jenodreamer

© juwonsicle. '26

©️ heesroses 2026

ever since that day, jake truly believed you were the closest thing he’d ever get to an angel. a very pretty angel at that, he insisted.

as he fell under your umbrella, he seemingly fell under your spell while he was at it— he could barely let out a thank you. while you were just trying to get home before the rain got worse, he was already trying to slide into your heart.

speaking of hearts— with your kind one, you offered to walk this beautiful stranger named jake all the way to his destination.

you two talked your mouths off. jake could talk for what felt like hours without getting tired— but the second you opened your mouth, he’d fall completely silent, giving you his undivided attention and lending you his two ears while he was at it.

what you didn’t know— and definitely wasn’t prepared for— was that this stubborn jake’s destination happened to be the hybe building in all its glory.

oh. Isn’t that great.

before you had the chance to spiral into a hundred different assumptions, jake was already stumbling over his words, quickly explaining that he was just a regular, completely unimportant staff member. definitely not some famous idol.

well, that would take a lot of convincing for you to believe that.

and if, by some miracle, that excuse was actually true, then he was a very handsome staff member who chose the wrong career path.

despite all odds, jake shamelessly begged for your number. he didn’t attempt to have some sort of dignity or shame— jake was one second away from getting on his knees in public. right infront of the hybe building.

he could not afford to fumble a beauty like you,

and thankfully, he did not.

from that day on, you and jake practically became inseparable. even if he was busy, busting his ass off flying one country to another, he’d still find time to ask you how your day has been from across the world.

that shared umbrella turned jake into a lovesick fool. you completely occupied jake’s mind without an ounce of mercy. he’d come up with countless stupid excuses just so he could see you again— ask you on dates that weren’t actually dates. things that friends obviously don’t do.

and with that, jake found himself falling harder than he ever thought possible.

it was without a doubt that jake loved everything about you. there was not a single thing about you that went unnoticed, if you mentioned it to jake— he’d have it completely etched in his memory forever, no exaggeration. just complete love.

you knew that to everyone else, jake was enhypen’s jake sim— the golden retriever member who had a smile that could make anyone go weak. someone who could lighten up the stage by just being on it.

but to you, there was a version of jake that only existed with you.

this jake was yours.

everyone else got the idol, but you got him.

and that’s where we arrive at your point—

dating jake, who just so happened to be an idol, was not for the weak and faint of heart.

one day, you’d have him all to yourself. he’d spend every second of his well-deserved break by your side, clinging to you as much as he can. you’d spend every waking moment doing everything with him, just because being together was enough.

then the next day, he’d be gone. you’d hear he’s going on a world tour in north america.

one announcement was all it took.

“pretty girl,” his voice crackled softly through your phone speaker, “you know you’re my number one priority, right?”

you were currently sprawled across your bed, all alone, staring blankly at the ceiling as you tried to convince yourself this wasn’t actually happening.

your boyfriend was halfway across the world, separated from you— your room felt too quiet. you hated how quickly you had to get used to missing him.

“say that to the thousands of people you are performing for.” you joked, quietly laughing— smiling despite yourself.

“and right after performing for those thousands of people, the first thing I do is check my phone, hoping you texted me.” he teased— hoping the ache in your chest would be partially lifted off with a smile or laugh.

“jake, I miss you.” you said into the phone, your voice coming out smaller than you even intended.

“I know, pretty. I miss you and your beautiful face. I might die out here.” he sighed, you could almost hear the frown he made as he spoke.

you were curled up in bed, hugging one of jake’s hoodies to your chest— your phone pressed against your ear.

as for your boyfriend, he was sitting alone in his hotel room— staring out the window at a city he wished the you two would visit together.

“baby?” he called out into the phone, his voice silent yet soft. it warmed you up before you could even notice.

“hm?” you hummed softly, forcing your voice to sound lighter than you felt. if you let yourself think for even another second, you’d be crying into jake’s hoodie— thinking alone after 10 p.m. had never ended well for you.

“I hope you know that I’m always thinking about you, pretty.” he reminded you gently, chuckling silently to himself, “like… all the time. like a maniac.”

“and I’m so mad because I can’t even kiss you right now. I’m gonna be driven crazy.”jake admitted, making you laugh— there wasn’t a pinch of sarcasm in his voice, he was dead serious.

“I think you’re so beautiful, you know that? like annoyingly beautiful, you’re so beautiful that it’s hard to focus on quite literally anything else.” he said, the smile in his voice was impossible to miss through the phone.

you gripped the hoodie tighter, letting out a shaky breath but a faint smile formed on your face. “jake…” you mumbled, only for you to hear.

“I just want to hug you again.” he continued softly, “I want to hold you and not let go for a while.” he added, his voice gentle— just enough to make you cry.

“baby, I miss making you laugh in person. do you miss me stealing your food? because I sure do.” jake asked you jokingly, making you laugh weakly in response.

“I want to fall asleep next to you, wake up and pretend I didn’t drool on your shoulder…”

you let out a small laugh, upon hearing your sweet laugh— a chuckle escaped from his lips.

“baby… don’t laugh at me, I’m being romantic.” he chuckled.

“you’re being ridiculous.”

“ridiculously in love with you.” jake answered in a heartbeat— because he knew he’d never hesitate loving you.

for a few seconds, both of you sat there in silence. not the uncomfortable kind, neither of you felt obligated to fill the quiet with meaningless conversation.

he hated this. he hated that the only way he could reassure you was through a screen and a phone speaker, when all he wanted was to wrap his arms around you until every worry disappeared.

“…baby.” jake’s voice was quiet, almost hesitant, as though he didn’t want to disturb the peaceful silence between you.

“close your eyes for me.”

“…okay.” there was a small pause before you answered— you hesitated.

“thank you, pretty.” he smiled instinctively at the sound of your voice, softer now that you’d stopped fighting the emotions sitting in your chest.

“i’m right there with you, okay? just imagine it.” his own eyes drifted shut, like it would make the distance disappear.

“i’ve got my arms around you,” a quiet laugh escaped him.

“i’m not letting go or anything, either. i’m just… staying here with you.” his thumb continued tracing lazy circles against the blanket as if, somehow, it were your back instead.

he imagined the way your shoulders would’ve relaxed against him if he were actually there, the way you’d eventually melt into his embrace.

he knew you too well.

sure enough, your breathing gradually slowed. jake, being the lovesick fool he was, noticed immediately. his smile only grew.

“and i’m kissing your forehead, a really slow one— because that makes you smile.” he whispered, warmth practically dripping from every word.

“then id kiss your nose.” this time, a small laugh escaped your mouth. “then you’d do the little scrunch afterwards. and then id tease you about it.”

“then I’d kiss you on the nose again, just to watch you do it one more time.”

you couldn’t help but laugh at jake’s words— shaking your head as the pain in your chest was slowly being lifted.

“…and then i kiss your lips.”

his voice softened even more, “if it’s possible. just once.” he paused, thinking thoroughly, ”…actually, probably more than once.”

“…i’ve missed kissing you too much to stop at one.” he shook his head.

your heart squeezed painfully. there was the smallest hitch in your breathing, barely noticeable to anyone else. but not to jake.

“there’s my girl,” he whispered. “i can feel you smiling already.”

you were smiling. you let out a tiny laugh, “…i am.” you admitted, chuckling.

“I always know, pretty.”

there was something almost unfair about how well he understood you. somehow, despite the distance, despite only hearing your voice through a phone speaker, he could still tell exactly what you were feeling.

“you always know how to make me feel better, don’t you?” you asked quietly, wiping away the few salty tears that had escaped despite your best efforts.

jake smiled to himself the second he heard the lightness in your voice. it wasn’t much, but it was enough.

“I try. that’s my job,” he said, laughing softly. “I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make you smile, baby.” his grip around his phone tightened absentmindedly.

“and when i’m finally with you again…” his voice softened into something impossibly fond, “i’m gonna make up for every hug i couldn’t give you.”

“i’m gonna hold you for so long you’re gonna have to start complaining.”

a quiet laugh escaped him. you smiled.

“…although knowing me, even after i let go, i’m probably just gonna pull you right back in again.”

the rest of the day, jake refused to leave your side. if you stood up, he stood up. if you walked into the kitchen— somehow he ended up in the kitchen too.

if you sat on the couch, congratulations, there was now a very clingy australian attached to your side within five seconds. he couldn’t help it.

every few minutes, he’d stop whatever he was doing just to admire you. even if he wasn’t really doing anything— why would he be doing anything when he could be with you?

“what?” you laughed after catching him staring once again. at this point, you’d probably called him out well over ten times already. every time you looked over, his eyes were already on you.

and it wasn’t even noon yet.

“nothing.” he answered far too quickly, lips curling into a sheepish grin that completely gave him away. you narrowed your eyes at him.

“jake.”

“hm?”

“you’ve been staring at me for like…” you glanced over at the little digital clock on the microwave before looking back at him, “five whole minutes.”

“i know.” his answer came so casually that you were slightly taken aback.

“why?”

jake blinked at you for a second, almost as if the answer should’ve been obvious. a smile slowly spread across his face. “…i missed your face.”

“my face?” you questioned, unable of controlling the smile tugging at your own lips.

“mhm.” his head rested lazily against the palm of his hand as he continued looking at you with that same soft expression. “…it’s a really pretty face.”

you let out another laugh, warmth blooming across your cheeks. “that’s your reason?”

“pretty much.” he reached over, carefully tucking a loose strand of hair behind your ear.

he smiled, completely unashamed.

“i’ve been looking at you through a phone screen for weeks.” he said quietly, his eyes never once leaving yours. “do you know how unfair that was?”

“i forgot how pretty you actually are.” he laughed quietly to himself, shaking his head. “actually… no.”his thumb absentmindedly brushed against your cheek.

“i didn’t forget.” his smile only softened. “i just forgot how pretty you are in person.”

he leaned closer until your foreheads were almost touching before pressing the softest kiss against the tip of your nose. he murmured with a lovesick smile, “it’s different now.”

you tilted your head. “how?”

“because now…” his eyes searched yours for a brief moment before his smile grew bigger

“you’re real.”

instead, you wrapped your arms around him again. jake hugged you back immediately, far too tightly.

“baby?”

“hm?”

“i can’t breathe...”

“good.”

“jake!”

“i’m making up for lost time.”

“its only been three weeks…?”

he looked at you, his eyes widening— how did he spend 3 weeks without the love of his life?“exactly.”

“…three whole weeks.”he dramatically buried his face into your neck with the biggest sigh. “…i’m never going on tour again.”

you laughed, running your fingers through his fluffy hair. “yes you are.”

“hm… probably.” he mumbled.

“but until then…” his arms squeezed around you just a little tighter.

“i’m stealing every second i can with you.”

and he meant every word.

if you were close enough, one arm naturally found its way around your waist before either of you even noticed. he’d simply missed you for far too long.

and now that he finally had you back in his arms,

he wasn’t planning on letting go. not anytime soon.

You woke sometime around four. The hospital room was dark, lit only by the thin blue glow of the monitor beside your bed and the faint amber strip of hallway light bleeding in beneath the door. Somewhere down the corridor, a cart wheel squeaked against the linoleum, then faded. The IV line taped to the back of your hand pulled slightly as you shifted, cool against your skin. For a second, you didn't know what had woken you up. Then it hit you all at once.

It wasn't just the nausea this time. All the fear you'd been pushing down for weeks came rushing up at once. It happened so fast you couldn't even brace for it.

Your breath caught in your chest. You tried to breathe in deeper, but your chest felt tight, like something was pressing down on it. Your heart started beating fast, too fast, hard enough that you could feel it in your throat. The thin hospital blanket suddenly felt too heavy across your legs, and the steady, indifferent beep of the monitor beside you seemed to grow louder with every second, keeping time with your racing pulse.

This was panic. You knew that, somewhere in the back of your mind. But knowing what it was didn't make it stop.

Your hands flew up to your chest, pressing hard against the thin cotton of your hospital gown, like you could hold your own heartbeat still if you just pushed hard enough.

"I can't—" The words barely made it past your throat. "I can't do this."

The room felt like it was shrinking around you, the walls pale and close in the dim light, the ceiling tile above you swimming out of focus. No matter how hard you tried to breathe, it never felt like enough air. Your whole body was shaking now, your fingers trembling against your own sternum, and you felt strangely far away from yourself, like you were watching this happen to someone else instead of living it.

"I don't know how," you whispered, and the sentence broke apart before you could finish it.

The chair beside your bed scraped softly against the floor, the sound sharp in the quiet.

"Hey. Look at me." Jungwon was already sitting up, the thin blanket someone had draped over him earlier sliding off his shoulders and pooling at his waist. He was still in yesterday's scrubs, wrinkled from sleeping upright, his hair slightly mussed, but there was nothing slow about him now. His eyes found yours immediately in the dark, and his expression shifted the moment he understood what he was looking at. This was fear.

He didn't hesitate. He rose from the chair, the vinyl creaking faintly under the sudden absence of his weight, and sat carefully on the edge of your bed instead, the mattress dipping slightly beneath him. Then, without asking, he wrapped his arms around you and pulled you gently against his chest.

"I've got you," he said, voice low and steady near your ear, warm breath against your hair. "You're safe. I'm right here."

You froze for a second, unused to being held like this. But his arms stayed steady around you, one hand splayed flat and warm against your back, solid, unmoving, not letting go, and slowly, your body stopped fighting it. You pressed your face against his shoulder, the fabric of his scrub top faintly warm, smelling faintly of hospital detergent and just him. Your hands curled into the fabric at his back, fingers gripping tight, and you let yourself lean into him instead of trying to hold yourself up alone.

"Breathe with me," he murmured, one hand moving in slow, gentle circles between your shoulder blades. "In. Hold it. Now let it go."

You tried. Your breath was shaky and uneven at first, catching every few seconds against a throat still tight with fear, but he stayed patient, breathing loudly and slowly against your ear so you had something to follow. Little by little, your breathing began to match the rhythm of his chest rising and falling beneath your cheek.

"That's it," he said softly. 

You didn't know how long you stayed like that, held against him in the dim room, the monitor beeping quietly beside you, the hallway light flickering faintly under the door, your tears soaking slowly into his shirt while he simply kept his arms around you and let you fall apart without judging you for it. But by the time your breathing finally slowed all the way down, some of the panic had loosened its grip, just enough for you to feel your own body again instead of feeling like a stranger inside it.

"I'm sorry," you whispered eventually, voice hoarse and small in the quiet. 

"You don’t have to apologize for this," he said quietly, still holding you, in no rush to let go, his chin resting lightly against the top of your head. You could hear that in his voice. He wasn't trying to convince you. He was simply offering you something solid to stand on.

Your breath hitched, tears spilling before you could stop them, your whole body still trembling. "It's too much. It's all too much, I don't—"

He just held you a little tighter instead, unsure what else to do with his hands, with everything piling up behind his teeth that he didn't know how to arrange into anything useful.

He felt his own arm stiffen, not from reluctance, but from the same rigid uncertainty he could feel radiating off you. Neither of you knew how to do this. You'd built a child together out of a single stranger's night, and here you both were, awkward and unpracticed, trying to hold each other through a panic attack at four in the morning like people who actually knew how.

He didn't say anything. He'd opened his mouth once, some sentence half-formed behind it, and closed it again without letting it out, like he'd caught himself reaching for something too small, for what this actually was.

You didn't say anything either. You just stayed rigid in his arms, spine not quite relaxing even now, your hands loosely fisted in the fabric of his shirt out of some instinct you didn't examine too closely. Whatever wall you'd built over the past two months didn't come down completely, even here, even shaking.

His hand found the back of your head instead, resting there, careful, uncertain, like he wasn't sure if the gesture would be welcome or if he should pull back. When you didn't flinch away from it, he let his palm settle more fully, fingers loosely threading through your hair, slow and hesitant, a motion that felt more like he was testing the shape of comfort than offering something practiced.

He reached for the blanket next, tugging it up over your shoulder where it had slipped, tucking the edge in with the same careful, deliberate attention he might give a bandage, like the physical task gave him somewhere to put everything he didn't know how to say.

You let him. You didn't lean into it, not fully, some guarded part of you still holding itself apart even as your body slowly stopped trembling in his arms. But you didn't pull away either, and that alone felt like more than either of you had managed with each other before tonight.

He glanced down at you once, his jaw still tight. You caught the look for only a second before you turned your face slightly away, back toward his shoulder, unable to hold his gaze any longer than that.

Neither of you tried again after that. He kept his arms around you, stiff but steady, one hand still resting against your hair, and you kept your hands loosely closed around the fabric of his shirt, neither of you offering the other any words at all.

The room stayed quiet except for the soft, steady beep of the monitor and the faint hum of the hallway lights beyond the door. Two strangers, bound by something neither of you had chosen and neither of you fully understood yet, sitting together in silence because it was the only language either of you seemed to have left to offer.

Eventually, your breathing slowed. His arms didn't loosen, even after he felt you finally drift back toward sleep. He stayed exactly where he was, unmoving, watching the rise and fall of your shoulders in the dim light, saying nothing, because there was nothing he trusted himself to say that wouldn't come out wrong.

He waited until your breathing had gone slow and even, until your grip on his shirt had loosened enough that he was sure you were actually asleep, before he let himself move. He eased you back against the pillows as gently as he could manage. Once you were settled, he didn't go back to the chair. He sat on the edge of the bed instead, close to you, elbows braced on his knees, and pressed the heels of his hands hard against his eyes.

His shoulders started shaking first. He caught it fast, biting down hard against the inside of his cheek, glancing at your sleeping face to make sure the sound hadn't woken you. He got up. He needed to move, needed somewhere to put the thing crawling up his throat, and the room was too full of you. He crossed to the window instead, gripping the edge of the sill, staring out at the dark parking lot below without really seeing it, and let himself finally fall apart the way he hadn't allowed himself to in front of you. 

You almost died.

The thought arrived, brutal and unavoidable now that there was no one left to be strong for. He'd told himself for weeks that respecting your wishes meant staying away. He understood now, standing here with his chest caving in on itself. He pressed his fist against his mouth, breath ragged, shoulders curling forward as he could physically fold around the guilt and contain it.

He couldn't stop thinking about how easily the night could have ended differently. You could have been alone in your apartment, lying on the bathroom floor with no one coming. The thought made his stomach turn. He imagined going to work the next morning, seeing patients, signing charts, complaining about the cafeteria coffee, completely unaware that something had happened to you. Maybe he would've blamed the restless sleep, the strange feeling that something wasn't right, on stress. Maybe he never would've known until someone else called him days later to tell him there was nothing left for him to do. 

The thought settled heavily in his chest. He wasn't sure which part frightened him more. That he could have lost you, or that he might never have realized you were slipping away until it was already over.  His stomach turned violently at the thought. He had to grip the windowsill harder, knuckles going white, to keep himself upright.

He couldn't stop hearing your voice from the night before. It's too much. What stayed with him wasn't the panic. It was the apology. You'd been scared enough that your hands were shaking, and somehow you'd still sounded sorry for needing him. He wondered when that had become your first instinct. Who had made you feel like asking for help was something to apologize for. 

He didn't know much about the life you'd lived before he became a part of it, but he knew it hadn't taught you that people would stay. Somewhere along the way, you'd learned it was easier to carry everything alone than risk leaning on someone who might let go. And the thought that you'd been living like that for so long left an ache in his chest he couldn't quite put into words. 

He hadn't fought for a place beside you. 

He turned back to look at you, small and still beneath the blanket, your face finally peaceful in a way it hadn't been in hours. Something in his chest crack open so completely it nearly buckled his knees.

“I'm sorry," he thought, the words he hadn't been able to say out loud earlier finally surfacing now that there was no one awake to hear them. “I'm so sorry. I should have fought harder. I should have never let you walk out that door.”

Tears finally slipped free without any resistance left to stop them, and let the guilt sit exactly where it belonged, heavy and deserved, in the center of his chest. He didn't go back to the chair for a long while.

.

.

.

You woke to gray, early light pressing thin through the blinds, and for a moment you didn't remember why your body felt so wrung out, then you turned your head and saw him.

Jungwon was sitting in the chair again, back straight. His scrubs were still wrinkled. His eyes looked tired, faintly red rimmed in a way you almost missed, if you hadn't been looking closely. You went still.

"You're awake," he said, and his voice came out oddly formal, like he too had spent the last several minutes rehearsing something neutral to say. 

You pushed yourself up slightly against the pillows, suddenly hyperaware of everything. The IV in your hand. Your voice, still hoarse. The fact that you'd apparently fallen asleep gripping his shirt like it was the only solid thing in the room. "I didn't realize you were still—" You stopped, unsure how to finish that sentence without it sounding like an accusation or a question you weren't ready to ask.

"I said I'd stay," he said simply.

You looked down at your hands instead of at him, picking at the edge of the blanket. "You didn't have to. I mean. You probably have a shift."

"It's fine." His tone stayed even, careful, matching yours in its determined neutrality. 

Neither of you said anything for a moment. The silence sat there between you, thick with everything from a few hours ago that neither of you seemed to know how to acknowledge in daylight. 

"Thank you," you said finally, stiffly, the words feeling too small and too formal for what you actually meant. 

"You don't have to thank me," he said, just as stiff, just as careful, like the two of you had silently agreed to retreat back into safer, more distant territory now that the sun was up.

You nodded, not quite meeting his eyes, and reached instead for the water cup on your tray, mostly to give your hands something to do besides sit uselessly in your lap.

He cleared his throat. "The nurse said you can probably be discharged this afternoon, once your labs come back."

It was strange, you thought, how easily the two of you had slipped back into this. Careful. Distant. Almost businesslike, as though the version of you that had cried into his shoulder for an hour few hours prior belonged to someone who didn't survive contact with morning light. You didn't know how to bridge the gap between the two versions of this. Neither, apparently, did he.

"I should let the nurses know you're up," he said, already rising from the chair, smoothing a hand once over his wrinkled scrubs like it might undo some of the disarray. "I'll be right back."

"Okay," you said again, and watched him go, the door clicking shut softly behind him, and sat there afterward in the quiet, oddly hollow feeling of two people who had been closer than they'd ever been just hours ago, and now didn't quite know how to look at each other in the light.

The hallway outside your room was already busy with the early shuffle of a hospital shift change. A cart rattled past him, pushed by an orderly he vaguely recognized. Somewhere down the corridor, a phone rang twice before someone picked it up. The overhead lights, brighter out here than in your dim room, felt almost aggressive against his tired eyes.

He found the nurses' station and told them you were awake, that your vitals had looked steady through the night, relayed it all in the same clipped, efficient tone he used for every other patient update he'd given a thousand times before. The nurse nodded, made a note, didn't look at him twice. 

He didn't understand what had happened to him last night. He kept turning it over as he walked, trying to find the exact moment it had tipped from concern into something that felt like grief. He passed a window that looked out over the hospital courtyard, sunlight only just beginning to touch the tops of the trees, and stopped there for a moment, hands in his pockets, trying to make sense of himself. 

He didn't know what that meant. He wasn't sure he was ready to know.  He didn't have an answer for what last night had done to him. He only knew that whatever it was, it wasn't going away, and he didn't especially want it to, even if he had no idea yet what he was supposed to do with a feeling this large and this unfamiliar. 

.

.

.

.

He pushed the door open quietly, expecting to find you sitting up the way he'd left you. Instead, he found you hadn't noticed him yet. Your eyes were fixed somewhere past the foot of the bed, and one hand rested against the small curve of your stomach, fingers moving in slow, absent circles. It didn't look deliberate. 

He stopped in the doorway, unwilling to break it.

Your hand stilled the moment you noticed him. The softness in your face folded away almost instantly, the wall sliding back into place.

"Sorry," you said, voice a little rough. "I didn't hear you come back."

"Don't apologize," he said, stepping inside, though part of him wanted to tell you not to stop.

He settled into the chair beside your bed. "The nurse knows you're up. Labs should be back within the hour."

"Okay," you said, reaching for your water again.

Silence settled between you, but this time he didn't let it stretch. He shifted in the chair, cleared his throat, opened his mouth, then closed it again.

"So," he said finally, and immediately regretted the word. Too casual. Too empty for what he actually meant. He tried again. "I thought maybe we should talk. Not about anything specific. I just realized I don't actually know very much about you."

You looked at him, cautious. "Like what?"

He rubbed the back of his neck, clearly improvising now. "Do you— do you live alone?"

"Yes," you said, a little wary of the question.

His expression shifted, subtle but immediate. His jaw tightened, just slightly, and he sat forward a fraction in the chair, like the answer had landed somewhere he hadn't braced for.

"Alone," he repeated. "The whole time? Even through everything the last few weeks?"

"Yes," you said again, more slowly this time, watching him.

"So the night you fainted, in your bedroom—" His voice had gone lower, more careful, but there was an edge underneath it now, tight and controlled. 

"I know," you said, cutting him off before he could finish the thought out loud.

He sat back slightly, dragging a hand down his face, visibly trying to keep whatever was rising in his chest from spilling over into something you hadn't invited. "That's not — I'm not trying to make you feel bad about it. I just." He exhaled hard. "I keep doing the math on how close that actually was, and it doesn't get easier every time I do it."

"I'm aware," you said, quieter now, some of your own guardedness slipping slightly at the rawness in his voice.

"Is there really no one," he pressed, gentler this time, though the worry hadn't left his face. "Family nearby? Anyone who checks in regularly?"

"My mom's a few hours away," you said. "We talk sometimes."

He nodded slowly, letting your words settle. For a long moment, he simply looked at you, his expression growing quieter, more thoughtful, as though pieces he'd never known were missing were finally beginning to fall into place. 

"You shouldn't be alone right now," he said finally, careful, like he was testing how the sentence would land. "Not with how things have been going."

"I've managed alone for a while," you said, old defensiveness rising automatically.

"I know," he said. 

That was one you couldn’t answer right off the bat. You looked at him. The concern was there, present now, naked, evident, not clinical anymore, not measured anymore. You knew, with a tiny, uncomfortable flicker, that this conversation had just quietly become something neither of you had intended it to.

He was quiet for a moment.

"What if you didn't have to manage alone?" he said finally. 

"What does that mean?"

He stopped. You could see war behind his eyes, some inner battle he was losing, and then he just said it.

"Marry me."

The words landed strangely in the quiet room, flat and stiff, nothing at all like anything you'd ever imagined hearing in your life.

You stared at him. "What?"

"I mean—" He seemed to hear himself a beat too late, and his face went slightly pale, though he kept going anyway. "It would make things easier. I could be listed as an emergency contact. I'd have real standing at your appointments. No one would have to guess where I fit into any of this."

Your chest tightened again, the small sense of ease you'd found only moments ago vanishing before you could hold onto it. 

"Because of the baby," you said flatly.

"That's not—" He stopped, but the hesitation itself answered the question before he could finish denying it.

"You're asking me to marry you because I'm pregnant," you said, voice rising, disbelief and hurt tangling together too fast to separate. "That's what this is. You panicked, and the solution your brain landed on was making it official so you can feel better about yourself."

"That's not— I—," he said, though even he seemed to hear how unconvincing it sounded once it was out loud.

"Then what is it?" you demanded. "Because from where I'm sitting, Jungwon, you don't know me. Not really. We've spent maybe a handful of hours together outside of hospital rooms in my entire life. You don't know what I actually eat for breakfast, or what makes me angry, or anything real about who I am. All you know is that I'm carrying your child, and that's apparently enough for you to offer marriage like it's the responsible box to check."

"I don't think of it like that," he said, but his voice had gone quieter, uncertain now, some of his earlier conviction crumbling under the weight of your reaction.

"Then how do you think of it?" Your eyes stung, and you hated it, hated how close this had cut, how much it had dragged up the ghost of another engagement, another ring, another version of yourself who had once believed being chosen and being convenient were the same thing. "Because I already did this once. I already built a life around someone who I thought wanted me, and it turned out I was just familiar. Comfortable. Easy to keep around until something better came along. I am not doing that again. I am not marrying someone because a baby made it the practical thing to do."

"It's not about practical," his voice cracked slightly, rawer than before.

"Then what is it," you said again, quieter now, though the hurt hadn't drained out of your voice.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped like he needed somewhere to put them. "I keep picturing you," he said, low, unsteady. "Alone in that apartment. Crawling to the bathroom in the dark. Collapsing, lying on your bedroom floor. I can't stop picturing it. It's there every time I close my eyes, and I don't know how to make it stop except by being close enough that it doesn't happen again."

"That's not a reason to get married," you said, though the sharp edge in your voice had softened, just slightly.

"I know," he said. "I know it's not. I'm not saying I did this right. I'm saying I don't know how else to ask for what I actually want, which is just—" He stopped, dragged a hand through his hair, tried again, slower this time, like he was forcing himself to say the real thing instead of reaching for the fastest one. 

"I want to take care of you.”

You remained silent for a while. You simply stared at him, something vulnerable and open in his face that hadn't been there even at the worst of last night. There was silence in the room.

"I don't want a marriage built on fear," you said finally, voice low.

"I'm not asking you to build anything," he said. "I'm asking you to let me stay close enough to catch you if you fall. That's all. The rest we can figure out slower. Just— let me take care of you. Please."

Something quieter had taken the place of some of the anger in the room. Sitting between the two of you like something still up for debate, neither fully at peace nor resolved.

You looked down at your hands, twisting the edge of the blanket between your fingers. Part of you wanted to believe him. That part felt small and foolish, though, buried under months of learning the hard way that wanting to believe someone and actually being able to trust them were two very different things.

"You say that now," you said quietly. "But you don't actually know what this looks like yet. The bad days. The nights like last night, over and over, for months. People say things like this at the start. It's easy to mean it when it's still new."

"I know it's easy to say," he admitted. "I know that. But I'm not asking you to just take my word for it. I'm asking for the chance to show you. Let me prove it instead of just promising it."

"And if you can't," you said. "If it turns out to be too much. What happens then?"

He didn't answer right away, and you almost expected that, some old, tired part of you already preparing to hear nothing, the way you always did when you asked a question like that out loud.

"I can't promise you I'll never get tired, or scared, or in over my head. I probably will. But I can promise you I'm not going to disappear the second it gets hard. That's different from promising it'll always be easy."

You didn't respond. Old and familiar, the doubt lingered in your chest, whispering all the reasons why this could still fall apart the way everything else had. Cautious wall faltering under the weight of his obvious sincerity. You didn't say yes. But you didn't say no either, and this time, the silence between you felt less like distance, and more like something slowly, carefully, beginning to bend. 

"If..." He hesitated, and for the first time since you'd met him, he looked genuinely unsure of himself. "If you're okay with it..."

He glanced down at his hands before meeting your eyes again.

"Would you let me be your emergency contact?"

The question hung quietly in the room. You hadn't expected that out of everything. Of all the things he could have asked, it felt like the biggest one yet.

"My emergency contact?" you repeated.

He nodded once, "That's all. Just that."

You looked at him for a long moment, turning the request over in your mind. It was such a small thing, on paper. A name and a phone number on a form. But you understood, watching his face, that it meant something much larger to him than that. It meant being allowed close enough to matter, without asking for anything more than you were ready to give.

"Okay," you said finally, quiet, careful, like you were testing the word before you fully committed to it. "You can be my emergency contact."

There was a slight but noticeable ease in his shoulders, as if he had been holding his breath ever since he asked.

"Okay," he echoed, softer.

He didn't reach for your hand this time. He didn't say anything else about marriage, or moving in, or any of the larger things he'd stumbled through earlier that morning. He just sat there, quiet, and let the small, simple yes settle between you, enough for now.

.

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.

You woke late, sun already high behind the blinds, and lay there for a while before finally dragging yourself upright. Your phone buzzed on the nightstand.

Jungwon: Morning. Don't forget your prenatal vitamin, and try to eat something small before you take it, it'll sit easier.

You glanced at it, thumb hovering for a second, then set the phone back down without answering. You padded into the kitchen instead, filled a glass of water out of habit more than thirst, and stood at the counter for a long moment just staring at nothing, the vitamin bottle sitting closed beside the sink.

Another message came through as you made toast you didn't really want.

Jungwon: Have you eaten anything yet? Even crackers count.

You ate the toast in silence, standing at the counter, phone screen lighting up beside you unanswered.

By early afternoon you'd moved to the couch, a lecture you were supposed to prep for open on your laptop, though you hadn't typed more than a sentence in over an hour. Your phone buzzed again.

Jungwon: Reminder, anti nausea meds are due around now if you haven't taken them. Set an alarm if it helps.

You reached for the bottle on the coffee table, more out of the low hum of nausea in your stomach than the reminder itself, and swallowed the pill with a sip of water gone flat and warm from sitting too long. You didn't text him that you'd done it. You just set the phone back down, screen dimming again in the quiet apartment.

A little later, another message.

Jungwon: You don't have to text back. Just take care of the basics today. Water, small meals, the meds. That's it.

You read it this time, your thumb hovering over the keyboard for a second, something tight rising in your chest. You closed out of the message instead, and went back to staring at the blinking cursor on your laptop screen.

The light outside had gone gray and low by the time your phone buzzed again, more insistent now, closer together than before.

Jungwon: Have you had any water today?

You had. You just hadn't told him. You curled up further into the corner of the couch instead, blanket pulled over your knees, phone screen glowing faintly against the darkening room, unanswered.

Later still, after you'd finally forced down a bowl of plain rice for dinner and taken your evening dose of medication without really thinking about it, another message came through, the tone shifting slightly, less practical now, more uncertain.

Jungwon: I need you to just tell me you took your meds today.

You looked at it for a long time this time, thumb hovering, the small, simple ask sitting there patiently on the screen. You didn't answer. You just turned the phone face down on the cushion beside you and closed your eyes, too tired to explain the silence even to yourself, unaware of how many times, across the city, he'd already checked his phone that day, waiting for three dots that never came.

.

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You didn't mean for it to become a whole week.

It started small, the way most things did lately. One morning you didn't have the energy to type back even a single word, and then it was easier the next day to just not start, because starting meant explaining, and you didn't have an explanation that didn't sound pathetic even inside your own head.

Jungwon: Morning. Vitamin first, then something small to eat, okay?

You read it lying in bed, sun barely up, your body already heavy with the particular exhaustion that had settled into you since you'd come home. Not the sharp, urgent sickness from before. Something duller. Slower. A tiredness that sat in your bones and made even the smallest tasks feel like wading through water.

You did take the vitamin, eventually, hours later, standing at the counter with a piece of dry toast you barely finished. You didn't tell him you had. Some small, tired part of you reasoned it wasn't worth the effort of typing it out. A bigger part of you, one you didn't examine too closely, simply didn't want to.

You weren't angry at him. That would have been easier, in a way, something to justify the silence with. You just didn't know how to be anyone's constant good update right now. Every message he sent asked so little of you, one word, a thumbs up, and still it felt like too much, like reaching across a distance you didn't have the strength to close.

By the third day, you noticed the pattern of his texts without meaning to. Morning. Afternoon. Evening. Steady, patient, never once irritated, never once demanding more than you were willing to give. You should have found that comforting. Some days you did, briefly, before the feeling folded itself back under the same flat exhaustion that colored everything else.

You thought about answering more than once. You'd pick up the phone, thumb hovering over the keyboard, and then set it back down without typing anything at all, because the truth felt too complicated to fit into a single line. I'm okay wasn't quite true. I'm not okay felt too heavy to hand to someone you still weren't sure you fully trusted with it.

By the fifth day, guilt had started creeping in alongside the exhaustion. You knew he was still sending them. You knew, somewhere underneath the fog, that the silence probably worried him, that a man who'd nearly broken down in a hospital chair over your safety wasn't likely to take a week of nothing lightly. You thought about that sometimes, staring at the ceiling at two in the afternoon, your laptop open and untouched beside you.

You just didn't have anything left over to give him. Not this week. You were barely managing to feed yourself, barely managing to take the pills sitting in neat rows on your counter, barely managing to answer your own department's emails with anything more than the minimum required to keep your job intact. Everyone else's worry, however gentle or well meaning, felt like one more weight you didn't have room to carry.

Jungwon: I know you don't want to talk. I'm not going to stop checking in, but I won't push either. Just take care of yourself today. Please.

You read that one late on the seventh night, curled on your side under a blanket that had started to feel more like a shelter than a comfort. Something in it cracked something open in your chest, small and aching. He hadn't given up. He hadn't gotten frustrated, hadn't demanded to know why you'd gone quiet, hadn't threatened to stop trying the way you'd half expected, half braced for.

You held the phone for a long moment, thumb hovering over the keyboard again. You still didn't type anything. You told yourself it was because you didn't know what to say. The more honest answer, the one you weren't ready to sit with yet, was that some old, deeply worn part of you was still waiting to see how long it would actually take for him to stop.

You set the phone down, unanswered, and closed your eyes, telling yourself, the way you always did, that you'd manage this too, quietly, on your own, the way you'd learned to manage everything else.

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.

By the end of the first week, the messages had become something he did without letting himself think about it too hard, the way you brush your teeth or check the time. Morning. Afternoon. Night. Small, careful reminders, sent into a silence that never broke. 

Morning. Vitamin first, then something small to eat, okay?

Just checking on the medication. Let me know if the nausea's worse today.

Did you manage any water?

He'd stopped expecting an answer somewhere around day four. He kept sending them anyway, because the alternative, silence on both ends, felt unbearable in a way he didn't fully understand yet.

He told himself, the first few days, that it was nothing. People got tired. People needed space, especially people who had spent months building walls specifically so they wouldn't have to lean on anyone. He reminded himself of that on repeat, like a script he needed to keep rereading before it would actually sink in.

It didn't stop him from checking his phone every twenty minutes between patients.

Sunoo noticed before he said anything about it. By day five, Jungwon had started keeping his phone on the counter instead of in his pocket, some instinct telling him he needed to see it the instant anything came through, even though nothing ever did.

"You've been doing the thing again," Sunoo said one afternoon, dropping into the chair across from him in the break room, watching him glance at the screen for the third time in two minutes. "Worse than before."

"It's fine," Jungwon said, the same automatic deflection he'd been using for weeks now, though it came out thinner this time, less convincing even to himself.

He didn't tell Sunoo about the silence. He didn't tell anyone. Explaining it out loud would have meant admitting how much it had come to matter, how disproportionately large the absence of a single text felt against everything else in his day, how he'd caught himself, more than once, drafting a message and deleting it three separate times before finally settling on something small enough not to feel like pressure.

By the sixth day, the worry had started to sharpen into something closer to fear. He ran through every version of what the silence could mean, cycling through them at odd hours, in the middle of consults, in the shower, lying awake at midnight staring at the ceiling. Maybe you were simply too exhausted to respond, the nausea and fatigue swallowing whatever energy you had left over for anything beyond survival. He could live with that explanation. He turned to it often, because it let him keep sending the messages without feeling like he was intruding on something you'd already decided to close him out of.

But underneath that explanation sat another one, quieter, uglier, harder to look at directly. Maybe this was simply how you ended things. Not with an argument, not with another version of the walk out that had marked the first day he met you, but with silence. A slow, deliberate fade, easier for you than confrontation, easier than telling him outright that his presence had already reached whatever limit you'd been willing to allow.

He hated how much that thought cost him to consider. He hated more how little control he had over which explanation was true.

On the seventh night, he sat alone in his apartment long after his shift had ended, phone in hand, scrolling back through the unbroken column of his own messages stacked one after another with nothing in between them. Morning check-ins. Afternoon reminders. Night, gentler each time, less about logistics now and more about simply needing some small proof that you were still there, still safe, still willing to let him stay close even in silence.

He typed one more, slower this time, more careful with the words than he'd been all week.

How are you feeling today?

Delete.

I'm starting to worry.

Delete.

Please answer.

Delete.

He thought about showing up. He thought about it every single night that week, standing at his own front door with his keys already in hand, working through every version of the conversation that might follow, and every time, he talked himself back down. You hadn't asked him to stop texting. You also hadn't asked him to come.

He didn't know which fear was worse anymore. That something was genuinely wrong, and he was, once again, the last person to know. Or that nothing was wrong at all, and you had simply, quietly, decided that whatever this was between you had already reached the end of what you were willing to give it.

He didn't have an answer for either. He only knew that the messages would keep going out into the silence the next morning too, faithful and unanswered, because it was still the only thing he knew how to do, and because some stubborn, aching part of him refused to be the one who stopped first.

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It started raining sometime in the early afternoon, the kind of sudden downpour that caught the whole city off guard, gray clouds rolling in fast over a sky that had looked clear just an hour before. You'd noticed it from your office window between office hours, watching students dash across the quad with jackets pulled over their heads, and had made a mental note, vaguely, to grab your umbrella before you left.

You forgot anyway. You always did, lately, your mind too crowded with everything else to hold onto small details like that. Your phone buzzed on the desk while you were packing up your bag.

Jungwon: It's raining pretty hard where I am. Did you bring an umbrella today?

You stared at the message for a moment. The pressure in your chest softened, just enough for you to take a fuller breath.. It wasn't a reminder about vitamins or medication this time. It was just rain. Ordinary, small, almost embarrassingly simple, and somehow that made it land differently than all the careful, practical check-ins from the past week.

You looked out the window again. The rain hadn't let up at all, sheeting steadily against the glass, the quad below emptied except for a few unlucky stragglers making a run for it.

You typed back before you could think too hard about breaking a week of silence over something this small.

No. Forgot it.

The reply came almost instantly, like he'd been waiting, phone already in hand.

Jungwon: Don't walk to your car in that. I can bring you one.

You blinked at the screen, caught off guard by how fast he'd responded, how immediately he'd pivoted into action rather than asking if that was allowed first.

You don't have to do that. I'll just wait it out.

Jungwon: It's not letting up anytime soon. I already checked. I'm fifteen minutes away. I'll leave it at the front desk if you don't want to see me.

You read that last line twice,the words settled more gently than you expected.  He wasn't pushing. He wasn't using the excuse to force his way back into a conversation you'd been avoiding for a week. He was just offering you a dry walk to your car, and quietly making sure you knew he wouldn't make you talk to him if you weren't ready to.

You sat with that for a long moment, thumb hovering over the keyboard.

Okay.

It was such a small word. But it felt, somehow, like the first real thing you'd given him in seven days.

Twelve minutes later, your phone buzzed once more.

Jungwon: Here. Left it at the front desk, told them it's for you. I'm heading back to the hospital, but text me if you need anything else.

You made your way down to the lobby a few minutes later, and there it was, a plain black umbrella waiting at the front desk exactly as promised, no note attached, no lingering, no attempt to turn a small gesture into something bigger than it needed to be.

You picked it up, held it for a moment, the weight of it oddly steadying in your hand.

Outside, the rain was still coming down hard, drumming against the pavement, but you didn't feel quite as unsteady walking out into it as you had all week. You opened the umbrella at the door, and for the first time in days, you found yourself typing out one more message before you could talk yourself out of it.

Thank you.

The reply came almost instantly, like he'd been waiting for exactly that.

Jungwon: Anytime.

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You were halfway across the parking lot, umbrella tilted against the wind, when you heard your name called out from somewhere behind you.

"Since when do you own an umbrella?"

You turned to find Karina jogging toward you under the awning of the building, one arm raised over her head in a futile attempt to shield herself from the rain, her bag clutched against her chest.

"I've always owned an umbrella," you said, though even as you said it, you weren't entirely sure that was true.

"No, you haven't." Karina ducked under the edge of your umbrella once she reached you, shaking rain out of her hair. "I have distinct memories of you running to your car with your jacket over your head like a woman being chased."

"Maybe I finally learned my lesson?"

Karina gave you a look, unconvinced, her eyes drifting down to the umbrella itself, plain, black, clearly not something you'd have picked out on your own if you had actually gone shopping for one. "That's not even your style. You'd have gotten something with a pattern on it. Or forgotten to buy one at all, which is what actually happens."

You didn't answer right away, and something in your silence seemed to catch her attention immediately, her eyes narrowing slightly, sharp and curious in the way they always got when she sensed there was more to something than you were letting on.

"Where'd you get it?" she asked.

"Someone dropped it off," you said carefully, already regretting how vague that sounded the second it left your mouth.

Karina stopped walking entirely.

"Someone," she repeated slowly. "Care to expand on that at all? Because that's a very suspicious amount of nothing, coming from you."

"It's not a big deal," you said, which only made it worse, judging by the way her eyebrows shot up.

"You've been weirdly quiet all week," she said, falling into step beside you again, half under the umbrella, half getting rained on. "You didn't answer any of my texts either, by the way, thank you for that. And now suddenly, someone delivering umbrellas to your building. That is, historically speaking, not nothing."

You felt your face heat, unsure how much you were even ready to explain, since explaining the umbrella meant explaining who, and explaining who meant unraveling a much bigger conversation you hadn't found the right moment for yet. You hadn't told her about Jungwon. Karina knew you were pregnant. Karina didn't know the father had a name, a face, or a habit of texting you three times a day, whether you answered or not.

"It's someone I know," you said finally, careful, deliberately vague. "It's complicated."

"Complicated how?" Karina asked, practically vibrating now with barely restrained curiosity. "Complicated like a coworker, or—" She gasped, "Oh my God, is this your baby daddy complicated?"

You didn't answer fast enough, and the silence gave you away completely.

"Oh my god," Karina said again, quieter this time, stopping in her tracks entirely, ignoring the rain now soaking steadily into her shoulder. "You found him? You actually found him?"

"It's not—" You exhaled, feeling suddenly cornered, unprepared for this conversation in the middle of a parking lot in the rain. "It's a long story. I'll tell you properly. Just not right now, okay?"

Karina studied you for a long moment, something softening in her expression despite the obvious explosion of questions clearly still queued up behind her eyes. "Okay," she said finally, gentler now. "But you're telling me everything soon. And I want to know why he's dropping off umbrellas instead of, I don't know, being a complete disaster about all of this, which is what I assumed happened, since you never brought him up."

"It's not simple," you admitted quietly.

"Nothing about this has been simple," Karina said, bumping her shoulder lightly against yours as you both hurried the rest of the way to your car. "Doesn't mean you get to keep it from me forever, though."

You didn't argue with that. You just held the umbrella a little more carefully over both your heads for the rest of the walk, quietly wondering how much longer you could keep holding this part of yourself back before it found its way out anyway. 

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.

"...so if her potassium continues to—" 

He was mid sentence with a resident, reviewing a chart at the nurses' station, when his phone buzzed against his hip.

He almost didn't check it right away. He'd trained himself, over the last week, not to react every single time, not to let his whole day hinge on a screen that so rarely had anything on it. But some instinct made him glance down anyway, quick, automatic, the way it always did now.

You: No. Forgot it.

He stopped talking mid sentence.

The resident beside him trailed off too, following his gaze, clearly confused by whatever had just happened to the attending physician who'd been perfectly composed a second ago. Jungwon didn't notice. He was too busy staring at two words on a screen like they were the most significant sentence he'd read in his entire career.

You'd answered him like the week of silence had simply never happened at all. His thumb was already moving before he'd fully processed the rest of it, typing out a reply so fast he had to backspace twice to fix the typos.

Don't walk to your car in that. I can bring you one.

He hit send and immediately felt the lurch in his chest,  ruined the fragile thread the second it appeared by reaching for too much too quickly. He stared at the screen, waiting.

You: You don't have to do that. I'll just wait it out.

He exhaled a breath he was unaware he was holding, unadulterated joy coursing through his chest so quickly it made him feel a little ashamed. You were conversing with him. Talking to him about something as trivial and unremarkable as rain felt disproportionately, almost ridiculously, huge after seven days of nothing.

"Dr. Yang?" The resident was looking at him carefully now, no doubt wondering why he'd gone still and slightly wide-eyed over his phone in the middle of a chart review.

"One second," Jungwon said, already typing again, unable to stop himself.

It's not letting up anytime soon, I already checked. I'm fifteen minutes away. I'll leave it at the front desk if you don't want to see me.

He sent it and immediately started calculating logistics in his head, whether he could actually get away for fifteen minutes, whether there was an umbrella in his car or if he'd need to buy one on the way, whether this counted as pushing too hard even though you were the one who'd started the exchange this time.

You: Okay.

He nearly laughed out loud, right there at the nurses' station, the small syllable landing in his chest like something enormous. He caught himself before it actually happened, though the grin that broke across his face was harder to suppress, wide and a little disbelieving, entirely out of place for a man reviewing lab values two minutes ago.

"You're smiling."  Sunoo said, appearing seemingly out of nowhere with his usual impeccable timing, coffee in hand, eyebrows already raised at whatever expression Jungwon was currently failing to hide.

"What?" Jungwon said, not looking up from his phone, already grabbing his coat off the back of a chair.

"That face," Sunoo said, gesturing vaguely at him. "That's not the face of a man reviewing bloodwork."

"I have to go run an errand," Jungwon said, already halfway down the hall, phone still in hand, the grin refusing to fully leave his face no matter how hard he tried to smooth it back into something professional.

"An errand," Sunoo called after him, clearly delighted, clearly not buying it for a second. "Sure. Good luck with your errand, Dr. Yang."

Jungwon didn't answer. He was already out the door, umbrella purchased in record time from the gift shop downstairs, driving faster than strictly necessary toward a building where a woman who had gone silent on him for seven straight days.

He didn't stop to question why something so small could leave him feeling this much lighter. He simply let himself hold on to it for the rest of the drive. 

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.

You reached your car a few minutes after leaving the lobby, umbrella still in hand, rain drumming against the fabric above you. The campus lot had mostly emptied. You were fumbling for your keys when something made you glance up.

He was there.

Near the building entrance, still in his white coat, no umbrella of his own, rain soaking into his shoulders. He wasn't moving toward you. Just standing there, hands in his pockets, watching from a distance, he'd clearly decided not to close.

Your breath caught.

He'd said he was heading back to the hospital. Instead, here he was, soaked, keeping his distance like he understood that showing up any closer would have been too much after a week of silence.

You crossed the lot toward him instead of getting into your car.

His eyes went wide. He took an abrupt half-step back. "You don't— I mean, you can go. I was just making sure—."

"You're standing in the rain," you said, tilting the umbrella over him, misjudging the angle so water sluiced off the edge onto his shoulder anyway. You adjusted it a little clumsily.

"I have a coat," he said, which was not, you both seemed to realize, a functional defense against rain.

"It's soaked through."

"It's fine." He shifted his weight, hands coming out of his pockets and going right back in. Neither of you said anything for a beat, both standing too close under an umbrella meant for one person.

"You bought an umbrella," you said finally. "In fifteen minutes."

"It seemed important at the time," he said and immediately looked like he regretted the phrasing, ears going faintly pink.

You bit back a smile. "Thank you," you said, quieter now. 

"You don't have to thank me. I told you I wasn't going anywhere."

The rain kept falling around the narrow, awkward shelter of the umbrella. "I should go," you said, though you didn't move.

"Yeah," he agreed, though he didn't either.

"You could walk me to my car," you offered. "Since we're already—" You gestured at the rain, the umbrella, the whole situation.

"Okay," he said, too fast.

Less than thirty seconds passed during the walk. You were both a little too conscious of how close the umbrella made you stand, so neither of you said anything more. He took a quick step back as soon as you got to your car, the rain immediately seeping back into his shoulder.

"Text me when you get home," he said.

"I will," you said, and this time, you meant it.

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.

.

.

.

.

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.