Two Kitchens

2026 | Seoul

The phantom warmth lingered on her knuckles.

Jisoo woke in 2026 with her fingers curled into a loose fist, as if still holding something—or rather, as if something still held her. For a long, suspended moment she lay perfectly still, staring at the smooth white expanse of her ceiling, and willed the sensation to remain: the dry press of lips against bone, the firm wrap of fingers, the anchor of another human being claiming her in the dark.

Her ceiling offered no comfort. No rabbit-shaped water stain in the corner, no hairline cracks in aged wood, no subtle warp from decades of coastal humidity. Just clean, architectural lines and recessed lighting that had never been turned on. The silence here was different too—not the living quiet of a sleeping house, but the hollow hum of climate control and the distant, filtered murmur of a city that never truly slept.

She turned her head on the pillow. Dalgom was a small white comma at the foot of the bed, his breathing a soft, regular rhythm. The other side of the bed was empty, the sheets undisturbed. Of course it was. It always was. But this morning, the emptiness felt newly carved, a negative space shaped exactly like a man’s sleeping form.

Slowly, she brought her left hand up and pressed her palm flat against her stomach. Smooth. Toned. Empty.

The absence had evolved. In the first weeks, waking to flatness had been a disorienting lurch, a physical wrongness like missing a step in the dark. Then it became a dull ache, a phantom limb sensation for an organ that had never been hers to begin with. Now it was grief—specific, daily, and quietly devastating. Not for “a baby,” but for the baby. The one who kicked when Suho hummed off-key in the kitchen. The one who rolled over when Jisoo talked to her through Sooya’s skin. The one who existed in a body Jisoo could only reach by sleeping.

She kept her palm there, the warmth of her own skin a poor substitute. “Stay well,” she whispered to the empty room, to the papaya-sized person thirty-two years away who couldn’t hear her and didn’t know she was gone. The words dissolved into the sterile air.

Coffee was automatic. The machine whirred, dispensing a single perfect cup into porcelain so thin it was nearly translucent. Dalgom padded into the kitchen as she fed him, expressing mild displeasure through a slow blink that breakfast was four minutes late.

“Manage your expectations,” she told him, her voice gravelly with sleep. “I’m running on hours of cross-dimensional consciousness. Your kibble can wait.”

He sniffed and began to eat with an air of wounded dignity.

She took her coffee to the kitchen island—a vast slab of white marble that had never known a flour-dusted rolling pin or a sticky ring from a sweating glass. The leather journal lay where she’d left it the previous morning. She opened it, the cool grain familiar under her palms, and turned to a fresh page. The blue pen—1994’s color—felt light in her hand.

The words came slowly at first, then in a rushing stream.

He named it. He named the glass.

For weeks I’ve been building walls, brick by careful brick, and he’s been watching me build them from the other side. And last night he finally said it out loud—‘it felt like you were on the other side of a thick glass wall.’ He saw it. He felt it. He never said a word, all those weeks. He just waited on his side for me to come back.

Then he said today the glass was gone. Thin, or gone. And he asked me to keep it gone. ‘Just be here,’ he said. ‘Like you were today. That’s all I want.’

The thing he doesn’t know—the thing I can’t tell him—is that ‘today’ wasn’t Sooya. Today was me. The shop reorganization was me. The strategy, the way I talked about wrapping versus substance, the way I saw what he couldn’t see because I’ve spent a decade looking at spreadsheets and brand analytics and market saturation curves. That was Kim Jisoo, CEO of BLISSOO, who has rebuilt her life from scratch twice. He fell in love with his wife thirteen years ago when she gave him a cartoon bandaid. But last night, he asked me to stay—and the ‘me’ he was asking for was the version of me that has never met him before.

He’s not asking for Sooya anymore. He’s asking for the person standing in front of him. And the person standing in front of him is me.

I don’t know what to do with this. I don’t know what it means. The closer we get, the further I am from the person he thinks I am. This is either the foundation of something real or the most elaborate deception in human history.

Possibly both.

He kissed my knuckles. Just that. A press of his lips against the back of my hand in the dark. No grand gesture, no dramatic confession. Just a kiss that felt like a promise and a question at the same time. And I felt it through my entire body—a current that ran from my hand to my chest to the soles of my feet. And then I woke up here and his hand is gone and this bed is enormous and empty on every side and I have to live an entire 2026 day before I can feel him again.

This is going to be one of those days. I can tell already.

She closed the journal but didn’t put it away. The pink pen lay atop the leather cover like a boundary marker. Dalgom jumped onto the stool beside her, his weight barely causing a dip in the cushion. He looked at her with the expression of a small, fluffy therapist who had seen it all and was deeply unimpressed.

“Don’t look at me like that. I know.”

He yawned, showing a pink tongue and neat white teeth.

“I know it’s complicated. I know it’s borderline insane. I know if I told anyone—anyone—they would have me committed before I finished the sentence. But you don’t get to judge, Dalgom-ah. You once spent forty minutes trying to bury a treat in the couch cushions. You have no high ground here.”

He yawned again, wider this time, and settled his chin on his paws. Maximum disdain.

She drank her coffee, the bitter heat a grounding anchor. Somewhere in Gunsan, in a room with a wooden ceiling, Suho was probably waking up beside the empty space where she had been a few hours ago. He would wake and find Sooya sleeping deeply—because Jisoo was the one who piloted the consciousness; the body slept on without her, a vessel waiting for its captain to return. He would kiss her forehead, the way he did every morning, and go downstairs to open the shop.

She wondered if he could feel the difference when she wasn’t there. If some part of him, some cellular recognition deeper than conscious thought, registered the absence even though the body in the bed was still warm, still breathing, still his wife.

She hoped not. The thought of him feeling her go—of him kissing a forehead that was, in that moment, truly empty—was unbearable.

The day stretched before her: a morning blessedly free, then a writing session with Junho in the afternoon, a brand appearance, and a dinner with a producer she’d been avoiding. A regular Tuesday in the life of Kim Jisoo. Except today she was carrying the residue of a man’s kiss across thirty-two years, and she had no idea what to do with the weight of it.

She stood at her kitchen island in the grey morning light and looked at the absurd, beautiful, utterly unused kitchen around her. The professional-grade range with eight burners she’d never lit. The double oven that stored takeout menus. The Sub-Zero refrigerator that hummed softly, containing nothing but condiments and regret.

A pull, low and steady, began in her chest. Not a thought, but an impulse—a physical ache to make something. To put her hands on ingredients and create something that hadn’t existed before, the way Suho did every morning without thinking. To fill the sterile silence with the sizzle of garlic in oil, the earthy scent of simmering broth, the mundane alchemy of turning raw things into nourishment.

She didn’t know what she would make. The idea had no shape. It was just a need—to do something physical and ordinary and real in a life that felt increasingly like a performance.

She filed it away. First: shower. Routine. Be Jisoo for a few hours.

But she left the journal open on the marble. She had a feeling she’d be back.

By mid-morning, the impulse had crystallized into a mission.

She stood in the middle of her kitchen, hands on her hips, surveying the battlefield. Dalgom had taken up his preferred observation post on the stool by the island, a small white sentinel ready to pass judgment.

“We’re making doenjang jjigae,” she announced.

Dalgom’s expression suggested he had several reservations about this plan but would withhold comment until the evidence presented itself.

“I’ve watched Suho make this approximately fifteen times,” she continued, more for her own benefit than his. “I know the steps. Anchovy stock first. Then paste. Then vegetables in order of density—potatoes first, then zucchini, then tofu last because it falls apart. Green onions at the end. Easy. Straightforward. I have seen this done by a man who was simultaneously reading a newspaper and humming off-key. I can do this.”

She opened the refrigerator. The interior was a portrait of a woman who viewed cooking as a theoretical concept: bottled water (three brands, each for a different purported benefit), leftover kimbap from two days ago (the seaweed looked suspiciously damp), six types of sauce (soy, gochujang, sesame oil, sriracha, something French with herbs floating in it, and one unlabeled bottle she was genuinely afraid to open), half a lemon turning a concerning shade of grey, and a glass container in the back that might have once held soup or possibly an experiment in microbial cultivation.

No doenjang. No tofu. No vegetables.

She closed the fridge. Opened it again, as if the ingredients might have materialized through sheer force of will. They had not.

“Right,” she said to Dalgom. “Grocery store.”

The Gangnam grocery store was a temple of curated abundance. Produce arranged by color gradient. Imported cheeses under glass. A wine section larger than Moonlight Stationery. Jisoo moved through the aisles with a basket, feeling like an anthropologist studying an alien culture. In 1994, the market vendor knew Suho by name and would slip an extra piece of fish or a handful of greens into his bag. Here, everything was wrapped in plastic and priced according to its carbon footprint.

She found the doenjang—an entire section devoted to fermented pastes, with artisanal brands boasting of heritage soybeans and traditional aging. She chose one at random. Tofu presented a crisis: soft, firm, extra-firm, silken, smoked, seasoned. In Gunsan, there was one kind. It came in a square block floating in water, and the old woman at the stall would cut it with a wire while telling Suho about her grandson’s grades. Jisoo stared at the wall of options, paralyzed, before grabbing a package labeled “firm.”

Zucchini, potatoes, green onions, garlic. Dried anchovies for stock—these, at least, looked familiar. She added rice to the basket, then paused. Did she own a rice cooker? She had a vague memory of receiving one as a brand gift, still in its box in some closet. She bought the rice anyway.

Back in her kitchen, she laid the ingredients on the marble counter. They looked small and lonely against the vast white expanse. Dalgom watched from his stool, ears perked.

“Anchovy stock first,” she muttered, filling a pot with water. She added the dried anchovies and a piece of kelp, the way she’d seen Suho do a dozen times. The water came to a boil, and the kitchen began to smell of the sea—salty, faintly funky, deeply familiar. A good start. She strained the stock into a bowl, feeling a flush of accomplishment.

Then she started chopping.

The garlic was her first mistake. Suho’s knife moved with a rhythmic, confident thwack-thwack-thwack, producing uniform minced pieces. Jisoo’s attempt resulted in something between a paste and a massacre. She scooped it into a pile. The zucchini fared worse. Her slices ranged from paper-thin translucent discs to hearty chunks that could have served as paperweights. The green onions, mercifully, were simple enough to manage—she cut them on a diagonal, the way he did, and felt a disproportionate surge of pride.

“See?” she said to Dalgom. “We’re doing it.”

He blinked slowly.

She heated the pot, added sesame oil. When it shimmered, she added the garlic paste. It immediately turned brown, then black, filling the kitchen with the acrid, eye-watering scent of burnt garlic. Dalgom jumped down from his stool and retreated to the living room without a backward glance.

“Traitor,” she called after him, scraping the blackened mess into the sink.

Second attempt. Lower heat. The garlic sizzled gently this time, releasing a fragrant, toasty aroma. She added the doenjang paste, stirring it into the oil until it bloomed, then poured in the anchovy stock. So far, so good. Potatoes in, then the uneven zucchini. The tofu, which she’d attempted to cube, crumbled in her hands—she’d squeezed too hard. It went into the pot in ragged chunks.

The jjigae bubbled, a murky, chaotic swamp of vegetables and disintegrating tofu. It smelled approximately correct—earthy, savory, warm—but looked nothing like Suho’s clean, amber-hued version with perfect cubes and uniform slices. Hers was a testament to struggle.

She ladled it into a bowl. The rice cooker—located after a five-minute search in a closet, still in its box—had performed its one job perfectly. She spooned rice into another bowl, the grains white and steaming.

She sat at the island. The kitchen was a disaster zone: cutting board littered with vegetable scraps, counters splattered with brown paste, a fine mist of anchovy stock coating the stove front. A thin haze of smoke lingered near the ceiling. Dalgom had not returned.

She looked at the meal. A C-minus, maybe a C. The paste ratio was off—too much, making it saltier than it should be. The potatoes were slightly undercooked at the center. The tofu had melted into the broth. But underneath the mistakes, the fundamental flavor was there—that deep, fermented, comforting warmth that tasted like small tables and evening light and a man humming while he stirred.

She took a bite. Then another. She ate the whole bowl, the warmth spreading through her chest. Her eyes stung. She told herself it was the residual smoke from the garlic incident. She knew it wasn’t the smoke.

After, she washed the dishes by hand. Not because the dishwasher was broken, but because she wanted to. She wanted her hands in warm, soapy water. She wanted the physical act of cleaning what she’d made. In Sooya’s kitchen, there was no dishwasher. Washing dishes was a nightly ritual—Suho washed, she dried, the radio playing something soft. Her hands in the water of her Gangnam sink felt like Sooya’s hands. The ghost-memory of domesticity, leaking across timelines.

She dried her hands slowly, looking at them—her 2026 hands. Manicured. Soft. These hands had held microphones and trophies and contracts worth more than some houses. Today, they had held a knife badly and burnt garlic and made a mediocre stew in an empty apartment, and it was the most real thing they had done in weeks.

She found Dalgom on the living room sofa, curled in a tight ball of disapproval. She picked him up, and he sniffed her cautiously.

“It wasn’t that bad. You didn’t even try it.”

He turned his head away.

“I made food, Dalgom-ah. From scratch. In this kitchen. That has never happened before. This is historic. You are witnessing culinary history.”

He sneezed.

“Fine. Don’t appreciate it.” She carried him to the couch, holding him against her chest. The apartment was quiet, the only sound the distant hum of the city. “Suho would have eaten it and said something nice. Suho always says something nice. Suho once called my burnt gyeran-mari ‘a new genre.’ You could learn from him.”

Dalgom licked her chin. It was the most supportive thing he’d ever done.

She rested her cheek against his fur. “I miss him, Dalgom-ah. I cooked his food in my kitchen because I miss him. That’s what this was. That’s what all of this is. I miss someone who doesn’t exist in this century, and I’m sitting in my apartment holding a dog and eating bad soup because that’s the closest I can get to being near him when I’m awake.”

He licked her again, and she closed her eyes, holding the small, warm weight of him until it was time to go to the office.

The BLISSOO writing room was a study in controlled chaos. A large table dominated the space, covered in two laptops, a scattering of notebooks, and approximately forty empty coffee cups in various stages of decomposition. A whiteboard spanned one wall, covered in episode breakdowns, character arcs, and arrows drawn in three different colors of marker that seemed to lead nowhere and everywhere at once.

Park Junho looked up as Jisoo entered, pushing his glasses up his nose. Mid-thirties, permanent five-o’clock shadow, wearing a wrinkled button-down that had likely been fresh yesterday morning, he was the kind of person who forgot to eat when he was deep in a script. He’d been working with Jisoo for a week now, and his expression whenever she handed him new pages was a fascinating mix of awe and profound confusion.

“You’re late,” he said, not unkindly. “I was about to send out a search party.”

“I was cooking.”

He blinked. “You cook?”

“Badly. But with feeling.” She slid into the chair opposite him, pulling out her phone. “I wrote something on the way over. It’s rough.”

“They’re always rough. And they’re always the best raw material I’ve ever worked with.” He accepted her phone, his eyes already scanning the text. “The shop reorganization scene? From the outline?”

“Yeah.”

He read. His eyebrows did a slow climb toward his hairline. He read it again, then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Where did this come from, Jisoo-ssi? This doesn’t read like a script. It reads like a diary.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“It’s the best kind. This level of detail—” He tapped the screen. “The way the husband folds receipts into perfect squares while he thinks. The specific thing she says about wrapping versus substance—‘if you wrap a cheap gift in beautiful paper, people think it’s expensive. If you wrap an expensive gift in newspaper, people think it’s cheap.’ The way she notices he checks paper quality by holding notebooks up to the light, not by feeling it. This isn’t invention. This is observation. From life.”

He looked at her across the table, his gaze sharp behind the lenses of his glasses. “You’ve never run a bookshop in a small town in the nineties, have you?”

“I have a good imagination.”

“No one has this good an imagination. You’re either lying, or you’re the most empathetic writer I’ve ever met.” He held up the phone. “This lunch scene. The husband’s quiet pride. The way he asks if he’s been doing it wrong all these years, and she reframes it as a packaging problem, not a product problem. That’s not a scene. That’s a therapy session disguised as dialogue. Where did it come from?”

Jisoo met his eyes. The truth sat on her tongue, heavy and impossible. I was there. I said those words to a man who loves me in another life. I watched his face change as he realized his wife saw him in a way no one else ever had.

“It just came to me,” she said, the lie smooth from practice.

Junho held her gaze for a beat longer, then sighed, replacing his glasses. “Fine. Keep your secrets. But if you ever decide to write a memoir, call me first. I want the adaptation rights.”

They worked through the afternoon, shaping the raw stream of her memory into proper teleplay format. The drama was taking shape—sixteen episodes, a slice-of-life structure that Jisoo had insisted on despite network hesitation. The female lead, Soo-jin, was both gentle and sharp, seeing the world in layers. The male lead, Seok-woo, was steady and funny and maddeningly patient. The bookshop was a character, the town was a character, and the pregnancy was a ticking clock and a promise simultaneously.

Junho raised a concern as they mapped out the mid-season arc. “The networks are going to resist this. No chaebols, no amnesia, no secret twins, no villain. The highest-stakes conflict is a chain bookstore opening two towns over. That’s not a hook—that’s a Tuesday.”

Jisoo didn’t look up from the whiteboard. “If the audience doesn’t care about whether a small bookshop survives, then we haven’t done our job. Make them care about the shop, and they’ll care about everything that happens inside it.”

“And if the network says no?”

“Then I self-finance. The Drama division in BLISSOO exists for projects like this. I didn’t start a company to make the same drama everyone else is making.”

Junho was quiet for a moment. She could feel him studying her. “You’re serious.”

“I’ve never been more serious about anything in my professional life.”

He wrote something in his notebook. She suspected it said she’s serious.

She was. This wasn’t a professional project; it was a personal confession disguised as entertainment. It was her holding up her secret life and saying: Look at this. Look at how beautiful this is. You don’t know it’s real, but feel it. Feel how real it is.

The brand appearance was at a Hello Kitty pop-up store in a major Gangnam mall—a temporary installation of pink and white and bows, swarming with young fans and harried parents. Jisoo did her job: photos with the giant Hello Kitty statue, a short greeting video for social media, smiling and waving and making heart shapes with her hands. She was warm, present, professional—a perfect simulacrum of Kim Jisoo, idol.

Afterward, Seri led her through the mall’s back corridors toward the parking garage. A shortcut through the children’s section of a department store. Jisoo was checking her phone, reviewing tomorrow’s schedule, only half-paying attention to her surroundings.

Then she saw them.

A mother, maybe in her early thirties, with a baby in her arms. The baby was tiny—three months old, perhaps—dressed in a yellow onesie with a small duck pattern on the chest.

The mother shifted the baby in her arms, the automatic micro-adjustments of someone who held this person all day, every day—a tilt of the hip, a subtle redistribution of weight, a hand coming up to cradle the downy head.

The baby turned.

Its eyes—unfocused, enormous, that particular newborn blue that seemed to see everything and nothing—landed on Jisoo.

They made eye contact. The baby stared with the unselfconscious intensity of a creature who had not yet learned that staring was rude. It was just looking. Just seeing. A tiny human existing at Jisoo with no agenda, no performance, no expectation.

Then the baby made a sound.

Not a cry. Not a laugh. Just a noise—a small, breathy, wet vocalization, the kind babies make when they are simply narrating their own existence. A tiny, unremarkable, completely devastating ah.

Something inside Jisoo’s chest opened.

Not broke. Opened. Like a door she didn’t know was there, swinging inward on silent hinges, revealing a room she didn’t know was inside her. The room was enormous and warm and it had been waiting for her, and it was full of a feeling she didn’t have a name for yet but would eventually call love, and it was the most terrifying thing she had ever felt because it belonged to a baby who didn’t exist in this century.

Her breath caught. Her phone, forgotten, hung loosely in her hand. The mall’s muffled sounds—the distant echo of a pop song, the hum of conversation, the squeak of stroller wheels—faded into a low roar. There was only the baby’s face, the yellow duck on its chest, the sound it had made.

The baby’s fist, small and perfect as a peony bud, waved vaguely in the air.

Jisoo’s own hand twitched at her side. An instinctive, muscular memory of a different belly, a different set of kicks beneath her palm. A phantom flutter, low and deep.

My baby is three months from being born, she thought, and the thought was a physical ache, a hollow pull beneath her ribs. And I cannot hold her. I cannot hold either of them.

“Jisoo-ya?” Seri’s voice, from two steps ahead. “Coming?”

Jisoo blinked. The world rushed back in—the fluorescent lights, the racks of tiny clothes, the mother now looking at her with a polite, questioning smile. Jisoo managed a weak smile in return, a slight nod, and moved her feet. She followed Seri, her legs feeling unconnected to her body.

In the car, Seri scrolled through her tablet. “The dinner tonight is at eight with Producer Kim. He’s pushing for a cameo in the next BLISSOO collaboration video. I’ve drafted some polite deflects, but you should be prepared for—”

“Unnie.”

Seri looked up from the tablet.

“I almost cried,” Jisoo said, her voice strangely calm. “Back there. Seeing that baby. I almost cried in the middle of the mall.”

Seri’s professional mask softened into concern. She studied Jisoo’s face. “Hormones? Have you had a check-up recently? You’ve been looking tired.”

Jisoo let out a small, helpless laugh. It sounded brittle. “No, it’s not that. I’m fine. Just… isn’t it weird? I’m not usually like that.”

But she knew why. Her body in 2026 was empty, but her heart—or her soul, or whatever part of her had been building a home for that other life—was full. She had been pregnant for weeks in another body. She had felt the quickening, the rolls, the hiccups. She had talked to a belly in the dark, her voice a low murmur meant for only one listener. She had watched a man kneel on a worn wooden floor, his ear pressed to her stomach, his eyes squeezed shut with joy as he felt his daughter move. A maternal map had been etched inside her across the swap, and a stranger’s baby in a yellow duck onesie had just traced its lines with a blinding light.

“You’re probably just tired,” Seri said gently, echoing Jisoo’s lie. “It’s been a lot. The drama development, the brand renewals… Let’s get you home after the dinner. Early night.”

Jisoo nodded, turning to look out the window at the streaming lights of Seoul. Early night, she thought. So I can go home to my other home.

Home. The word felt different now. Her penthouse was a home of sorts—a beautiful, silent, curated space. But it wasn’t the home that had opened inside her chest in the children’s department.

She ran a bath. The bathroom was a monument to modern luxury: marble floors heated from below, a freestanding tub large enough to swim in, a rainfall showerhead the size of a dinner plate. She sank into water scented with expensive oils, steam rising around her, and tried to feel the luxury. She only felt the water.

She thought about the bathroom in Gunsan. Tiny. The bathtub was short and deep, a relic from the seventies, with claws feet and enamel chipping at the edges. You couldn’t stretch out fully. The tiles were small and mint green, cracked in places. The mirror above the sink had a chip in the bottom left corner. She’d had her first true panic attack in that bathroom, gripping the cold porcelain sink, staring at a face that was hers and wasn’t, whispering this isn’t a dream, this isn’t a dream, this isn’t a dream until the words lost meaning.

She wasn’t panicking anymore. She wasn’t sure when she’d stopped. Somewhere between the diary and the hand-holding and the baby kicks and the shop reorganization, the sharp terror had dissolved, not into acceptance, but into something more active. Commitment. She had committed to this double life the way you commit to a person: not because you understand everything about them, not because it’s easy, but because you’re in it, and the person on the other side is worth the trouble.

She got out, water sluicing off her skin, and wrapped herself in a towel so plush it felt like a cloud. In Gunsan, the towels were thin and scratchy from years of sun-drying.

Pajamas. The couch. Dalgom a warm weight on her lap. The city glittered beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, a galaxy of artificial stars.

She picked up her phone and called her sister.

Jiyoon answered on the second ring. “What’s wrong?”

“Why does something have to be wrong?”

“Because you’re calling me at 9 PM on a weekday. You never call. You text memes. A call means crisis or pregnancy. Which is it?”

“Maybe I’m evolving.”

“Kim Jisoo.” Her sister’s voice was flat. “What’s wrong.”

Jisoo pulled Dalgom closer, his heartbeat a tiny drum against her palm. “Unnie, what was it like when you first had Sua? The actual moment they put her in your arms?”

A beat of silence. Then, cautious: “Why are you asking me this? Are you pregnant?”

“No! God, no. I’m just… curious.”

“You’re never ‘just curious.’ You’re the least casual person I know. Everything you do has seventeen layers. Try again.”

Jisoo smiled into the phone. Her sister knew her too well. “Fine. I… saw a baby today. And I felt something. Something big. And it scared me. So I’m asking.”

Jiyoon’s tone softened. “Ah. Okay.” A rustling sound, like she was settling into a couch. “The actual moment? It was terrifying. It hurt more than anything I’d ever experienced. The epidural only worked on one side, so I felt everything on the left. I screamed things at my husband I will take to my grave. And then… they put Sua on my chest. She was so small. And so angry. She was born angry, I swear. Red-faced, tiny fists clenched, screaming at the world for having the audacity to make her leave a perfectly good womb.” A fond laugh. “And I looked at this furious, tiny person and I thought: Oh. There you are. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Jisoo’s throat tightened. She pressed her fingers against her closed eyelids.

“But you want to know the really weird part?” Jiyoon continued, her voice dropping into a confessional tone. “The part nobody warns you about?”

“Yeah.”

“The moment I saw her face, I felt like I became someone other than myself. Not that I lost myself. I became more. Like I was suddenly two people. The woman I’d been my whole life, and also this new person—this mother—who had always existed inside me but only just arrived. Like I’d been one person my entire life, and then in a single second, I split in two, and both halves were me, and both halves were real.”

The words landed in the silent apartment with the weight of truth. Jisoo was quiet for a long time, listening to the faint staticky breath on the line, the hum of her own refrigerator, the distant wail of a siren many floors below.

“Yeah,” she whispered finally. “I think I kind of understand that.”

“Jisoo-ya.” All teasing was gone from Jiyoon’s voice now. “Do you have something to tell me? For real?”

She did. She had everything to tell her. I am two people, unnie. I have been two people for weeks. I am a singer and a CEO and a wife and a mother-in-progress, and I split in two every night, and both halves are me, and both halves are real, and I have never been more whole or more divided in my entire life.

The words piled up behind her teeth, a confession yearning to be born.

“No, unnie,” she said, her voice thick. “I’m just tired.”

“You’re always tired lately.”

“I’m a CEO and an idol. Tired is my brand.”

Jiyoon laughed, but it was concerned. “Call Mom this week. She worries.”

“I will.”

“And Jisoo-ya?”

“Yeah?”

“Whatever’s going on… you know you can tell me, right? Whenever you’re ready. I’m here.”

The simplest, kindest sentence. Jisoo’s eyes stung for what felt like the hundredth time that day. “I know, unnie. Thank you.”

She hung up and held the phone to her chest. Dalgom snuffled in his sleep. She looked at the pristine ceiling of her penthouse and thought of a different ceiling—wooden, slightly cracked, stained with a water mark in the corner that looked like a rabbit if you tilted your head just right.

She reached for the journal. Turned to a fresh page. Picked up the pink pen.

I am becoming two people, she wrote. I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know if I want to. The door that opened today… it doesn’t lead out. It leads in. And I think I have to walk through it.

She closed the journal. Turned off the light. Lay in the dark, one hand on Dalgom’s back, the other resting on her own flat, empty stomach, and waited for sleep to take her to the place that felt, increasingly, like the only place she was real.

1994 | Gunsan

The air changed first.

It was always the first thing she noticed in the moment of crossing. The sterile, filtered cool of her penthouse was replaced by the dense, living atmosphere of the Gunsan house. It carried the scent of wood polish and old paper, the faint salt of the sea through a window left cracked open overnight, and underneath it all, the warm, sweet smell of the rice straw matting on the floor.

Then the bed changed. The expansive, firm mattress became the softer, slightly sagging one that cradled her body in a familiar dip. The silken sheets became crisp, sun-dried cotton.

She opened her eyes.

Yellow morning light filtered through floral curtains, casting a soft, dappled pattern on the opposite wall. The ceiling—wooden, with its familiar hairline cracks and the water stain in the corner that looked, unmistakably, like a rabbit with one long ear.

She was here.

Her hands moved to her belly before her mind was fully awake. A reflex now. Her palms pressed flat against the rounded swell beneath the thin nightgown. Warm. Firm. Real.

She waited, holding her breath.

A kick. Immediate. Hard. A distinct, rolling thrust against her right palm, as if in greeting. As if to say, I’m still here. Where were you?

Jisoo let out a shuddering breath, her eyes closing. The kick reverberated up her arms and into the center of her chest, right where that door had opened in the Gangnam department store. It didn’t close the door. It swung it wider, filling that new, enormous room with a profound, resonant yes.

“I’m back,” she whispered into the quiet room, her voice rough with sleep and emotion. “I’m here.”

From downstairs, the sound of a radio, tuned low to a morning news program. The clatter of a pan. A soft, off-key humming.

Suho’s voice, warm and clear, floated up the stairs. “Sooya, are you awake? I’m making breakfast.”

She lay there for one more moment, hands on her belly, feeling the baby settle into a gentle, rhythmic pattern of movement. The smell of garlic and sesame oil frying, the sound of his humming, the feel of the old cotton sheets, the light through the curtains—it all wove together into a single, tangible sense of arrival.

For the first time, it did not feel like a displacement. It did not feel like waking up in the wrong body, in the wrong life. It felt like the opposite. It felt like the world clicking into alignment. It felt like the answer to a question she had been asking herself every morning for weeks: Where do I belong?

Here, she thought, as another kick nudged her palm. I belong here.

And also there. In the sterile kitchen with the burnt garlic. In the writing room with Junho. On the stage with a microphone in her hand. The truth, both terrifying and liberating, settled over her like the morning light: she belonged in both. And in the space between.

She got up, her body heavier, more grounded. She pulled on a robe and padded downstairs.

Suho stood at the stove, his back to her, one hand stirring something in a pan, the other holding a cup of coffee. He was humming a tune she didn’t recognize. The small kitchen was warm and full of light.

He turned, sensing her presence. His face broke into a smile that reached his eyes, crinkling the corners. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

She sat at the small table, watching him. He moved with an easy, practiced grace—flipping an omelette, sliding it onto a plate, adding a scoop of rice and a drizzle of soy sauce. He set the plate in front of her, then leaned down and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. It was a simple, domestic gesture that sent a wave of warmth through her.

He sat across from her with his own plate. They ate in comfortable silence for a few minutes, the only sounds the clink of utensils and the quiet radio.

“You were sleeping deeply,” he said eventually, glancing at her. “You didn’t even stir when I got up.”

Because I wasn’t here, she thought. My body was, but I was in another world, cooking your food badly and missing you.

“I was tired,” she said, which was true.

“The baby keeping you up?” He nodded toward her belly, his expression soft.

“Something like that.”

He studied her for a moment, his head tilted. “You seem… different today. Good different.”

She looked at him—really looked at him. The slight stubble on his jaw, the way his hair fell over his forehead, the familiar, kind lines of his face. He was asking the person in front of him to stay. Not a memory. Not a ghost. Her.

“I feel different,” she said, and it was the truest thing she’d said in either life.

She ate the food. It was perfect—the omelette fluffy, the rice perfectly seasoned. She thought of the doenjang jjigae she’d made in her other kitchen—the chaotic, salty, C-minus version. Two kitchens. One marble and empty, a stage for a performance of self-sufficiency. One wooden and full, the heart of a shared life.

She was a woman with two kitchens, two lives, two selves. Two sets of hands—one that held a microphone, one that held a husband’s hand in the dark. One belly flat and toned, one rounded with life. And for the first time, looking at the man smiling at her over a simple breakfast, she did not feel torn.

She felt expanded.

She reached across the table and took his free hand, lacing her fingers with his. He looked down at their joined hands, then back up at her, surprise and pleasure in his eyes.

“What’s this for?” he asked, his thumb stroking her knuckle.

She thought of the glass wall he’d named. She thought of the distance she’d built and the distance she’d crossed. She thought of the door that had opened inside her and the baby kicking beneath her ribs, a promise in a yellow duck onesie.

“Nothing,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Just wanted to hold it.”

He smiled, a slow, sweet smile that felt like coming home, and squeezed back.