Ha Min-ji was ten years old when time stopped.
She remembered it clearly. Too clearly. The sky was overcast, the pavement still slick from the morning drizzle. Her schoolbag bounced against her back as she half-skipped, half-walked the last few blocks to the house, clutching a rolled-up sheet of paper in one hand. Her art project. A watercolour of their family.
"Eun-ji's going to love this," she'd whispered to herself. Her little sister always liked her drawings. Said they made everything look magical.
She opened the front gate, humming, shoes squeaking slightly on the tiled entryway. But the moment the door creaked open, the air changed.
There were shoes in the hallway. Shoes that didn't belong to anyone in their house. Dark ones. Heavy.
Inside, her mother was wailing.
Her father was on the floor, gripping the coffee table like it was the only thing keeping him upright. And across from them—two uniformed officers. Stone-faced. Tense.
Min-ji stood in the doorway, confused.
Her mother looked up and screamed, "Min-ji, no! Stay outside! Stay outside!"
One of the officers turned slowly toward her. The other spoke in low tones. There were words. Strange, adult words that Min-ji couldn't string together.
"...car accident..."
"...identified only through uniform..."
"...no autopsy..."
Her father rose unsteadily. "It wasn't her," he kept muttering. "You're wrong. You're all wrong. It wasn't my daughter."
They made her sit. Made her hold a warm drink she never sipped. Made her stare at a photo of a crumpled vehicle, metal twisted like a crushed can, burnt along the edges.
"This is the car," one of the officers said. "We believe the child inside matches the description."
Min-ji blinked. "But... where is Eun-ji?"
No one answered.
The funeral was held two days later. No one let them see the body.
"Due to the condition of the remains," they said. "It's better for your memories this way."
The casket was too small. Too silent.
Min-ji kept looking around the room, expecting her sister to burst in, laughing, saying it was all a mistake.
But no one came.
Not her. Not the truth.
She kept asking. Again and again. Whispering it into her pillow, screaming it in her sleep:
"Where is she? Where is Eun-ji?"
No one ever answered.
And the house has never moved forward since.
The house didn't collapse in one day. It folded in on itself slowly. Quietly. Like paper dipped in water.
Ha Min-ji remembered the noise of the before. The way laughter used to echo off the tiled floor. The constant clatter of cutlery, the hum of the TV that no one really watched, the scolding from their mother when Eun-ji ran too fast down the hallway. There used to be footsteps. Music. Life.
Now, silence pressed against every wall. It was the kind of silence that didn't soothe. It screamed.
Her mother, Lee Su-young, stopped cooking by the end of the week. The scent of food disappeared first. Then the sound of pots. Then the sight of her altogether. She no longer left her room. She no longer opened the curtains. Her body stayed in the house, but everything else had left. Her eyes, once bright with teasing and warnings, had dulled into an unfocused grey. The kind of stare that scared Min-ji more than crying ever could.
Eun-ji's room remained untouched. Her bed made, her socks still tucked into drawers. Even her school uniform still hung behind the door. Their mother didn't let anyone clean it. She didn't change the bedsheets. She didn't open the windows. The room began to smell like time had stopped.
Min-ji once saw her mother kneeling at the foot of the bed, whispering something over and over. She couldn't hear the words. She never asked.
Their father, Ha Tae-jin, returned to work the following Monday.
He shaved. He dressed. He kissed Su-young on the head and told her he loved her before he left. He told Min-ji to eat. He brought home groceries. He answered the phone when people called.
He was functional. Impeccably so.
Until night fell.
Min-ji heard it through the wall. A choked kind of sobbing. Muffled, restrained. Almost violent in its effort to stay hidden.
He never cried in front of them. Never missed a meal. Never forgot to buy Min-ji's favourite snacks.
But the photo frames started vanishing one by one.
It was Min-ji who noticed first.
The hallway—once covered with school photos, summer trips, birthdays—grew blank. She walked through it one day and realised something chilling:
There were no pictures of Eun-ji anymore.
Except one.
The last one they ever took together.
A family photo from two weeks before Eun-ji vanished. Her smile had been wide, arms looped around Min-ji's waist. Their mother held a picnic basket. Their father had barbecue tongs in hand. It was warm that day. They'd laughed so hard, they couldn't even finish the photo without someone blinking.
That picture stayed.
Not in the living room. Not in the hallway.
But in Su-young's room. Taped to the mirror. The only surface she still looked at.
Min-ji didn't know what was worse:
That her parents had started to erase Eun-ji—or that they never stopped clinging to her.
Ha Min-ji was ten when her sister died.
At least, that was what everyone said.
The funeral happened too fast. The photo used on the altar was one Min-ji had drawn herself. She'd spent hours trying to get Eun-ji's eyes just right—big, soft, the way they looked when she snuck extra snacks from the cupboard. Her parents didn't ask for another picture. They just used it.
They said the car accident was bad. That the casket needed to be closed. That it was better this way.
But no one ever let her see.
Not once.
She waited days after the funeral, thinking maybe it was a trick. A prank. Maybe Eun-ji would pop out from the closet and yell, "Got you!" like she always did. Maybe they'd all laugh and Min-ji would be annoyed, but relieved. But no one ever came.
And so, Min-ji didn't go back to school.
Not that anyone forced her. Her teachers called for a while. Then they stopped. The neighbours whispered. Then they stopped too. Everyone left her alone. As if the grief was contagious.
The spare room her parents were planning to convert into Min-ji's study became something else entirely. Eun-ji's schoolbag was placed at the centre. Her shoes, scrubbed clean, sat neatly beneath the window. Her hairbrush still had strands of her hair. The blanket she'd clutched every night remained folded with surgical precision.
Min-ji started wearing Eun-ji's clothes. Her old jumpers. Her soft pyjamas with faded cartoon bears. Her hair, once always braided differently each day, was now always tied the same way Eun-ji used to wear it—half up, with a small ribbon.
She never noticed when she stopped being ten.
The years moved on, but Min-ji didn't.
She was twenty-seven now. Chronologically. But time, for her, had been paused for seventeen years. She still asked her mum if she'd seen Eun-ji's red pencil. Still pointed out snacks at the store that her sister liked. Still said things like, "Eun-ji's going to be mad I ate the last yoghurt."
Her parents didn't correct her.
They couldn't.
Because part of them, too, was still waiting.
The Ha household was a house without time. A space where childhood had fossilised, and grief had made every wall echo with what was never said aloud.
And in the middle of it all was Min-ji.
Still ten. Still waiting. Still hoping that any minute now, her little sister would walk through the door and ask why the world had forgotten her.
The silence of the Ha household was louder than any scream.
There were nights when Lee Su-young would sit on the floor of Ha Eun-ji's room, staring at the bed, clutching her daughter's hairbrush like it was a weapon. The walls were still pink, still soft, still covered in childish stickers that had begun peeling at the edges. Eun-ji's pyjamas still hung on the back of the door. A layer of dust had settled, but Su-young never wiped it away. To her, it was sacred.
She remembered the 48 hours that followed the knock on the door.
Police. Formal shoes in the hallway. Papers rustling. Cold, clinical voices. A photo of a crushed car. No body. No remains. Just a closed-casket funeral. They said it was an accident. That the damage was too extensive. That there was nothing left to see. No autopsy. Case closed.
"Closed," she whispered once in the kitchen. "How do you close something that never opened?"
She tried to reopen the case six months later. Walked into a station clutching every file she had been handed. Asked to speak to someone. Anyone.
They laughed.
Not with malice, but with pity. As if her pain was inconvenient. As if her insistence meant she hadn't moved on. One officer even patted her hand and told her she should let go. That the world was cruel to people who couldn't accept the end.
That night, she didn't sleep. She sat by the window, the one facing the street where Eun-ji used to skip rope, and whispered her daughter's name like a prayer.
Ha Tae-jin had found her there.
"Geumanhae jebal (Please stop), Minji-yah," he said, his voice flat. Empty.
"They didn't check," she replied, eyes unblinking.
"We buried her."
But even as he said it, his hands trembled. He had repeated it so many times over the years it had become more of a mantra than a belief.
In the dark, alone in the bathroom, he would sometimes lean over the sink and whisper: Where did you go, Eunji-yah? Then he'd slap cold water on his face. Pretend it didn't happen.
Their grief didn't look like grief anymore. It looked like rot. Like something slowly devouring the inside of the house.
Min-ji never asked why no one ever moved on.
Because somewhere inside her, she already knew:
It was because none of them believed it was real.
And that was the cruelest part.
The Ha family home had not changed in seventeen years.
Not a single item out of place. Not a single decoration updated. Not a single corner touched by time in the way most homes naturally change.
The hallway light still flickered. The kitchen still smelled faintly of seaweed soup. The shoes at the front door still included the last pair of sneakers Eun-ji ever wore.
Her bedroom remained untouched. Her bed was still made, corners tucked in just as she left them.
Every Sunday, Lee Su-young entered the room with a cloth and dusted her daughter's shelves. She didn't rush. She didn't cry. It had become something mechanical. Reverent.
The calendar on the wall still read June 2008. A small yellow sticker marked the 7th.
On the desk sat a small box of coloured pencils and a birthday card—newer than the rest of the room. It was slightly bent at the corners, as if held too tightly. The handwriting on the front read:
Happy 10th Birthday. I'll find you soon.
Min-ji had placed it there herself. Seventeen years too late.
In the living room, Ha Tae-jin sat in silence, staring at the blank TV screen. The remote was in his hand, but he never pressed play.
They no longer ate meals together. They no longer spoke unless necessary. But they remained in the same house—not out of love, but out of shared grief.
Sometimes, when the wind passed through the hallways just right, it sounded like the echo of children playing. But there were no children here. Only ghosts.
Ha Min-ji stood at the window in her sister's old room. She was wearing a faded pink jumper that once belonged to Eun-ji. Her long hair was brushed straight, her bangs uneven like a child had trimmed them.
She looked out at the street below, eyes glassy, as if searching for something only she could see.
Then she hummed. Softly.
"Gom semari-ga han jibe isseo~"
Three bears in one house.
Her voice cracked on the second line. She covered her mouth. Not to stop the sound. But to stop the sob.
"If you're still out there..." Her voice was barely above a whisper.
"...please come home."
Seo Yoon staring at the ceiling of her apartment.
The light from the television cast soft shadows against the walls. A commercial played in the background—something about family, about childhood. In it, a child hummed the same tune.
Gom semari-ga han jibe isseo momma gom~
Her fingers twitched. Her body jolted upright. Her hands began to shake.
The memory didn't come.
But the ache did.
An ache so heavy it made her want to scream.
She didn't.
She just sat there.
Listening.
Waiting for something to make sense.