. 

“Can you make it look expensive?” he asked. 

“Can you try looking sincere?” 

Jake winced. “Right. Sorry.” 

With another quiet sigh, Jungwon returned to his work, layering tulips beside cream roses and soft greenery. Somewhere along the years, he had become less of a florist and more of a crisis manager for careless men in love. 

“I should start charging emotional hazard fees,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

After the bouquet finished, Jake rushed out as dramatically as he had arrived. Bouquet clutched to his chest and phone already in hand, nearly colliding with the doorframe on his way out. The bell above the entrance jingled wildly behind him before settling back into silence. 

“Flower shop owner,” he continued under his breath, adjusting a crooked vase. “Part-time relationship counselor. Full-time cleaner of other people’s messes.” The corner of his mouth twitched despite himself. 

Jungwon dusted stray leaves from the counter and reached for the next stack of wrapping paper, irritation still lingering beneath his calm expression. 

.

.

.

.

Jungwon expected many things when he stayed past closing. Last-minute customers were unfortunately one of them. 

The bell above the door rang just as he was about to flip the sign to 'closed,' and a young man in a wrinkled suit hurried inside with a guilty expression on his face, a look Jungwon knew far too well by now. 

“Please,” the stranger said, breathless. “Do you still have tulips?”

Jungwon glanced at the clock. Two minutes past eight. Of course. 

“I do,” he replied evenly, already turning back toward the cooler. “Who did you disappoint?”

The man blinked. “My wife.”

“Hm.” Jungwon selected a bundle of pink tulips. “Honesty. Rare.” 

“It’s our date night,” the man admitted. “I got stuck at work.” 

Jungwon wrapped the flowers neatly in kraft paper, fingers swift and practiced despite the annoyance tugging at his patience. He hated rushing. Hated the way people treated flowers like emergency repairs for problems they had neglected all week. 

Still, the bouquet came out lovely. It always did. 

“That’ll be twenty-three thousand,” he said.

The man paid, bowed gratefully, and hurried out with promises to do better. Jungwon doubted it.

Once the door shut behind him, silence finally settled over Eden’s Garden. Jungwon exhaled through his nose, locked the front door, and turned the sign to closed with more satisfaction than necessary. He dimmed the front light one by one, gathered ribbon scraps from the counter, and then headed toward the back to check the greenhouse before leaving. 

He expected many things when he heard the sudden crash from behind the glass doors. Stray cats, fallen pots, another loose windowpane. What he did not expect was a girl lying among overturned orchids, breathing hard, with torn wings trembling behind her like broken glass. 

Jungwon stopped where he stood. 

For a moment, his mind refused to make sense of what he was seeing. The greenhouse lights cast a warm glow over the shattered pots and scattered soil, over the pale shape of a girl curled carefully on the floor—and over the pair of delicate wings folded weakly behind her. They shimmered faintly, dusted in silver, the edges cracked and bent as though made from glass. 

A fairy. 

The thought came absurdly, impossibly clear. 

He had heard stories as a child of spirits hiding in old forests and winged beings blessing the garden in spring. He had long since grown out of believing them. Yet there was no other word for the creature struggling to sit upright among his orchids. 

You noticed him then. 

Your eyes widened, and for a second, you looked more startled than he felt. Slowly, carefully, you lowered your gaze and bowed your head despite the pain tightening your face. 

“I’m terribly sorry,” you said softly. Your voice was light as wind through leaves. “I didn’t mean to damage your flowers.” 

Jungwon only stared. 

You glanced at the broken pots beside you and seemed to shrink further in embarrassment. 

“I tried to land more gracefully,” you admitted in a small voice. “It did not go as planned.” 

Still, Jungwon said nothing. You looked back up at him, hesitant now. 

“Are humans always this quiet when surprised?”

That finally snapped him out of it. Jungwon blinked once, then twice.

“No,” he said slowly. “Usually we scream first.”

A faint, apologetic smile touched your lips before you winced and reached for your wing. Only then did Jungwon move forward, kneeling beside you as disbelief gave way to concern. 

“You’re hurt,” he murmured. 

“A little,” you said, though the tremble in your voice suggested otherwise. “I’m sorry for troubling you.” 

Jungwon glanced around at the ruined orchids, the feathers scattered like moonlight, and the fairy trying to apologize while barely able to sit upright. Somehow, this was not how he imagined ending his night. 

.

.

.

.

Jungwon returned a moment later with a small first-aid kit tucked under one arm and a clean towel draped over the other. He had also, for reasons he did not care to examine too closely, brought a cushion from the front of the shop. 

You were still where he had left you, sitting carefully among the overturned pots with your injured wing drawn close. Your expression brightened a little when you saw him return, though pain still lingered around your eyes. 

“I wasn’t sure you would come back,” you admitted softly. 

Jungwon set the cushion down in front of you. “It’s my greenhouse,” he said. “Hard to abandon it.” 

Then, after a pause, he added, “You too, I guess.”

A shy smile touched your lips. He helped you shift onto the cushion, movement cautious and surprisingly gentle for someone who looked perpetually unimpressed by the world. Once you were settled, he knelt behind you to inspect the damage more closely. 

“Tell me if this hurts.”

“It already hurts,” you said honestly. “But I’ll let you know if it becomes dramatic.”

A quiet huff of laughter escaped him before he could stop it. 

Using warm water and a soft cloth, Jungwon carefully cleaned the dirt from the fractured edges of your wing. Up close, the structure was delicate and intricate, each translucent feather threaded with a faint silver vein that pulsed like moonlight. He handled it with the same patience he used when pruning fragile blooms. 

You shivered once when his fingers brushed a sensitive spot. 

“Sorry,” he murmured immediately. 

“It’s all right,” you said, voice smaller now. “You’re very gentle.” 

Something unreadable crossed his face. He focused harder on wrapping a strip of gauze around the split near the base. When he finished, he leaned back on his heels to study his work. 

“There. Not perfect, but it should keep it stable for tonight.”

You turned your head enough to look at him, wonder softening your features. “Humans know how to mend wings?” 

“We don’t,” Jungwon said. “I’m improvising.” 

“That may be even more impressive.”

He looked away first. Then his gaze flicked back to you, lingering on how pale you’d gone. 

“Are you hungry?” he asked, as though the question had surprised even him. 

“Hungry?”

“You crashed through my greenhouse,” he said flatly. “I assume that takes energy.” 

A tiny laugh slipped from you. “Yes,” you confessed. “Very much so.” 

Jungwon rose to his feet. 

“Stay there. Don’t touch anything expensive.”

As he headed toward the shop kitchen, you watched him go with a smile that felt strangely warm in the quiet greenhouse. 

Jungwon returned carrying what looked like a tray assembled through reluctant thoughtfulness. A small saucer no bigger than his palm held a few berries, torn petals of edible flowers, and a single cube of honeycomb. Beside it sat a thimble-sized cup of water and half of a steamed bun from the baker next door. 

You blinked at the offering, then at him. 

“You prepared this?”

“I guessed,” he said, setting it carefully on the potting table. “You’re smaller than most of my customers.”

A soft laugh escaped you. “That’s true.”

He dragged a stool over and sat across from you, arms folded. 

“Eat.”

You climbed a little closer to the tray, wings tucked carefully behind you, and picked up one berry with both hands. The fruit looked oversized against your palms. After one bite, your eyes widened with delight. 

“This is wonderful.” 

“It’s a blueberry.”

“It’s a perfect blueberry,” you corrected gently. “Sweet, cool, and sun-warmed.” 

Jungwon watched as you nibbled another bite with the concentration of someone tasting treasure. Then you reached for the honeycomb. The moment the golden sweetness touched your tongue, you let out the tiniest sigh of happiness. He stared. 

“Is honey always this good?” you asked. 

“Yes,” Jungwon said slowly. “Have you never had it before?” 

“Not from human shops.” You took another careful bite. “Everything here tastes heavier. Richer. It lingers.”

He did not know what that meant, but nodded as though he did. You sampled the bun next, tearing off a piece no larger than a petal. 

“Warm bread,” you whispered, visibly moved. 

“It’s from next door.” 

“Then your neighboring kingdom is also blessed.” 

Jungwon looked away to hide the smile threatening his mouth. When you reached for the tiny cup of water made out of a bottle cap, your injured wing twitched painfully. You winced. He was beside you before thinking, steadying the cup so it would not tip. Your fingers brushed his. You both paused. 

“Thank you,” you said softly. 

“It’s just water.”

“And yet,” you murmured, looking up at him with bright eyes, “you keep saving me with simple things.”

Jungwon straightened too quickly and returned to fixing overturned pots. Behind him, he could still hear your small, delighted hums over berries and bread. Somehow, in the middle of a ruined greenhouse and a very long night, the sound made the place feel warmer than it had all day. 

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The next morning arrived quietly, washed in pale gold sunlight that filtered through the glass panes of the greenhouse. Jungwon unlocked the back door with a yawn, balancing a tray of watering tools in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other. He had almost convinced himself that the events of last night were some elaborate exhaustion-induced dream. An injured fairy in his greenhouse sounded far less believable in daylight.  

Then he stepped inside. And there you were. Fast asleep on the makeshift bed he had arranged from folded blankets, spare cushions, and an old linen cloth usually used for wrapping pots. You had curled into yourself near the row of hydrangeas, one tiny hand tucked beneath your cheek. Your wings, carefully bandaged by his own clumsy hands, were folded close behind you, catching the morning light in soft silver hues. 

Jungwon stopped in the doorway. For a moment, he simply stared. In sleep, you looked even smaller than he remembered. A few loose petals had gathered around your bed during the night, as though the flowers had crept closer to watch over you. 

He had spent years trying to keep this greenhouse alive, and somehow, overnight, it had decided to adopt a fairy. The floor creaked beneath his shoe. Your nose scrunched first. Then your lashes fluttered open slowly, heavy with sleep. For a second, you only blinked up at him in confusion before memory returned. 

“Oh,” you murmured, voice soft and rough with sleep. “Good morning.” 

Jungwon looked away too quickly, clearing his throat. 

“You’re drooling.”

You sat up at once, horrified. “I am?”

“No.”

You stared. A beat passed before he took a sip of coffee, expression unreadable. 

“That was mean,” you said quietly. 

“It was funny,” Jungwon replied, already moving toward the watering cans so you wouldn’t see the corner of his mouth lift. 

Jungwon busied himself with the watering cans, pretending he had not just lied to an injured fairy before breakfast. Behind him, he heard the rustle of blankets and the soft shift of wings as you carefully sat straighter on the makeshift bed. 

For a few quiet moments, the greenhouse was filled only with the sound of running water and morning birds beyond the glass. Then, your voice drifted over, gentle and curious. 

“What is it that you do for a living?”

Jungwon glanced back. You were watching him with open interest, knees tucked beneath the blanket, hair still mussed from sleep. He frowned slightly. “You mean right now?”

“In general,” you said, smiling a little. “Humans seem to spend much of their time doing things for a living.”

He considered that. “I own this place.” He gestured around the greenhouse. “The flower shop out front, too. I arrange bouquets, sell plants, keep everything alive.” 

Your eyes widened with genuine admiration. “You care for flowers every day?”

“That’s the job.”

“Thats sounds lovely.”

“It’s mostly dirt, invoices, and people who remember anniversaries too late.”

You laughed softly, the sound bright enough to make him pause mid-pour. 

“I think it suits you,” you said. “You have gentle hands.”

Jungwon nearly overwatered a fern. He set the can down with unnecessary care. 

“Mm.” 

Then, because he needed the subject away from himself immediately, he turned back to you.  

“What about you?” he asked. “Why did the accident happen?” 

Your smile faded. Fingers curled lightly into the blanket over your lap. For a moment, you looked down at your bandaged wing. 

“My home was destroyed,” you said quietly. 

Jungwon stilled. 

You glanced toward the glass roof, eyes distant now. “It was a garden. Full of blooming flowers. Vines, ponds, trees older than memory.” A small breath left you. “It’s gone now.” 

He said nothing, sensing there was little to say. 

“I had nowhere to return to,” you continued softly. “So I wandered, looking for another place where I might stay.” 

Your fingers tightened around the blanket.

“Then a hunting creature found me.”

Jungwon frowned. “What kind of creature?”

You hesitated. “Small. Round face. Sharp eyes. Very smug.”

He blinked once. “A cat?”

You looked offended. “It was vicious.”

Jungwon had to look away to hide the smile threatening his mouth.

“It chased me through the alleyways,” you said with wounded dignity. “I flew faster than I should have. Then I saw this greenhouse full of flowers and thought I could hide here.”

His eyes moved slowly over the broken pots, spilled soil, and bent orchid stand.

“You then flew directly into my shelves.”

“I lost control,” you murmured. “At the last moment.”

“You crashed through three pots.”

“Two and a half.”

Jungwon let out a quiet breath that was almost laughter.

Despite the absurdity of it, something in your voice lingered with him—the way you spoke of a ruined home, of wandering alone, of choosing his greenhouse because it was full of flowers.

He reached for another watering can, tone calmer when he spoke again.

“Well,” he said, not looking at you, “until your wing heals… You can stay here.”

For a moment, the greenhouse went completely still. Even the faint rustle of leaves seemed to pause. You looked at him as though you were not certain you had heard correctly.

“…I may stay?”

Jungwon kept his attention fixed on the row of ferns in front of him. “Temporarily.”

Your voice turned smaller, softer. “Here?”

“Until your wing heals,” he repeated.

For a heartbeat, you simply stared at him. Then your eyes began to shine in a way that caught him entirely off guard. 

“It’s not a place invitation, it’s a spare corner in a greenhouse.” 

But you were already pushing yourself carefully to your feet, clutching the blanket around your shoulders. 

“This is the kindest thing anyone has done for me in a very long time.” 

The sincerity in your voice made him glance over despite himself. You looked genuinely overwhelmed by something he considered practical at best. 

“Thank you, Jungwon.” 

His name sounded different in your mouth. Soft, careful, almost precious. Jungwon forgot, briefly, what he had been doing. You bowed your head over his hands, though it was something worthy of reverence, then looked up at him with such open gratitude that he had to clear his throat and look away. 

“You’re making this weird,” he said quietly. 

A tiny laugh escaped you, bright as wind chimes. He risked another glance and immediately regretted it. You were smiling at him like he had handed you the world instead of an unused corner and some blankets. Ridiculous. And, annoyingly, kind of cute. 

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Later that morning, once the front sign had been turned to open, Jungwon guided you into the narrow space behind a tall shelf of potted hydrangeas near the doorway between the shop and greenhouse. From there, hidden between leaves and ribbons, you had a clear view of the counter. 

“This is your spot,” he said. “Stay quiet, stay hidden, and don’t reveal yourself to strangers.” 

You nodded solemnly. “I shall be invisible.”

“You are currently sparkling.” 

You looked down in alarm and quickly tucked your wings closer. Jungwon sighed and went to unlock the front door. The bell chimed only minutes later. An elderly woman entered first, leaning on a cane with careful steps. Before she could even speak, Jungwon had already moved around the counter. 

“Good morning, Mrs. Han,” he said, taking the basket from her hand. “The daisies lasted longer this week?” 

Her face brightened. “You remembered.”

“You complained about them twice,” he said mildly. 

You watched, wide-eyed, as he selected fresh stems and adjusted them to a height easier for her to carry. He even tied the ribbon loosely so arthritic fingers could undo it without trouble. When she left smiling, you pressed both hands to your mouth. He knew her flowers. He knew her hands. 

The bell rang again. This time, a nervous student came in asking for ‘something pretty, but cheap’.

Jungwon did not laugh. He simply asked, “For apology or confession?” 

The boy flushed crimson. “Confession.”

“Then yellow tulips. They’re hopeful without being arrogant.” 

You nearly gasped aloud. He could read hearts from a flower request alone. 

Throughout the morning, customers came and went. A mother with a crying toddler received a free carnation to distract the child. A tired office worker was offered water before discussing the colors of the bouquet. A young woman is uncertain about caring for succulents left with written instructions and Jungwon’s promise that she could return if she killed them accidentally. 

Each time, he remained calm, steady, a little dry in humor—but attentive in ways so small most people probably missed them. He noticed trembling hands, tired eyes, wedding rings, and ink stains, as well as sadness hidden beneath smiles. And he responded gently every time. 

From behind the hydrangeas, you could only stare. When the shop finally emptied for a moment, Jungwon began reorganizing ribbon at the counter. You slipped out from hiding before remembering you were supposed to stay hidden. 

“You’re astonishing,” you blurted. 

He looked up slowly. “That sounds suspicious.” 

“You care for them the way you care for flowers.”

Jungwon blinked once. “I sell them flowers.”

“No,” you said, stepping closer. “You make them feel seen.”

The ribbon in his hand stilled. For once, he had nothing dry or clever to say. You smiled at him with shining admiration. Jungwon looked down at the ribbons again, ears faintly pink. 

“Get back behind the hydrangeas before someone walks in.” 

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That afternoon slowed into a gentle lull. Sunlight poured through the front windows in warm strips, turning the shop golden and quiet. No customers came for nearly half an hour, leaving only the soft hum of the refrigerator cooler and the distant sound of traffic outside. 

Jungwon used the silence to sort a shipment of fresh stems at the worktable near the greenhouse door. Roses, lisianthus, eucalyptus, peonies–ordinary things, familiar things. Easy to understand. 

You, meanwhile, were not. 

He glanced over to find you perched on the edge of a wooden crate, legs swinging idly as you studied a sunflower that was bigger and taller than you. Your injured wing was tucked carefully behind you, bandages neat from where he had changed them earlier. The other wing caught the light each time it moved, scattering tiny flecks of shimmer across the floor. 

You reached out with both hands and cupped the sunflower’s face with reverence.

“It follows the sun,” you whispered, delighted. “How loyal.”

Jungwon stared for a moment too long before looking back down at the stems in his hands.

“It’s called heliotropism,” he said.

You turned immediately. “You know the language of flowers scientifically and emotionally. That feels unfair.” 

He nearly cut the eucalyptus crooked. A few minutes later, he looked up again. You had discovered the ribbon drawer. Lengths of satin and organza were spread around you like treasure while you held a spool of green ribbon above your head. 

“This one matches your aura,” you announced. 

“I don’t have an aura.”

“Everyone has an aura.” You squinted at him thoughtfully. “Yours is moss after rain.” 

Jungwon had no idea what that meant. Yet somehow, hearing it made his chest feel strange. He went back to trimming stems. Then came a soft gasp. He looked up sharply. 

You were standing beside a vase of unopened lilies, hands clasped under your chin. Before his eyes, the tight buds slowly loosened, petals unfolding one by one as if waking from sleep.

Jungwon straightened. “Did you do that?”

You blinked at him. “A little.”

“That’s possible?”

“You talk to flowers with water and patience,” you said simply. “I talk to them differently.”

He walked closer without meaning to, gaze fixed on the lilies now fully open and fragrant. All his life, flowers had been work. Beautiful work, yes–but still predictable in their own ways. Soil, sunlight, pruning, seasons. Cause and effect. 

But you stood among them like something from a story, smiling shyly because you thought opening lilies was ordinary. Jungwon looked at your face, then your bandaged wing, then the petals blooming around you. 

Ridiculous. Impossible. Entirely inconvenient. And he couldn’t stop looking. 

You tilted your head. “Why are humans always so quiet when surprised?”

He blinked, caught.

“…Because sometimes,” he said slowly, “we don’t know what to say.”

Your smile softened. For the rest of the afternoon, Jungwon found himself glancing up every few minutes—just to make sure you were still there. 

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Days slipped into one another so quietly that Jungwon did not notice when caring for you became part of his routine. 

At first, he told himself it was temporary. You were an injured guest, nothing more. A strange responsibility that had fallen into his greenhouse like broken weather. He was only helping until your wing healed. 

Then, somehow, mornings began with looking for you first. 

He would unlock the greenhouse and find you asleep in a nest of blankets, petals gathered around your hair, or sitting cross-legged by the window, whispering to seedlings until they stood a little taller. Sometimes you would already be awake, waiting for him with a bright, “Good morning, Jungwon,” spoken as though his arrival was the best part of your day.

He never admitted how much he liked hearing it. 

You learned the rhythm of the shop quickly. When a customer came, you hid in the back room or behind the taller plants, peeking through leaves with scandalous curiosity. When the store emptied, you emerged to ask endless questions.

Why did humans apologize with flowers? 

Why did some people buy roses only after making mistakes?

Why did Jungwon frown when concentrating, but smile at lilies?

He had no answer for the last one. 

You followed him everywhere your wing allowed. If he watered the orchids, you carried the spray bottle two-handed behind him.  If he trimmed stems, you sorted discarded leaves into neat little piles. If he rearranged displays, you offered opinions no one asked for.                                                                                                                        

“That vase is insecure,” you declared once.

“It’s ceramic.”

“It knows what it did.”

Jungwon laughed so suddenly that he startled himself. That happened more often now. You had a way of filling quiet spaces without making them loud. The greenhouse, once peaceful in a lonely sort of way, now felt warm with your presence. There was always the soft rustle of wings, the hum of your voice, the occasional gasp of delight over something ordinary. Bread. Rain. Fresh peonies. The fact that pencils could be sharpened. 

You made the world seem newer than he remembered it being. And you notice him in ways others did not. 

You left flowers beside his register ‘because they matched his mood’. You reminded him to eat when lunch hours grew busy. You scolded him gently when he worked too late. You thanked him every single night for letting you stay, as though he had not already lost count of how many times he would say yes. 

One afternoon, while tying ribbons for an order, Jungwon realized he was smiling before you had even entered the room. He had heard your footsteps in the hall and smiled automatically. The realization unsettled him. He set the ribbon down and stared at nothing for a long moment. Then you appeared in the doorway carrying a strawberry twice the size of your face. 

“Look what I found,” you announced proudly. 

Jungwon looked at you, ridiculous and radiant in the late sunlight, and felt the strange tightness in his chest again. 

“Wash it first,” he said. 

You beamed as though he had said something tender. 

Maybe, Jungwon thought as he watched you hurry to the sink, he was growing used to having a fairy around. Maybe that was all it was. But when you laughed from the kitchen a second later, bright and familiar, even he knew he was lying to himself. 

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It happened on an afternoon so ordinary that Jungwon almost missed how impossible it was. 

Rain tapped softly against the greenhouse glass, customers were scarce, and the shop smelled of damp earth and fresh eucalyptus. Jungwon was in the back room sorting inventory sheets while muttering about missing ribbon spools. You had been strangely quiet for nearly twenty minutes. That alone was suspicious. 

He looked up from the papers. “What are you doing?”

No answer. Jungwon frowned and pushed back his chair. “If you’re using magic on the stock again, I’m charging rent.”

Still nothing. 

He followed the faint rustling sound toward the greenhouse, stepping around buckets and crates until he reached the row of climbing roses near your makeshift bed. Then he stopped so abruptly that the clipboard nearly slipped from his hand. You were standing in the middle of the aisle. Not perched on a crate. Not small enough to fit in his palm-sized blankets. Standing. Human-sized. 

Your head nearly reached his shoulder now, wings spread carefully behind you in a softened shimmer. The loose shirt he had left folded nearby hung off one shoulder, its sleeves too long for his arms, the hem brushing the tops of his thighs. Bare legs, tousled hair, startled eyes. You looked just as shocked to see him as he was to see you. For a long moment, neither of you spoke. Jungwon’s brain, usually dependable and practical, offered nothing useful. 

“...What,” he said finally, “is this?”

You clutched the oversized shirt tighter. “I can explain.” 

“I would love that.”

Your gaze dropped to the floor. “Fairies can shift forms.” 

“You could do this the whole time?” 

“No!” you said quickly. “Not properly. It requires strength, and my wing has been damaged.” 

You flexed your fingers uncertainly, as if surprised by their length. “I only just regained enough magic to hold it.”

Jungwon stared. This explained many things. None of them helped. 

“You mean to tell me,” he said slowly, “that for days I’ve been making you tiny fruit plates when you could one day become…” He gestured helplessly at all of you. “...this?”

You bit your lip. “The fruit plates were very sweet.”

His eyes caught on the way the borrowed shirt slipped lower on your shoulder. He looked away so fast it almost hurt. 

“And you chose now to mention this because?”

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“You’ve succeeded.”

A pause.

“Are you upset?” you asked softly.

Jungwon looked back then. You stood there, nervous and hopeful, bare feet against his greenhouse floor, wrapped in one of his shirt like it belonged to you. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled. 

“No,” he said after too long. His voice came out rougher than intended. “Just… unprepared.”

Your expression brightened instantly. “Then you’re not angry?”

“I didn’t say that.”

You laughed, warm and relieved, taking one step toward him. The movement made your still-healing wing wobble. Jungwon was beside you before thinking, hand catching your waist to steady you. Both of you froze. His palm burned through the thin fabric. Yours caught lightly at his wrist. Up close, you smelled like rainwater and flowers. Jungwon cleared his throat and stepped back at once. 

“Sit down,” he said. “Before you break something else.”

You smiled in a way that made his pulse deeply uncooperative. You only nodded. He turned sharply and walked back toward the stockroom. Behind him, he heard your soft laughter echo through the greenhouse. He did not return for five full minutes. 

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The discovery of your human-sized form changed surprisingly little. Jungwon had expected complications. More blankets, larger meals, perhaps an entirely new category of headaches. Instead, by the next morning, he opened the greenhouse to find you exactly as usual—small again, curled atop a folded towel beside the basil pots, one wing draped over your face to block the sunlight. He stared down at you.

“You can become human-sized,” he said. “And yet you choose to sleep in a herb tray.”

Your wing twitched. Then you peeked out at him with one sleepy eye.

“It smells nice.”

“That is not an answer.”

“I like being light. I like fitting into warm places. I like hearing flowers from close by.”

That was such a fairy sentence that he did not know how to respond. So instead, he handed you the lid of his coffee cup, now emptied and rinsed, filled with fresh water. 

“Drink this before you start saying stranger things.”

You accept it happily. 

You followed Jungwon through the shop perched on his shoulder like an inquisitive ornament, asking questions from sunrise to closing.

“Why do humans brush their teeth every morning if they become dirty again?”

“Because that’s how cleaning works.”

“Why do people stare at glowing rectangles while ignoring flowers?”

“Phones.”

“That did not answer the question.”

You rode in his apron pocket while he restocked ribbon, peering over the edge like a suspicious manager. You sat cross-legged on the register while he counted change, watching coins stack with fascination. You once spent twenty minutes observing the receipt printer as if it were a mystical beast.

“It screams paper,” you whispered in awe.

“It prints receipts.”

When business was slow, you demanded lessons on ‘human daily rituals’. Jungwon showed you how to make tea. You insisted the kettle was too aggressive. He demonstrated sweeping. You called brooms ‘floor combs’. 

He tried explaining taxes once. You stared at him in silence before declaring, ‘That cannot be real’. 

“What do fairies even do all day?”

You blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You keep interrogating humans. I’m asking back.”

You considered it seriously.

“We greet flowers in the morning,” you said. “We collect dew. We nap in warm petals. We sing to roots when they are sad.”

Jungwon stared. “Roots get sad?”

“Sometimes.”

“What else?”

“We chase dragonflies. We braid grass. We gossip.”

“With who?”

“The bees, mostly.”

He rubbed a hand over his face. “Of course.”

“What do humans do for fun?”

The question came while Jungwon was trimming wilted leaves from a row of daisies near closing time. He did not look up. 

“Depends on the human.” 

You sat cross-legged on the counter, chin in your hands, wings flicking lazily behind you. “What do you do for fun?” 

“I enjoy silence.”

“That cannot be the whole answer.”

“It’s a strong one.”

You frowned at him. “No festivals? No dances? No moonlit flower gatherings?”

“We have bills,” Jungwon said dryly.

You gasped softly, scandalized. “That is tragic.”

He continued clipping stems, pretending not to notice the way you were now staring at him with obvious pity.

“I think,” you declared, “you have forgotten how to enjoy life.”

“I think,” Jungwon replied, “you’ve been alive in my greenhouse too long.”

When the last customer left, he locked the front door, flipped the sign to closed, and began counting the register. Behind him, you sighed dramatically every few seconds. He lasted three minutes. 

You perked up at once. “What?” 

“You wanted to know what humans do for fun.” He grabbed his coat from the hook. “Come on.”

Your wings fluttered so fast they blurred. “We are going on an adventure?”

“We are walking three blocks.”

“That is still an adventure.”

Ten minutes later, you were tucked safely inside the deep pocket of his coat, only your head peeking out as he walked down the quiet evening street. The city glowed in warm shop lights and passing headlights, rainwater still shining on the pavement from earlier. You stared at everything. 

“The world sparkles at night,” you whispered.

“It’s puddles.”

“It’s magic puddles.”

He took you to the convenience store first.

You nearly fainted at the snack aisle.

“So many colors,” you breathed. “So many shapes. Why is that bread smiling?”

“It’s a mascot.”

“It knows something.”

Jungwon bought you a small honey candy after five full minutes of you pressing your face to the packaging displays. Outside, he unwrapped it and handed it over.

You held it like a jewel. “For me?”

“You were becoming a public spectacle.”

You licked the candy once and gasped. “Humans are geniuses.”

He looked away to hide the smile tugging at his mouth.

Next, he took you through the small night market near the station. Steam rose from food stalls. Music drifted from somewhere unseen. People laughed, bargained, and hurried past. From his pocket, you watched it all with shining eyes. 

“So this is fun,” you said softly.

“This is crowds and overpriced snacks.”

“This,” you insisted, “is life happening everywhere at once.”

Jungwon glanced down at you. Your face was lit by lantern glow, wonder written plainly across it. Something in his chest shifted again. later , on the walk home, you grew quieter, sleepy from excitement. You leaned against the inside of his pocket, clutching the candy wrapper like treasure. 

“Jungwon?” 

“Mm?” 

“Thank you for showing me human fun.” 

He kept his gaze on the road ahead.

“It wasn’t a big deal.”

“It was to me.”

A pause.

Then, softer—already half asleep:

“You make ordinary things feel safe.”

Jungwon’s steps slowed for just a second. When he reached Eden’s Garden, you were asleep in his pocket, warm and trusting. He stood outside the shop door longer than necessary before unlocking it, strangely unwilling to disturb you. 

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A week later, Jungwon noticed it before you did. 

You were hovering. Only an inch above the greenhouse floor, wobbling dangerously near a bucket of fertilizer. Jungwon set down the watering can at once. “Get down.” 

“I’m flying,” you corrected, voice full of triumph. 

You drifted sideways, clipped a hanging fern, and landed in a pot of basil. 

“A temporary setback,” you said from the leaves. But he had already crossed the room, crouching beside you with an expression caught somewhere between concern and disbelief. 

“Are you hurt?” 

“No.” You sat up, leaves in your hair, grinning so brightly it almost annoyed him. “Did you see?” 

He had. 

More than that, he had seen the way your wings moved now without trembling, the silver fractures nearly gone, the old stiffness replaced by clean, smooth light. The bandages he had changed day after day were no longer needed. 

Jungwon reached out before thinking, fingertips brushing the edge of your wing. It was whole. You went still at the touch. 

“They healed,” he murmured. 

Your smile softened. “Because you cared for them.”

“I wrapped gauze badly and fed you fruit.” 

“You stayed.” 

The simple answer left him strangely quiet. You stepped out of the basil pot and spread your wings carefully. Morning light poured through the greenhouse glass, catching every translucent panel until they shimmered like water. 

“May I try again?” you asked. 

He should have said no, told you to rest, to wait, to be careful. Instead, Jungwon only nodded once. You bent your knees, then lifted. This time, there was no wobble. No crash. No panicked grab for nearby shelves. You rose smoothly into the warm air, higher and higher until you circled above the hanging ivy with a laugh so bright it filled the entire greenhouse. 

Jungwon stood motionless below, head tilted back. You were beautiful like this. Weightless. Made for the sky in a way the earth could never keep. The realization hit harder than expected. You dipped lower, spinning once before landing lightly in front of him, cheeks flushed with joy. 

“I did it!” 

He looked at your shining face, then at the wings now strong enough to carry you anywhere. 

“Yes,” he said quietly. “You did.” 

You stepped closer, excitement fading as you noticed something in his expression. 

“Jungwon?”

He turned away first, reaching for the watering can he no longer needed. 

“Don’t break anything on your victory lap.” 

But the greenhouse suddenly felt too small, and far too empty. 

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The morning your wings fully healed, the greenhouse felt inextricably bright. 

You had risen laughing into the air at sunrise, circling the rafters with effortless grace before landing in a spill of golden light. There was no tremble now, no hesitation, no pain. Only freedom. 

Jungwon had smiled. Just not for very long. For the rest of the day, he buried himself in work. He rearranged bouquets that did not need to be rearranged, polished shelves already clean, and spent ten full minutes glaring at the ribbon spool as though it had offended him personally. You noticed, of course. You always did. 

When closing time came, you found him in the greenhouse stacking empty pots with unnecessary focus. 

“My wings are better,” you said softly. 

“So I’ve heard.”

You stood there for a moment, hands clasped behind your back. 

“I think… I should go soon.”

The pot in his hands nearly slipped. He set it down carefully before answering. 

“Probably.” 

Your smile dimmed. “Probably?”

“You wanted to travel.” He kept his eyes on the shelf. “Find somewhere new. Bigger than this place.”

The silence that followed felt heavier than it should have. Then you nodded once. “I see.”

He did not look at you. That night, Jungwon barely slept. The next morning, he opened the shop to find your makeshift bed neatly folded. The tiny cup you liked to drink from had been washed and left upside down to dry. The ribbon drawer was organized by color. 

You were gone. 

For a full minute, Jungwon simply stood there. The greenhouse was quiet again. Too quiet. No humming. No questions. No soft voice asking why humans enjoyed bitter bean water. His chest tightened painfully. He lasted seven minutes. 

Then he was out the door.

He found you on the rooftop of the building across the street, standing at the ledge where the morning wind tugged at your hair. In your human-sized form, your wings gleamed behind you, strong and radiant beneath the sky.

You turned when you heard him. 

“I forgot to say goodbye properly,” you said. 

Jungwon was slightly out of breath, hands shoved into the pockets of his coat. 

“Don’t go.” 

The words came rough, immediate, and far too honest. Your eyes widened. He swallowed once. “I know your wings are healed. I know you can leave whenever you want.” He looked away briefly, jaw tight. “But I don’t want you to.” 

The wind moved softly between you. Jungwon forced himself to continue.

“This place was quiet before you came.” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “Too quiet. Now every corner reminds me of you. The basil tray. My pocket. The fact that I apparently buy honey candy now.”

A watery smile touched your lips. He stepped closer. 

“I don’t know when it happened,” he said quietly. “But somewhere between fixing your wing and arguing about taxes, you became…”

He exhaled.

“…home.”

Your eyes filled at once.

“Jungwon…”

“If you still want to travel, then go,” he said, voice gentler now. “If you want the sky, I won’t stop you.”

“But if you’d like to stay…” He met your gaze fully. “Stay with me.”

You crossed the space between you so quickly that he barely had time to brace before your arms wrapped around him. This time, human-sized and warm and laughing through tears.

“I was waiting,” you whispered into his shoulder. “I was waiting for you to ask.”

Jungwon held you tightly, face buried in your hair.

“You are impossible,” he muttered.

“And staying,” you replied.

He pulled back just enough to look at you, eyes soft in a way he no longer bothered hiding.

“Good.”

Then he kissed you there beneath the open sky, gentle and certain, while your wings shimmered in the morning light.

.

.

.

.

Months later, customers often whispered that Eden’s Garden bloomed more beautifully than any florist in the city. Flowers opened overnight. Wilted stems revived by morning. The whole place seemed touched by luck. Jungwon, tying ribbons behind the counter, only sighed when tiny laughter came from the tulips. 

“I said no magic on inventory.”

“No promises,” came your cheerful voice.

And Eden’s Garden, at last, had become home to you.