The breaking news banner had been cycling through the same footage for three days. Ji-eun sat on her bed in the dim light of her apartment, the glow from her laptop screen casting shadows across her face. *Man Found Dead in Hangang Park. Investigation Underway.* The anchor's voice droned on, professional and distant, but the words carved themselves into her chest like a blade.
Sunghoon's photograph appeared on screen. She knew that photo she'd taken herself last summer when he'd complained about his university ID picture making him look "like a serial killer." In that shot, he was laughing, his head tilted slightly, the Han River blurred behind him. Now that same photograph was being broadcast to millions as the face of a dead man.
Ji-eun's fingers curled into fists. She pressed her palms flat against her thighs, feeling the tremor that had started somewhere deep in her chest and spread outward like a poison through her veins. Three days of this. Three days of watching the news cycle spin, watching journalists stand in the cold spring morning with their mournful expressions, pointing to the exact spot where they'd found him.
She reached for her water glass.
Her hand shook so violently that the glass rattled against the nightstand, the sound obscenely loud in the quiet apartment. A few drops spilled across the wooden surface. She set it down carefully, as if movement itself had become a threat she had to manage. The water remained untouched.
This wasn't supposed to happen. That was the thought that kept circling through her mind, nonsensical and useless. Of course it wasn't supposed to happen. Nothing about any of this was supposed to happen. She'd been careful. They'd all been careful. And yet here was Sunghoon's photograph, his death made public, and she was sitting alone in her apartment watching it happen over and over again.
The detective who had questioned her yesterday had sat across from a small table in a police station that smelled like instant coffee and old paper. His name was Park, or Chen, or something she couldn't quite remember now. He'd shown her photographs of places she recognized and asked her questions in a voice that suggested he was trying to put her at ease.
"Were you close with Sunghoon Lee?" he'd asked.
"We knew each other," Ji-eun had answered. The words had come out measured, rehearsed. She hated how they sounded. "We had mutual friends."
"And when was the last time you saw him?"
The date had come to her immediately. April third. Nearly two weeks ago. She'd practiced this answer in her mind so many times that it emerged from her mouth like an actor delivering a line she'd memorized.
"I see. And where did you see him?"
"At a café. Near my university." Another practiced answer. Technically true. They had been at a café near her university. What she hadn't mentioned was that he'd been there because she'd asked him to be there. That she'd needed to tell him something. That the conversation that had followed had spiraled into something neither of them had intended.
The detective had made a note, his pen scratching across paper. He hadn't seemed particularly interested in her, which should have been a relief. It wasn't. The lack of suspicion somehow made everything worse, because it meant she was getting away with her careful lies, and that made her complicit in a deeper way than she wanted to examine.
When he'd dismissed her an hour later with a polite nod and a business card she'd never used, Ji-eun had walked out into the street and felt the trembling begin in earnest.
Now, as the sun set outside her apartment window, painting the Seoul skyline in shades of orange and gray, the shaking had only intensified. It wasn't the kind of shaking that came from fear alone,she'd been afraid before and managed it. This was something else. This was her body betraying her, refusing to cooperate with the calm facade she was trying so desperately to maintain.
She picked up her phone. The messages were still there, exactly where she'd left them, the thread between her and Sunghoon ending abruptly in the early hours of April fourth. She'd read them so many times that she could recite them from memory, but she found herself scrolling through them again anyway, as if repetition might change their meaning or make them less incriminating.
"I can't do this anymore."
"You have to understand, this isn't right."
"I'm going to the police. I can't live like this."
Those had been his last words to her. She'd stared at them for a long time before typing her response. And what had she said? She couldn't remember anymore. The messages had been deleted afterward by her, she assumed, though the details of that night were already beginning to blur in her memory, like a photograph left in the sun.
Someone had warned her to stay quiet. The message had come through an unknown number, a text in the middle of the night after Sunghoon's body had been discovered. Four words: *Don't talk to anyone.*
She had obeyed. What choice did she have?
Across the city, in a small café tucked between a bookstore and a shuttered dry cleaner, Cha Eun-woo sat at a table by the window with a cup of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. The café was one of those places that tried too hard exposed brick, carefully curated vintage posters, a menu written in chalk that rotated seasonally. He'd come here to be around people without having to interact with them, a distinction that had seemed important when he'd pushed through the door.
The news had followed him everywhere. He couldn't turn on the television or scroll through his phone without seeing it. Sunghoon's face. Details about the investigation. Speculation about who might have done it. Everyone had a theory. Everyone had an opinion about the life that had ended in that park.
Eun-woo had no opinions. He had only the weight of exhaustion that had settled over him like dust, making even breathing feel like an effort.
He was rereading the same paragraph in a book he'd brought,something about a man learning to let go of his past,when someone approached his table.
"Is this seat free?"
Eun-woo looked up. The person asking was young, perhaps early twenties, with the kind of face that suggested he spent most of his time slightly worried about something. Dark eyes. A nervous smile that didn't quite settle into comfort.
"Yes," Eun-woo said, gesturing to the empty chair. "Go ahead."
The young man sat down carefully, as if he was afraid the chair might break beneath him. He ordered an Americano from the waitress, his Korean accented in a way that suggested English was his first language. Pakistani, perhaps, or Indian. Eun-woo wasn't particularly curious, but the information registered anyway.
"Thank you," the young man said, seeming to appreciate the gesture more than it warranted. "I didn't want to sit alone today."
It was a strange thing to say, an admission that suggested his own exhaustion ran deep. Eun-woo found himself nodding in understanding.
"I'm Ahmad," the young man offered. "I'm on scholarship here. Studying engineering."
"Eun-woo," he replied. He didn't add a title or context, just the name. It seemed sufficient.
They didn't talk much after that. Ahmad read something on his phone,something that made his expression darken briefly before he put the device away. Eun-woo returned to his book, though he continued reading the same paragraph over and over without comprehension. The café hummed around them with the quiet sounds of other people's lives: the espresso machine, soft conversation from another table, the gentle clinking of cups.
It was the kind of moment that shouldn't have mattered. Two strangers sharing a table in a café, exchanging nothing of substance. But as Eun-woo sat there, watching the last of the afternoon light slip away from the window, he felt something shift in his chest. Not relief, exactly. Not hope. But something like acknowledgment that he existed, and someone else existed beside him, and for now, in this small café with its false vintage aesthetic and its cold coffee, that was enough.
Ahmad left first, after an hour of comfortable silence. He stood, gathered his things, and paused briefly at Eun-woo's table.
"Thank you," he said again. "For letting me sit here."
"You're welcome," Eun-woo replied.
He watched Ahmad disappear through the café door and into the Seoul evening. He would see this young man again, Eun-woo somehow knew. The connection, though fragile and barely acknowledged, had created a thread that wouldn't simply snap. It was too real, too human, even in its simplicity.
Back in her apartment, Ji-eun lay in the dark, her hands clasped together in an attempt to stop their trembling. It didn't work. The shaking only grew worse as the hours stretched past midnight.
Outside, the city hummed with its usual energy, indifferent to her fear. Somewhere out there, investigators were pursuing leads she couldn't predict. Somewhere out there, someone had murdered Sunghoon Lee and had warned her into silence. The threat was unspoken but understood: stay quiet, or face the same fate.
She didn't know who had written those four words. She had no way of knowing if the person who'd sent them had also held a knife in the darkness by the Han River. She only knew that silence was the price of survival, and she was paying it with every tremor of her hands, with every sleepless night, with every lie she'd told the detective.
The guilt was physical now. It lived in her stomach like a stone, hard and cold and impossible to expel. She had wanted Sunghoon to be quiet, to stop talking about going to the police. But she hadn't wanted this. No one could want this.
She closed her eyes, but sleep wouldn't come. It hadn't come for three days. Her mind replayed the same moments over and over: Sunghoon's face when she'd told him it was impossible, the way he'd said he couldn't live with what they'd done, the silence after that,a silence she'd accepted but never expected to become permanent.
Her phone buzzed. She grabbed it, her heart suddenly racing.
It was a news notification: Police release new statements in park sunghoon murder Investigation.
With trembling fingers, she opened it. The statement was brief. Police were exploring multiple leads. They were asking anyone with information to come forward. There was no indication that they suspected her. There was no indication of anything, really just the standard language of an investigation in its early stages.
But the message was still there in her recent texts, invisible to everyone but her. Four words that had reordered her entire existence:
Don't talk to anyone….
Ji-eun set her phone down and pulled the blanket over her head. Beneath it, in the dark, her hands continued to shake.