#tsbu3

You set down the scraper. Looked at the crack. Didn't pick it back up.

It was the third attempt this morning and it was barely six AM and the bakery was empty and quiet — just you and the low hum of the ovens and the specific, terrible stillness of a space that was waiting for the day to start while you were still somewhere inside a night that hadn't ended yet.

You had driven here straight from the house.

Not because you had planned to. Not because there was work that couldn't wait — there was work, there was always work, the event was in eight days and the centerpiece still wasn't right and the wedding catering brief was due by Friday, but that wasn't why you were here at six in the morning with flour on your wrists and your eyes still raw from crying alone in a living room while your husband walked out the door.

You were here because the alternative was going back upstairs. Back to the room that still smelled like him — his cologne, the warmth of him, the specific combination that had meant home to you for ten years — and lying down on sheets that were cold on his side, in a house where Jungkook was asleep down the hall, oblivious and snoring, and Jin was somewhere in the city with his armor back on getting ready to stand in front of cameras and perform like four in the morning hadn't happened.

Like the living room floor hadn't happened. Like he hadn't said there's everything to fix and then walked out the door and left you standing alone in the dark with all of it.

He had given you his entire broken heart and then left.

And you weren't angry. That was the thing — you kept waiting to feel angry, kept looking for it the way you'd look for a light switch in a dark room, because angry would have been easier. Angry would have given you something to do with your hands. But it wasn't there. There was just the grief of it, sitting in you like something waterlogged and heavy, and the quiet, and the particular loneliness of being the person someone loves completely and still leaves.

So you had come here.

And you had started the isomalt because your hands needed something and because the centerpiece still needed to be right and because you had spent your entire adult life solving things you could solve when the things you couldn't were too large to look at directly.

And it had cracked three times more.

You looked at it now — the clean line down the middle, the two halves sitting slightly apart, the thing that was supposed to be beautiful broken on the marble in the grey early light — and something settled in you. Something that was not defeat exactly, and not peace exactly, but something in between. Something that felt like finally seeing what had been in front of you the whole time.

Maybe I've been trying to fix the wrong thing.

Not the isomalt. Not even the centerpiece.

The whole approach — the picking up and trying again, the adjusting the temperature, the telling yourself that this time if you just got it right, if you just controlled the variables carefully enough, it would hold. You had been standing here for hours doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, and the truth, the actual truth, was that some things didn't crack because the technique was wrong. Some things cracked because they needed something different entirely. Because what you were asking them to hold was more than they were built for. Because you couldn't fix something back into a shape it had already left.

Some things you couldn't fix by trying harder.

Some things needed to be broken down completely and started from nothing.

You looked at the cracked isomalt on the marble for a long moment.

And then you looked past it.

When did we break? you thought. When did the space start? There must have been a beginning. A first thing. If I can find the first thing maybe I can find the way back to before it.

You stood in your empty bakery in the early morning quiet and you went looking.

You went all the way back.

The house.

Technically, your house now, even if half of it still looked like a moving company had lost an argument with it — smelled like fresh paint and cardboard and the candles you'd been burning for two weeks trying to make it feel like home before it was ready to feel like home.

There were still boxes in the hallway.

Not many — you'd been working through them slowly, weekends and late evenings when Jin was home and you'd put on music and unpacked things together and argued about where the books should go, which was the most married-people thing you had ever done without technically being married, which your mothers had both noticed and expressed opinions about.

His mother over tea, delicate and pointed.

Yours more directly, over the phone, on a Tuesday. When is Seokjin going to finally propose to you?, she had said, which had made you roll your eyes so hard you'd had to sit down.

It made sense, moving in together. You had been together for almost six years, you were both in your thirties, the new house was big enough and living together was practical and also the truth was that you had been sleeping at each other's places in alternating rotation for the last four years and the moving in had mostly just been admitting what was already true.

Your parents knew this. They had accepted it. They had also, separately, expressed their feelings about the natural next step, which both of you had been nodding along to while privately knowing that the natural next step would happen when Jin's career allowed it, which was not a romantic way to think about your future but was an honest one, and you had made your peace with honesty a long time ago.

When we feel ready, you said to your mother, and to his, and to your brothers, and to every cousin who asked.

It was not entirely a lie.

You both did need to feel ready. But underneath that — underneath the practical truth of it — was the other truth, the quieter one, that readiness in your life together had never really been about feelings. It had been about windows. About the tour ending, the album cycle finishing, the schedule clearing enough that something personal could exist in the space it left behind. You had gotten very good at finding those windows. You had gotten so good at it that you had almost stopped noticing that you were doing it.

Almost.

It was June. Beautiful, warm, the kind of early summer evening that made Seoul feel generous, light still in the sky past eight o'clock. You were in the kitchen — the kitchen that was fully unpacked because the kitchen was always unpacked first, always, because that was where you both lived — when you heard him hit the keypad in the door.

You heard him come in.

You heard him stop.

Not the usual stop — not the coat coming off, the keys in the bowl, the particular sound of him arriving and settling into the space the way he always did, easy and immediate, like the house exhaled when he walked in.

This was different. This was a stop.

You looked up.

He was standing at the end of the hallway, still in his jacket, one of the moving boxes beside him that hadn't been there this morning — he'd moved it, sometime in the last thirty seconds, without thinking, something to do with his hands — and his expression was the one you didn't have a name for yet.

Not the camera face. Not the face he gave interviews or variety shows or even the members when something was wrong. Not the real face you got at two in the morning when the guard was fully down. Something else entirely. Something you had never seen before, that looked like a man who had been carrying something for a very long time and whose arms had simply given out.

"Hi," you said.

"Hi," he said.

He didn't move.

"Are you okay?" you said.

"I've been thinking," he said.

And then he stopped. Laughed — short, slightly wrecked, the laugh of someone whose rehearsal had just completely deserted them — and pressed his hand over his eyes.

"I practiced this," he said, to his palm. "I've been practicing this for months. I had a speech. A whole speech. Namjoon helped me with some of it, which — he cried when I read it to him, which I thought was a good sign—"

"Namjoon cried?"

"He said he was allergic to the sentiment. He wasn't." He lowered his hand. Looked at you down the hallway, past the boxes, past the half-renovated wall that the contractors were supposed to finish in August, and his eyes were bright in a way that was doing something to your chest. "I had a plan," he said. "I had a whole plan. I was going to rent a venue—"

"Seokjin—"

"You said once — you said once that you wanted something big. The whole thing. You were very specific about it. You said theme park."

"You were the one who said theme park," you said. "You were drunk. You said you were going to rent all of Lotte World."

Something crossed his face. Something that was almost a smile and also, underneath it, wasn't. "I was going to," he said, quietly. "I was going to do it exactly like that. I had it planned out. The whole thing. I even looked into what it would cost to—" he stopped. Exhaled. "And then I thought about the cameras. About someone with a phone getting close enough to photograph us. About what happens if the wrong person sees, if it ends up somewhere, if—" he shook his head. "And I couldn't. I couldn't give you that. I couldn't give you the theme park or the big venue or the proposal that gets photographed and shared and — I couldn't give you the thing that everyone else gets to have, and I kept thinking, I'll find another way, I'll find something that works, and I have been thinking that for a year and I—"

His voice caught.

Just slightly. Just for a second. You had known him for ten years and dated him for six and you had heard his voice do a lot of things and this specific catch — the one that happened when he was feeling something he hadn't decided to feel yet — you knew it the way you knew the sound of his footsteps at the door.

"I've been carrying this ring in my pocket for a year," he said. His hand went to his jacket pocket. Stayed there. "I bought it in Vegas. We were on tour. I went with Yoongi and Jungkook and Jimin and they helped me choose it and they were—" he exhaled through a small, helpless laugh — "so embarrassing about it. Jimin cried. In the store. He said the lighting got to him."

"It always gets to him," you said, because your throat was doing something and you needed a second.

"The point is," he said, and his hand came out of his pocket, and there it was — small, simple, the kind of ring that meant someone had paid attention not to a magazine or a trend but to you, to the specific person you were, and you felt the sight of it somewhere below your ribs — "I have been waiting for the right moment for a year. And I've been waiting for the right life for longer than that. And I think—" he looked at you across the hallway, past the boxes, his jacket still on, his shoes still on, the house still half-finished around him — "I think there is no right moment. I think there is never going to be a right moment because our life doesn't have those and I have been asking it to have something it can't give me."

He walked toward you.

He stopped when he was close enough that you could see exactly how nervous he was — the slight tension in his jaw, the way he was holding himself very carefully, like something would spill if he moved too fast.

His hands were shaking slightly.

"I watched myself announce today that we're going on hiatus," he said. "I sat there in our old dorm with the members, in front of that camera and I said the thing and I smiled the way I smile and I—" his jaw worked — "and all I could think, the entire time, was: I have not asked her yet. I have been in love with this woman for fifteen years and I have not asked her yet." He looked at you steadily. "I fell in love with you the second you asked me what I wanted for lunch. That first Tuesday. You didn't even look up from your order pad." He shook his head, something between a laugh and a confession. "I spent the next five years trying very hard to pretend I hadn't, because admitting that I fell in love with someone over a lunch order felt like information that should not leave my body. And then I stopped pretending. And it has been fifteen years and I am still — every single day — more certain than I was the day before."

"Seokjin," you said. Your voice was not steady at all.

"We have a mortgage together," he said.

You blinked. "We do."

"I know." He reached into his jacket pocket. "AND YET."

He got down on one knee.

Right there. In the hallway. With his shoes on and boxes stacked against the wall and the unfinished plaster behind you and the evening light coming through the kitchen at that specific gold angle, and he was looking up at you with the ring in his hand and his eyes were very bright and his hands were still shaking and he was the most ridiculous, most wonderful, most entirely himself person you had ever known.

"I want the paperwork," he said. "I want your name next to mine on everything — the house, the accounts, all of it, every single thing I have is already yours, I just want the legal documentation to confirm what has been true for ten years." He exhaled. "I want to leave in December knowing you are my wife. I want to come back to my wife. I want you to have every protection, every right, everything — while I'm gone and when I'm back and for the rest of our lives." His voice softened. "And I want it because I love you. Not because of the paperwork. The paperwork is just — the paperwork is how I make sure the whole world knows you're mine even when I can't say it out loud."

You were crying. You hadn't decided to cry. It had simply happened.

"You would make me," he said, "the happiest, luckiest, and objectively handsomest man on this earth — already the handsomest, that's established, that's a fact — if you would do me the honor of becoming my wife." He paused. "Please. I'm on one knee and this floor is not as forgiving as it looks."

You laughed. A real laugh, a surprised one, the kind that came out before you could catch it, and then you were crying and laughing at the same time and he was looking up at you with that face — the real one, the underneath one, the one that was just him, just Seokjin, completely undone and completely certain — and you crossed the hallway and took his face in your hands.

"Get up," you said.

"Is that a—"

"Yes," you said. "Obviously yes. Get up. Come here."

He got up.

He kissed you in the hallway, shoes on, ring in hand, boxes all around you, and you were so completely, entirely happy that the happiness felt like something physical — like it had weight and warmth and took up all the available space.

He put the ring on your finger. His hands had stopped shaking.

It fit perfectly. Of course it fit perfectly — he had known your hands for ten years, had held them enough times to know them without looking, and he had apparently described them in enough detail in a Las Vegas jewelry store that four grown men had managed to find the exact size without you there. Gold band, because you had never once in your entire life worn a silver accessory, not a single one, and he knew this the way he knew everything about you — not because you had made a point of telling him but because he had been paying attention for fifteen years. And at the center of it, a pink diamond, soft and warm and the exact shade that made your chest do something you couldn't name, surrounded by a small crown of white diamonds that caught the evening light coming through the kitchen window and threw it in every direction.

You didn't want to think about what it cost.

You thought about it anyway, briefly, and then set it aside, because the price of it was not the point and he would tell you the price was not the point and you both knew the price was not the point.

The point was that it was beautiful. That it was exactly what you would have picked for yourself — had dreamed of picking for yourself, actually, since you were a girl with opinions about jewelry and a very clear internal picture of the ring you would someday wear. The point was that he had walked into a store in Las Vegas with Yoongi and Jungkook and Jimin and between the four of them, somehow, they had found the exact thing. Not similar to it. Not close. The thing itself.

Not only did he love you.

He knew you.

They all did.

Your eyes were already stinging before you'd fully processed that thought, because there was something about it — about all four of them standing in a jewelry store being collectively, embarrassingly invested in getting this right — that undid you in a way that the ring itself almost didn't. He loved you. And the people he loved most in the world had stood in a store and cried about the lighting and argued about settings and helped him choose something that proved it.

That was the whole thing, really.

That was all of it.

And underneath it — you think now, in the bakery, in the early morning quiet, the isomalt still cracked on the marble — underneath all of that happiness, already, so quietly I didn't even feel it happening:

The ghost of the theme park.

The version of that moment that existed in a life slightly different from yours — where someone could have photographed it, where you could have posted the ring with his name, where your mother could have called her friends and your father could have told the whole restaurant and your brothers could have shared it and it would have just been a thing that happened, a normal, visible, joyful thing that everyone who loved you got to be part of.

You would never have that.

You had known this before you said yes. You had known it when you said yes. You had said yes anyway, completely, without hesitation, without regret.

But standing in this kitchen now — three years and a space you can't name and a husband somewhere in the city putting his armor back on — you finally let yourself feel the full shape of it.

Not the theme park.

Not even the proposal.

The version of your life where love didn't have to hide.

Where it got to be loud.

You had set it down so quietly. So willingly. With so much love.

You had been so happy you had almost not felt the weight of it.

Almost.

You stood at the prep station and the isomalt sat cracked on the marble and you thought: that's where it started. Not the space — the space came later. But the first thing we set down — that was in a hallway, four years ago, still in his shoes, a ring in his hand and the theme park already somewhere behind us that we'd never go back for.

And you had been so happy.

You had genuinely been so happy.

And still, underneath it, the very first thing you had given up was already given up.

And you had never once said so.

You reached for the scraper.

Started again.

The wedding was on a Saturday in October, two months before he enlisted.

You had planned it in six weeks. Not because you wanted to — you had dreamed about a wedding your whole life, had grown up watching your brothers get married in big, loud, beautiful ceremonies with three hundred people and full banquet tables and every cousin you had ever met crying in the front row. You had wanted that. You had both wanted that, in the abstract, in the version of your life where the math worked differently.

The math did not work differently.

So you planned it in six weeks, in a private venue forty minutes outside the city, on a guest list of thirty-two people that had required more painful editing than anything you had ever done. Not even all of your family could come — no aunts, no uncles, no cousins, none of the sprawling warm chaos of the people who had raised you. Just your parents. Your three brothers and their wives. Jin's parents. His brother and sister-in-law. Sooah, Minji. The members. A handful of people from the company.

No children. Your brothers and his had decided this together, quietly, practically — the kids were too young to understand why they couldn't tell anyone, and a child who couldn't keep a secret at a secret wedding was a problem nobody needed. You had agreed. You had smiled and said of course, it makes sense, it's fine.

You had not told anyone that you had imagined your nieces as flower girls since they were born.

You set that down too. You were getting good at it by then.

The venue was beautiful. That was the thing — it was genuinely, completely beautiful, small and warm and full of flowers you had chosen yourself, the kind of place that felt intentional rather than reduced, like you had chosen this on purpose rather than arrived here through a series of things you couldn't have.

The members had shown up early and collectively stressed about everything, which had mostly expressed itself as Jimin crying before the ceremony even started, Taehyung telling him to stop which made Taehyung also cry, and Yoongi standing in the corner watching both of them with the expression of a man who was absolutely not going to cry and was doing so with great effort.

Namjoon had written something to read. He had practiced it so many times he had it memorized, and he stood up there and said it with his whole chest, and by the end of it your father was crying and Jin's mother was crying and even the company representative was blinking more than usual.

Jungkook had cried openly and without apology. He had decided early that this was an acceptable thing to do and had committed to it completely. You had loved him for it.

You walked toward Jin and his face did the thing.

Something that was him, stripped of every single layer, looking at you walking toward him in this small perfect venue forty minutes outside the city with thirty-two people watching, and his eyes went wet immediately, and he didn't bother to hide it, and you thought: whatever we had to set down to get here, it was worth it. It was worth every single thing.

You still believe that.

Standing at your prep station at six in the morning with cracked isomalt on the marble, you still believe it.

But you are also, finally, letting yourself ask: what did it cost?

You had stepped outside to take a call.

Ten minutes, maybe. Your boss at the restaurant, something that couldn't wait, the specific bad timing of a business that did not know you were getting married today. You had slipped out through a side door, phone to your ear, still in your dress, and you were standing in the small garden at the side of the venue when you heard the commotion at the front.

You didn't understand it at first. Just voices — raised, unfamiliar, the sound of something not going the way it was supposed to. You ended the call and moved toward it, and then you came around the corner and there he was.

Junho.

Your ex-boyfriend from high school and a handful of months into your first year of university — a relationship you had ended cleanly, eight years ago now, eight years of you living your entire life while he had apparently never fully accepted that the version of himself that existed in relation to you had stopped being relevant the day you walked away.

He was standing at the gate in his regular clothes, arguing with two men from the security team with the energy of someone whose script hadn't accounted for other people having lines. You stood there and ran through the questions in the order they arrived — how did he find the venue, how did he know today was the day, what version of himself did he decide to be this morning — and underneath all of them, quieter, the one that actually mattered: eight years. He had eight years to accept it. And he is at my wedding.

He saw you.

"I just need five minutes," he said. Not to the security. To you. "Five minutes, I just need to—"

"No," you said.

"Please—"

"No," you said again, and your voice came out steadier than you felt, and then someone was beside you — one of the members, you didn't even look to see who, a hand on your arm — and two men from the company were moving Junho away from the gate, firmly, not cruelly, and he was saying something that you stopped listening to because you turned and went back inside.

You stood in the small anteroom just inside the door and took three slow breaths.

And then you heard it — behind you, low, from one of the members talking to another, not meant for you to hear:

"—could have been seen. He almost came out. You know he almost came out."

"I know."

"If he'd been photographed—"

"I know. I know. It's fine. It's handled."

You stood very still.

You had known, in the moment, that Jin was inside. That he would have heard the commotion. That his instinct — his immediate, complete, entirely predictable instinct — would have been to come out. To stand between you and whatever was happening at the gate. To be your husband in the most visible way possible.

And someone had stopped him.

Not cruelly. Not wrongly — you understood why, you had always understood why, the logic of it was exactly the logic you had agreed to when you agreed to all of this. A photo of BTS Jin at a secret wedding, at a gate, confronting an unknown man, would have been a disaster. A photo of him and you together on your wedding day would have been the end of the careful thing you had built.

He had had to stay inside.

He had had to stand in a venue forty minutes outside the city and listen to something happening to his wife at the gate and stay inside and trust that the company's security would handle it.

And the first thing one of the members said after was not are you okay or is she okay but he almost came out, he could have been seen.

You had gone back to the ceremony. You had married him. You had been so happy.

And you had never, once, said to him: I know you wanted to come outside. I know you couldn't. I know what that cost you. I know what it cost both of us.

You had set that down too.

The honeymoon was a weekend in the mountains.

It was the only thing that made sense — Jin couldn't leave the country, not this close to his enlistment date, not with the paperwork and the restrictions and the specific bureaucratic reality of the situation — so you had packed a bag and driven three hours to a house that belonged to his family, tucked into the countryside in a way that made Seoul feel very far away and very small.

There was a strawberry farm.

An actual strawberry farm, right there, attached to the property, and you had spent a whole morning walking through it in wellies that didn't quite fit while he trailed behind you eating strawberries directly off the plants with the complete lack of remorse of someone who considered this a personal right.

It was not France. It was not the Maldives.

It was not Universal Studios in Orlando, which you had both talked about with the specific longing of two enormous nerds who had never quite outgrown the part of themselves that wanted to run toward a theme park holding hands — but it was quiet, and green, and the house had a kitchen with a window that looked out over the mountains, and you had cooked for him for the first time in a space that was neither yours nor his but somehow felt like both.

For an entire weekend, you called each other husband and wife every chance you got.

Every single chance. Completely without shame. Husband, can you pass the salt. Wife, I think it's your turn to make the coffee. Husband. Wife. Mine. You said it over breakfast and over dinner and standing in a strawberry field and lying in bed at night listening to the countryside be quiet around you, and it was so ridiculous and so wholesome and so entirely you that by Sunday evening you had both said it so many times it had started to feel like breathing — just the word, just the fact of it, the simple staggering reality that you were each other's.

It wasn't France.

But he was yours for a whole uninterrupted weekend, no schedule, no cameras, no anything, just him and you and a strawberry farm and the mountains, and when you drove back to the city on Sunday night his hand was over yours on the center console the whole way and neither of you talked much and you didn't need to.

You think about that weekend now. How full it was. How enough it was.

You also think about France.

You had never said: I am so happy with the strawberry farm and I also wanted France.

And you should have.

Not because it would have changed anything — it wouldn't have, there was no version of that conversation that produced a honeymoon in Paris — but because saying it would have been honest, and you had spent a long time curating your honesty around him, keeping only the parts that were useful and setting the rest down somewhere he couldn't see it.

The bakery came eleven days after you got back.

He told you he was taking you somewhere. He wouldn't say where, deflecting every question with increasing smugness, and you watched Seoul go past the window and told yourself to be patient and failed at it, and he talked about nothing in particular the whole drive — just talking, easy, the warm familiar sound of him filling the car — and then he stopped outside a building in a neighborhood you loved.

You had mentioned it to him once. That you loved the light here, the way it came through at a specific angle in the late afternoon. A single passing comment in a conversation about something else entirely, months ago.

He had remembered.

Of course he had remembered.

The windows had balloons. Soft pink, pastel — the exact shade you had told him was your favorite in a conversation so casual you had barely registered having it, about colors, about nothing, about everything he quietly filed away without ever indicating he was filing. Inside, before he could say anything, you walked.

The kitchen first.

Always the kitchen — but this one, this one, was the kitchen from your head. Not similar to it. Not inspired by it. The actual kitchen, the exact proportions, the counters at the precise height that meant you could work for twelve hours without your back protesting, the ovens already installed and already the right kind, the shelving built the way you had once described shelving to him at midnight when neither of you could sleep and you had been talking about nothing and apparently he had been storing everything. The prep station. The pass-through window into what would be the front of house. The light — south-facing, full in the afternoons, the kind of light that made everything look like it was worth making.

You had described this kitchen to him across six years of conversations. Not all at once, not as a plan — in pieces, in passing, the way you talked about things you wanted so much you were almost afraid to want them directly. Someday I want a kitchen where I can actually move. Someday I want to make things that don't exist yet. Someday I want something that's mine. Not a blueprint. Just the language of a dream that had been living in you since you were twelve years old watching your family cook in their restaurant and thinking: I love this and I also want something different. Something mine.

You had spent four years working as a pastry assistant chef at a hotel restaurant with a Michelin star and a head chef who was one of the best in the city and also one of the most miserable human beings you had ever encountered, a man who had perfected the specific art of making talented women feel like they were lucky to be allowed in the building. You had learned from him and resented him and stayed longer than you should have because the credential mattered and because you were stubborn, and you had come home from shifts and told Jin about it and Jin had listened — had always listened, had never once told you to quit or stay or do anything at all except be heard — and somewhere in all of those conversations he had been building this.

Not because he felt guilty about the honeymoon.

Not because he was leaving in six weeks.

Because he loved you. That was all. That was the whole of it — he loved you and you had wanted something and he had paid attention and built it, the way he built everything he cared about, quietly and completely and without announcement.

You stood in the middle of your kitchen for a long time.

When you turned around he was by the door, hands in his pockets, watching your face with an expression he was trying very hard to make casual and failing completely.

"I know it's not Paris," he said.

"Seokjin—"

"I know it's not the honeymoon we—" he stopped. "I know I'm leaving and I know the timing is—" another stop. He looked at you steadily. "I just wanted to give you something that was yours. That couldn't be taken away. That was there when I was gone." A pause. "That was there when I came back."

You crossed the kitchen.

You took his face in your hands.

"It's ours," you said.

"Yours," he said.

"Ours," you said, and kissed him before he could argue, and he laughed into it and held you in the middle of the kitchen — the biggest room, the one he'd built first because he knew you — while outside the pink balloons pressed against the glass and the afternoon light came through at exactly the angle you had always wanted.

You were so happy.

You held onto that. The happiness was real and whole and entirely true.

But standing at your prep station now, years later, with the cracked isomalt on the marble, you let yourself ask the question you had never asked out loud, not once, in all the years since:

He is so good at making everyone around him happy. His members, his family, his fans — you. Always you.

But is he happy?

Has he ever, even once, put his own happiness first?

Have you ever made sure he did?

You looked at the cracked sugar.

You looked at the bakery he had built you, the kitchen that was exactly right, every detail assembled from years of you talking and him listening.

When did I stop listening back?

The question sat in the empty kitchen and you didn't have an answer for it and the isomalt was still cracked on the marble and somewhere in the city your husband was getting ready to go to practice and you were standing here in the thing he built for you, realizing that you had no idea how long he had been the one holding the door open while you walked through.

Seven thirty.

You looked at the clock on the wall and felt the number land like something physical. Cameron would be here in thirty minutes. The isomalt was still cracked on the marble. The kitchen smelled like butter and sugar and the particular quiet of early morning, and you had been standing here for — you didn't know how long. Long enough to have gone back through the proposal and the wedding and the strawberry farm and the bakery and all the small, quiet, accumulated things you had both set down without saying you were setting them down.

You had been looking for the moment. The place where the crack started.

And you had been circling it this whole time without letting yourself land on it, the way you circled things that were too large to look at directly, the way you had been circling it for three years.

For the first time in almost three years, you were ready to look at it.

The thing that broke you both.

He had been a year into his service.

He was, unsurprisingly, doing well. Because that was who Kim Seokjin was — someone who looked at hard things the way other people looked at weather, as simply part of the condition of being alive, as something you moved through rather than argued with. He called when he could. He was funny on the calls, warm, present in the specific way he was always present even across distance. He said he was fine. Happy, even. I have everything I want, he said. My members, a beautiful wife, and yes, this whole thing is difficult, but the good thing about difficult things is that they end.

You knew the other members were not doing as well. You knew because the last time they had all been at your house — a leave that had overlapped, a miracle of scheduling — they had gotten so drunk that every single one of them had ended up crying. All of them, at your kitchen table, in various states of undone, even Yoongi, who had excused himself to the bathroom for twelve minutes and come back red-eyed and claimed he had allergies. Even you had cried. The collective grief of people who loved each other and were being asked to be apart and were pretending, most of the time, that it was fine.

But Jin said he was fine.

And because he said it with such complete, warm certainty, you had believed him.

That night — the night they were all at your house, the night everyone cried and then recovered and then ate everything in your kitchen at two in the morning — Jin had held you differently.

Slower than usual. More careful. Like he was doing something intentional, something he had thought about. He said I love you more times than he usually said it, which was already a lot, and each time he said it he looked at you in a way that was very still and very certain and very present, and you had thought, half-asleep and warm: he knows something. He knows exactly what he's doing right now.

Five weeks later, you found out exactly what you had made that night.

You called Minji first. Then Sooah. They were at your house within the hour — Minji with food, Sooah with the efficient calm of someone who cried only after she had handled everything that needed handling. You all cried anyway, together, at your kitchen table, the three of you, and it was the happiest crying you had ever done.

Then you called your mother, who cried so hard she had to put down the phone and come back to it.

Then his mother — usually composed, always elegant, the kind of woman who considered public displays of feeling to be optional — who made a sound you had never heard from her before, something that was pure joy before it was anything else, high and overwhelmed, and then she was laughing and crying at the same time and you were laughing and crying at the same time and neither of you could finish a sentence.

You were so happy.

You had grown up in a loud, enormous family — three brothers, their wives, the nieces and nephews who had started arriving before you were finished being a niece yourself — and you had known for as long as you could remember that you wanted that. The fullness of it. The noise. The chaos of a house that was always full of people who loved each other. You had accepted, quietly, sometime in the last few years, that the fullness you'd dreamed of might look different with Jin — smaller, more careful, built around the shape of a life that didn't always have room for everything you wanted. You had accepted it. You had made peace.

And now this.

You waited until his next leave to tell him.

He went completely still when you said it. Two full minutes — you counted, not because you were counting but because the silence was so total you became aware of every second of it — completely silent, completely motionless, like his body had simply stopped while his mind went somewhere it needed to go alone.

You thought he might faint.

And then he started crying.

Not the quiet kind — the loud kind, the uncontrolled kind, the kind that came out of him in a sound that turned into a laugh that turned back into crying, and he was jumping, actually jumping, in the hallway of your house saying I'm going to be a dad, I'm going to be a dad like if he said it enough times it would become more real than it already was. He hugged you and then immediately, comically, let go — I don't want to hurt the baby — and then hugged you again more carefully, and you were laughing so hard you had to hold onto him just to stay upright.

He made lists. Actual lists, written on his phone, items appearing faster than autocorrect could keep up: crib, mobile, white noise machine, books — what age do you start books, fishing rod (small), pink things (pink is for everyone, I am a very manly man who loves pink). He decided the baby would be beautiful — obviously, have you seen us, we need to hire security in advance — and that he would be fine being second-favorite once the baby arrived, truly fine, he was evolved enough for that.

He video-called Namjoon and Yoongi from your living room, both of them appearing on screen looking alarmed at the volume of him, and announced that they were going to be uncles. Namjoon had immediately teared up. Yoongi had looked at the ceiling for a long time and then said, very quietly, that's good. That's really good. Which from Yoongi was a standing ovation.

You laughed so hard that night.

You laughed until your stomach hurt and your face hurt and you couldn't remember the last time you had laughed like that.

You wished that happiness had lasted longer.

He went back to the base.

The next day you went to the doctor with your mother.

The doctor was speaking and you were nodding and somewhere underneath the nodding your heartbeat was so loud you could feel it in your teeth, and then he said high risk and absolute rest and complicated and the words arrived one at a time like something being dropped from a height, each one landing separately, and your mother's hand found yours under the table and held on.

Iron shots. Transfusions. Supplements and tests and monitoring schedules and a list of restrictions that turned the next few months into something that needed to be managed rather than experienced. You went home. Your mother came. Then his mother. Then your brothers and their wives and your father and his brother and people kept arriving and meaning well and loving you loudly and filling the house with their worry until the house felt like it was pressing in on you from every side.

You loved them.

You sent them home.

You needed quiet. You needed to breathe. You needed to lie in your bed in your house and not have to perform okay for anyone for five minutes, and you needed Jin, who was not here, who was kilometers away on a base being fine and happy and completely unaware that the thing you had made together was fighting to stay.

You told yourself it would be fine.

You told yourself this so many times it became a kind of prayer, something you said before you fell asleep and the first thing you thought when you woke up, a promise you were making to no one in particular because there was no one there to make it to.

It was three in the morning.

You woke up and knew before you were fully conscious, the way your body sometimes knows things before you have the words for them. The sheets. The cold. The feeling that something enormous and irreversible had happened while you were sleeping.

You don't remember getting to the bathroom.

You don't remember calling your mother. You must have, because she came, but the call itself is gone, some mercy of shock erasing it cleanly.

You remember the sound.

A sound you didn't recognize for a long time afterward — high and broken, coming from somewhere that didn't feel like you — and then your brother was there, your oldest brother who had always been the one you called when things were too large, and he carried you. You don't remember getting to his car but you remember the feeling of being carried, of not being able to make your legs work, of the cold night air and his arms and the specific smell of his jacket.

Then the hospital.

The lights. The particular antiseptic smell of an emergency room at three in the morning, that specific smell that you will never, for the rest of your life, be able to separate from this night.

The doctor's face.

The way he looked at you before he said it — that particular arrangement of professional composure over genuine human sorrow that doctors learn and that tells you everything before the words arrive.

There is nothing else we can do.

Your mother crying. Not loudly — your mother didn't cry loudly — just the tears moving down her face while she held very still, the way she held still when things were too large for movement.

Your sister-in-law's hand in yours. Holding on. Not saying anything. Just there.

Your brother's voice, low and steady, somewhere near your ear: it's going to be okay.

You didn't say anything back.

You were thinking about Seokjin.

About his face when you told him, the two full minutes of stillness and then the jumping, the crying, the I'm going to be a dad said over and over in your hallway. About the lists. About fishing is for everyone and so is pink. About the boxes that had started arriving — things he had ordered from the base, tiny things, soft things, things that were going to need to go somewhere now.

He was on a base kilometers away, completely asleep, completely unaware that the thing you had made together was gone.

He was going to wake up tomorrow still a father.

How could you call him and tell him that he wasn't anymore.

You didn't call him.

You told yourself it was practical — the information could leak, the timing was catastrophic, Yoongi was already in the papers, the press were looking for any thread they could pull. You told yourself it was protective. You told yourself it was the right decision.

You avoided him on calls. Said you were tired. Said the bakery opening was taking everything. He believed you, because why wouldn't he — you had never lied to him before, not really, and this was the biggest lie you had ever told, the lie of omission, the performance of fine while sitting on a kitchen floor some nights unable to stand up.

He had a leave in six weeks.

You waited.

He was still in uniform when you told him.

Standing in the hallway — the same hallway where he had proposed, still in his shoes, the same hallway that held everything now — and you told him.

He went completely still.

The same stillness as when you told him you were pregnant. But this time the stillness didn't break into jumping and crying and lists. This time it lasted, and lasted, and then he dropped to his knees.

Right there. On the floor of your hallway. And the sound that came out of him was nothing like the sound you had heard from him before, not even on the living room floor last night — it was something older, something that didn't have a shape yet, grief that hadn't learned its own name.

You were both on the floor.

You don't know how that happened either. You were just there, both of you, on the floor of your hallway, holding on.

He never let you apologize.

Every time you started — I'm sorry, I should have told you, I should have called — he stopped you.

Gently.

Firmly.

Don't.

He asked what you needed. He asked what the doctors were saying, what came next, what your body needed to recover. He was so careful with you. So specific. He quietly made things happen — the company gave him extra days, the boxes stopped arriving, the house became yours again — and he sat with you and mourned with you and let you be as bad as you needed to be without once asking you to be anything else.

He told you he would never forgive himself for letting you go through it alone.

That he would never let that happen again.

Three years.

It had been almost three years and you had never talked about it directly. Not really.

You had survived it side by side and mourned it separately and kept going the way you both kept going — by showing up, by being present, by being the safe place for everyone else so that neither of you had to look at what the loss had done to the space between you.

You had seen it from your side. The things you lost. The night alone. The call you couldn't make. The way the house had felt after — too large, too quiet, the house that was meant to always be full.

You had carried all of that.

But standing here now, in the kitchen he built for you, looking at the cracked isomalt on the marble —

He lost something too.

He had lost it in a hallway.

Still in his uniform, still with his bag over his shoulder, still carrying the exhaustion of someone who had just traveled a long way to be home.

Standing in the same hallway where he had proposed to you, where he had still had his shoes on, and you had watched his face go through every stage of understanding in the space of thirty seconds — the confusion first, then the listening, then the stillness, and then the thing underneath the stillness that broke your heart completely.

He had come home expecting to hold you and instead you had told him, and he had dropped to his knees right there on the floor, and you had gone down with him, and you had both stayed there for a long time.

He had been so careful with you after.

So specific.

So entirely focused on what you needed — and then his leave ended and he went back, and he took all of it with him, everything he felt, packed up and carried back to a base where there was nowhere to put it and no one who knew what he was carrying.

What did he do with it?

Who sat on a floor with him?

He told you he would never let you go through something like that alone again.

But who made sure he didn't go through it alone?

The question arrived and didn't leave.

Eight AM.

The back door opened. The specific sound of Cameron — his keys, his particular way of coming through the door, the small sounds of someone starting their day with reliable warmth.

"Morning," he said. Took one look at you. Said nothing else.

"I need to go," you said.

He didn't ask where. He didn't ask why. He just looked at you the way he looked at things he understood without needing them explained.

"Go," he said. "I've got the fort."

You took your jacket from the hook. Your keys from the counter. You didn't look at the isomalt.

You walked to your car.

You sat in it for a moment before you started it, your hands on the wheel, the morning going on around you, ordinary and indifferent.

For three years you had been looking at the miscarriage from inside your own grief. The things you had lost. The night alone. The things you had given up. The weight of it that you had carried quietly because carrying quietly was what you did.

But Seokjin.

He had jumped around a hallway saying I'm going to be a dad. Jin who had made lists and ordered boxes and called his members from your living room to tell them they were going to be uncles. Jin who had come home in his uniform and dropped to his knees on your floor and never let you apologize. Jin who had gone back to a base and held it alone, all of it, the way he held everything — quietly, efficiently, without telling anyone the cost.

He was just as broken.

He had always been just as broken.

You had just never let yourself see it.

You started the car.

You started driving.

You didn't know yet where you were going. You just knew you were finally, after three years, moving toward him instead of around him.

That felt like the first true thing you had done in a very long time.

— JIN —

He had been in the studio since five in the morning.

Not the practice room — the small room on the upper floor that he had claimed over the years as his own, the one nobody else used much, with the couch that had a permanent dent in it from all the times he'd sat in the same spot and the window that looked out over a city he had known for fifteen years and still sometimes found surprising. He had a gaming setup in the corner that he barely touched anymore. He had come here because the house was empty and the only thing worse than being alone was being alone somewhere that was supposed to be full.

He sat on the couch and he did not turn on the games.

He thought about the living room floor.

He thought about your face when he'd asked is it enough and the way you had answered with such fierce, immediate certainty, and how he had known you meant it and had still walked out the door. He thought about the cheek kiss — how he had done it without deciding to, how his mouth had just landed there instead of where it wanted to be, some cowardly last-minute redirection that you had noticed, that you always noticed, because you noticed everything he did even when he wished you wouldn't.

He thought about what you had asked him.

Are you happy?

He had said I love you.

He knew that wasn't an answer. He had known it the moment it came out, had watched your face understand that he wasn't going to answer the real question, and he had let you understand it and walked upstairs anyway. Because the real answer — the honest version, the one that didn't have a performance built around it — was something he didn't know how to say out loud yet. Not because it was bad. Not because the love wasn't real.

Because he didn't know what the answer was.

And not knowing — after thirty-four years of being the person who knew things, who held things, who had an answer ready for every room he walked into — not knowing was the most frightening thing he had felt in a very long time.

The concert was in four days.

The choreography for this comeback was harder than anything they had done in years — the members had pushed for it, and he had agreed, and he was going to do it because he always did it, because showing up was what he did. But his body was thirty-four years old and he had been honest enough with himself, in the private space of his own head, to admit that thirty-four felt different than twenty-four in ways the cameras wouldn't see and that he would never say out loud because saying it out loud would make it a story and he was so tired of being a story.

He went down to the practice room three hours before rehearsal because he couldn't sit still anymore.

Hoseok was already there.

Not practicing — just standing at the mirror, looking at his own reflection with the expression of a man having a conversation with himself that wasn't going well. He turned when he heard Jin come in, and something in his face shifted from whatever it had been to something more ordinary.

"Hyung," he said. "Practice is in three hours."

"I know," Jin said.

He went to the mirror too. Stood beside Hoseok and looked at himself — the face he had been performing for fifteen years, familiar and strange at the same time, the face that had gotten easier to wear and harder to take off — and felt very tired.

The silence between them was not uncomfortable. It was something more interesting than comfortable — it was honest, which was different. Jin had always felt slightly misaligned with Hoseok in a way he couldn't fully name, not distant exactly, just — differently built. Like two instruments in the same key that didn't naturally harmonize. Hoseok's stage presence was sunshine in a container, warm and enormous and relentless, and Jin had always known that the real Jung Hoseok — the one behind it — was something quieter and considerably harder to read. More serious. Someone who felt things deeply and processed them privately and showed you the result rather than the process.

Not unlike you, he thought, looking at his own face in the mirror.

"Why do I feel like you're also here running from something, hyung?" Hoseok said.

Jin let out a sound that was supposed to be a laugh and wasn't quite. "Are you."

Hoseok was quiet for a moment. "Yeah," he said. "I am." He said it simply, without self-pity, just the fact of it laid out clean. Then: "Do you want to run the choreography?"

Jin looked at him.

"Together," Hoseok said. "Three hours is enough time to either fix it or break ourselves. Both seem useful right now."

Jin almost smiled. Almost. "Yeah," he said. "Okay."

They ran it twice before either of them spoke again.

Hoseok was — as he had always been, as he would always be — devastating to watch. The kind of dancer whose body understood music as a first language rather than a translation, who moved through choreography the way water moved through a space, finding every angle, filling every beat. Jin moved beside him and felt, as he had felt for fifteen years, the particular frustration of working very hard at something that someone else simply was.

He was not a bad dancer. He knew that. He had worked himself into being a good dancer through sheer accumulated effort, the way he had worked himself into everything — through showing up, through doing it again, through deciding that the gap between where he was and where he needed to be was just a distance to be covered and covering it was his job.

But watching Hoseok dance was still, after fifteen years, the most efficient way to feel inadequate he had ever found.

"Stop watching me," Hoseok said, without stopping.

"I'm not—"

"You're comparing," Hoseok said. "Stop."

Jin stopped watching. Looked at his own reflection instead.

"You know what I've always admired about you," Hoseok said, slightly breathless now, both of them three-quarters through the second run. "You always show up. Doesn't matter how hard the day was or how hard the thing is. You show up."

"Showing up isn't the same as being good," Jin said.

"No," Hoseok agreed. "But it's rarer than being good. And it matters more." A beat. "Jimin is the best dancer in this group. Maybe in the world, honestly. But you are the reason this group still exists. You know that, right?"

Jin didn't say anything.

"Hyung." Hoseok stopped. Turned to look at him properly, the way he did when he had decided a thing needed to be said and was going to say it. "We all see it. We've been watching you carry something for months if not years and none of us have said anything because—" he stopped. "Because you always seem fine. And it's very convincing." He exhaled. "How's your wife?"

The question landed differently than Jin expected.

Not gently. Not cruelly. Just directly, the way Hoseok said things when the performance had been set aside.

"She—" Jin started. Stopped. "Things are. We're—" He stopped again. Pressed his hand over his eyes. "I don't know," he said, into his palm. "I don't know how she is. I don't know how I am. I said things last night and this morning and then I left and I don't know how to go back to the conversation and I—"

"Hyung."

"I know."

"You need to talk to her."

"I know."

"Not the version of talking where you say the things you've decided you're allowed to say," Hoseok said. "The actual version. The whole thing." He paused. "I know you've been hurting. We all know. But we are not teenagers you need to protect anymore. You can lean on us."

"I know," Jin said, quieter.

"And your wife—" Hoseok paused. Something moved across his face. "She has been choosing you every single day for ten years. That means something. Don't make her choose in the dark."

Jin looked at him.

Hoseok held his gaze, and something in it was complicated in the way that things between them had sometimes been complicated — the specific, textured history of two people who had spent fifteen years in each other's lives and had, at various points, been wanting different things that couldn't all exist at once.

"You had a crush on her," Jin said. It came out flatter than he intended, a little harder, the edge of something he thought he'd long since dealt with.

Hoseok didn't flinch.

"Yeah," he said. Simply. "I did."

Jin looked at the mirror.

"Hyung." Hoseok's voice was quiet now, all the performance stripped out of it. "I don't say that to make anything harder. I say it because — she is the most real, most warm, most completely herself person I have ever known. And I say that as someone who has been in every room this group has ever been in." He paused. "I had feelings for her. And then I watched the way she looked at you. And I understood — not slowly, not eventually — immediately. From the moment I saw it." His jaw worked slightly. "It was always going to be you. There was never any version of that where it wasn't. I don't think she even knew she was choosing. She just — was."

Jin was quiet for a moment.

"I broke someone," Hoseok said then, low, mostly to himself. "Someone who deserved better than what I gave her. And I would give anything to have the chance to sit with her the way you can sit with Y/n and say the thing that needs to be said." He looked at Jin. "So don't waste it, hyung. Whatever is happening between you two — go fix it. Because I would trade everything to be in the position you're in right now."

Jin opened his mouth.

His phone buzzed.

A staff member's voice through the door: "Mr. Kim? Your wife is downstairs. She's in the small meeting room on the second floor."

The practice room went very quiet.

Hoseok looked at him.

"Go," he said. Simply. And then, after a beat, something crossed his face that was complicated and honest and fond all at once: "And yeah. I was jealous of you. For longer than I should have been." He almost smiled. "But she chose you. She was always going to choose you." He picked up his water bottle. Turned back to the mirror. "Now go fix your marriage."

— JIN —

You were sitting in the small meeting room with your hands around a paper cup of something you wern't drinking.

You looked up when he came in. Your face was — he couldn't read it completely, which almost never happened, and the almost-never was its own thing to sit with.

"We need to talk," you said.

"Yes," he said.

He sat down across from you.

"I think it would be good for both of us to have some space," you said. "Just — for a few days. While things are—"

He went very still.

"No," he said.

"Seokjin—"

"No." He said it quietly. Without anger. But absolutely. "No. I am not doing that."

"I'm not leaving," you said. "I'm not — this isn't—" you pressed your hands flat on the table. "You need space. I need — I don't know what I need. I don't know, okay? I don't know, and I need to figure it out somewhere that isn't—"

"Somewhere that isn't our house," he said.

"Yes."

"Without me."

"Yes."

"Because?"

"Because—" your voice caught. "Because I have been so scared," you said. "I have been so scared for so long and I don't know when the fear started and I don't know how to be in our house right now and feel anything except—" you stopped. "Except afraid of losing something I can't name yet."

The room was quiet.

"What are you afraid of losing?" he said, very carefully.

You looked at him.

"I don't know," she said. "That's what I'm trying to figure out."

He looked at his hands. "Is it me?"

"No," she said immediately. Then: "I don't know. It's not — it's not you, it's — it's us. It's the version of us that we've been performing and I don't know where the real version went and I'm scared it went somewhere I can't get back to."

Something in his chest that had been very tight for a very long time cracked open.

"I'm scared too," he said.

You looked at him. Slightly surprised. Like you had been expecting him to argue rather than agree.

"I've been scared since—" he stopped. The word sat in his throat. He hadn't said it directly between them since the week he came home, since the floor of the hallway, since the boxes stopped arriving. "Since we lost our baby," he said. "I have been scared since then and I haven't said it. I came home and I tried to take care of everything and I went back and I—" his jaw worked — "I didn't tell anyone. I went back and I carried it and I didn't tell anyone because that was what I did, and then you said you wanted to try again and I—"

"You were terrified," you said.

"Yes."

"So was I."

"I know."

"We never said that to each other," you said. "We just — kept going. Like if we kept going fast enough the thing behind us wouldn't catch up."

"It caught up," he said.

"It caught up," you agreed.

They sat with it for a moment.

"I want to try again," you said, finally. "I want that. It's not about not wanting it. I'm just—" you exhaled. "I'm so scared of losing again. And I'm scared of trying while we're—" you gestured between you two. "Like this."

"Like what," he said. Not challenging. Genuinely asking.

"Broken," you said.

The word landed.

He didn't argue with it.

"Then we fix it," he said.

"You can't fix things by—"

"I know," he said. "Not by pushing. Not by performing. I know." He looked at you. "But I am not going to sit across from you in a meeting room and agree to not see you for days and call that fixing anything."

"I'm not asking you to—"

"You're going to your parents," he said.

"Yes."

"That's—" he stopped. Breathed. "Okay. Okay, if you need to be somewhere that isn't the house—" something crossed his face — "I'll stay. You're not—" he shook his head. "That's your house. I'm not asking you to leave your house."

"I can't be in that house alone," you said. Very quiet. "I can't. I need you to understand that."

He looked at you.

He understood.

He understood completely, and the understanding of it — the image of you alone in that house, the specific night three years ago that he hadn't been there for, the reason she couldn't be in that house alone — sat in him like something swallowed wrong.

"Okay," he said. His voice came out rough. "Okay. Go to your parents. I'll — I'll stay home."

You nodded.

You stood up.

He stood too. And he wanted — he needed — to cross the room, to put his arms around you the way he had put his arms around you a thousand times, to feel the specific, particular weight of you against him, the thing that had always been the most reliable home he had ever had.

He didn't move.

Because he knew — with the certainty of fifteen years of knowing you — that if he touched you right now he would not be able to let go. And letting go was what you needed. And he had spent fifteen years learning to set things down that needed to be set down.

So he stood there.

He watched you pick up your bag.

He watched you walk to the door.

"I'll call," you said, at the door.

"I know," he said.

You left.

He stood in the empty meeting room for a moment, hands at his sides, and then he went back upstairs to rehearsal.

He was not present for any of it.

His body was there — hitting the marks, executing the formations, doing the work with the accumulated muscle memory of fifteen years — but his mind was in a car, watching her drive away. His mind was on the living room floor at four in the morning. His mind was in a restaurant fifteen years ago watching a girl behind a counter raise an eyebrow at his father's black card and not say a single word about it.

Then Jungkook was beside him, breathless from the final run, sweat on his forehead, with the guileless energy of someone who had worked hard and was ready to be done with working hard.

"Hyung, can I come to dinner, tonight?" he said. "Noona said she'd make—" he named a dish, cheerful, already assuming — "she told me this morning she said she had the ingredients—"

"She's not home, Jungkook," Jin said.

The words came out flat. Not unkind. Just true.

Jungkook blinked.

The rest of the members went very still in the particular way they went still when they had understood something before they were supposed to. Staff members moved quietly, reading the room, creating small excuses to be elsewhere.

Namjoon looked at the room. Made a small gesture. The remaining staff filed out.

"Hyung," Namjoon said, carefully. "Are you okay?"

Jin opened his mouth.

Closed it.

"No," he said. "Actually, no. I'm not."

Nobody said anything. Nobody tried to fill the silence with comfort or deflection or the usual architecture of making hard things easier. They just — sat with it. All of them, in the practice room, still in their rehearsal clothes, and let him have the space to say the true thing.

So he said it.

All of it.

He didn't perform it. He didn't make it light. He said it the way it actually was — the album, the writing block, the feeling of holding a door open for so long he'd forgotten what was on his side of it. The miscarriage. The guilt of not being there. The three years of carrying it quietly and moving forward and never saying I am still inside this, I never actually left this. The question she had asked him — are you happy — and how he had said I love you because it was true and also because he was a coward.

When he finished the room was very quiet.

Then Jimin said, simply: "You never told us you felt this way, hyung."

Jin looked at him.

"How can we fix something," Namjoon said, "if we don't know it's broken?"

The words hit him somewhere specific.

He sat with them for exactly four seconds.

And then he stood up.

"Thank you," he said. "For listening. I need to go."

"Hyung—" someone started.

"I need to go," he said again, and he was already moving, already out the door, already down the corridor with his jacket half on, because Namjoon was right, Namjoon was completely right, and he was not going to lose his wife over his inability to say the true thing to the person who had always deserved it most.

He got to his car.

He was driving before he had fully decided to be driving, the city moving past him in the dark, the streets wet from the rain that had been falling since early evening, and he was going too fast, he knew he was going too fast but he needed to get there, he needed to say the thing before another hour passed with it unsaid—

The light ahead turned green.

Then red.

He hit the brake.

The wet road.

The slide.

A sound he did not have time to process.

Author's Note: Yes, several bricks were kissed before being violently thrown at you on this one. i am so sorry. i am not sorry at all. both things are true.

okay so. i need to say a few things before anything else.

first — trigger warning for pregnancy loss. i want to be really clear about that before anyone goes into this chapter without knowing. the miscarriage storyline is handled with as much care as i know how to give it, but i know it's a topic that can hit very differently depending on where you are in your own life. please take care of yourselves. 🤍

second — this chapter is personal. more personal than most things i've written. i wanted to write it with the rawness it deserves. not as a plot device. as a real thing that happens to real people and changes them in ways that don't announce themselves.

the core of this story — the thing i keep coming back to — is that these two people are not broken because they love each other too little or because they made a terrible mistake or because they don't know each other. they are broken because they love each other so much that they have spent years trying to protect the other person from their own pain. they have been so busy taking care of each other that they forgot to tell each other the truth. and i think that's the most real kind of broken there is. the kind that sneaks up on you. the kind where you're standing in your kitchen at six in the morning trying to find the exact moment the space opened and realizing you can't, because it didn't happen all at once. it happened slowly, in all the small things you set down without saying you were setting them down.

i also did something in this chapter i have never done in the main series before — a POV change. jin gets his own section. and that was entirely intentional, because this is a story about both of them. every other story in this series centers the reader's experience, and that's by design. but for jin and his wife, i needed you to be inside his head too. i needed you to see that the space between them looks the same from both sides.

there is so much more coming. part four and part five are going to have a lot of real, hard, healing conversations — and some things that are going to make you want to throw your phone and then immediately pick it back up. as i always say: i don't write sad endings. every brick i throw, i kiss first. everything is going to be okay. just not yet.

and finally — coming very soon: the don't look at me like that teaser (jimin finally gets his moment 👀), the what happens when you fall special summer chapter, and the summer chapter for this series as well. i am so excited i can barely stand it.

thank you for reading this one. thank you for trusting me with the hard chapters. these two mean everything to me.

— ria 🍞

ps. yes. that ending happened. no i will not be taking questions at this time. ps. 2 If you want to be on the tag list send me an ask or comment below!!