Scenes From Someone Else's Life

2026 | Seoul

The transition was never gentle, but some mornings it felt like being dredged from the warm, silty bottom of a familiar river and dumped onto cold, sterile concrete. This was one of those mornings.

Jisoo opened her eyes to the pristine, soundproofed silence of her Gangnam apartment. For a disorienting second, her body expected the weight—the solid, forward pull of seven and a half months of pregnancy, the ache in her lower back that had become as constant as her own heartbeat. Instead, there was only the flat, unyielding plane of her stomach beneath the thousand-thread-count sheets. The absence was a physical shock, a phantom limb sensation that stole her breath every single time.

She lay perfectly still, letting the reality of 2026 settle over her like a fine, cold dust. The air smelled of nothing—of filtered, climate-controlled neutrality. No trace of sea salt from the Gunsan breeze, no lingering scent of the lemon balm Suho had started growing in a pot on the windowsill, no warm, yeasty smell of the bread Halmeoni sometimes sent over in the mornings. Just… clean nothing.

Her hand moved of its own volition, sliding from her chest down to her abdomen. The skin was smooth, taut. No hard curve, no fluttering kicks, no Dalbi. The routine grief was a practiced thing now, a sharp, quick puncture to the heart that she acknowledged and then set aside. She didn't have time to wallow. She had a performance to give.

With a sigh that felt ripped from a deeper place than her lungs, she pushed back the duvet and swung her legs over the side of the bed. The floor was cool beneath her feet. She padded to the walk-in closet, not turning on lights, moving by the faint blue glow of the city that seeped around the edges of the blackout curtains. Her purse was on the chaise lounge where she’d dropped it last night—a structured, buttery-soft leather thing that cost more than Suho’s monthly rent. She unzipped the inner pocket, the sound obscenely loud in the silence.

Her fingers found them immediately: the moon socks. White cotton, embroidered with silver crescent moons. She didn’t pull them out. She simply pressed her thumb against the bundle through the leather, feeling the softness, the raised texture of the thread. A two-second ritual. A grounding wire to a life that currently felt more like a dream than this sterile reality.

In the kitchen, the espresso machine hissed to life with a touch. The sound was aggressively modern. Dalgom was already stationed on his velvet stool by the island, a small, judgmental sentinel in the gloom. He watched her with dark, unblinking eyes as she poured the dark shot into a porcelain cup.

“Dalgom-ah,” she said, her voice raspy with sleep and displacement. “Today I’m going to kiss another man.”

He blinked slowly. Unimpressed.

“On camera. For work. A scripted kiss, rehearsed and blocked and lit by a team of professionals who will discuss the angle of my head and the part of my lips as if they’re engineering a bridge.” She took a sip, the bitterness a welcome anchor. “It will look beautiful. Cinematic. It will be the emotional climax of Episode Five. It will feel like absolutely nothing.”

She leaned against the cold marble countertop, the warmth of the cup seeping into her palms. “Because the man I’m kissing is not the man I kissed last night in a bedroom that smells like old paper and sea salt. He’s an actor. A very good, very kind actor, wearing clothes that my stylist bought from a vintage store to approximate what my husband wears. He’ll stand on a set built by carpenters from my descriptions of a shop that exists three decades in the past. And I have to look into his eyes and make the audience believe I’m falling in love, while all I can think about is how the color is wrong. Suho’s eyes are warmer. They have gold in them when the lamp is on.”

Dalgom yawned, a tiny, dismissive display of teeth.

“You’re right. Professionalism.” She set the cup down with a definitive click. “I’ll be the consummate professional. I’ll kiss the very nice, very handsome actor. I’ll say ‘good take’ in a steady voice. I’ll go to my dressing room and I will not sit there and compare the scent of his expensive cologne to Suho’s plain bar soap. I will not think about the way Suho’s hands always find my waist, like they’re checking I’m still there. I will not remember the sound the real floral curtains make when the night breeze touches them.”

She looked at the dog, who had begun meticulously cleaning one white paw. “I’m going to think about all of those things, aren’t I?”

Dalgom hopped off the stool and trotted out of the kitchen, his mission of morning judgment complete.

The drive to Paju was a blur of gray highway and the low hum of the electric car. Seri was beside her, tablet in hand, going through the day’s adjusted schedule. “Kwon wants to push through and get the first scene of Episode Five tonight. The… kiss scene.” Seri said the words carefully, neutrally, but her eyes flicked up to meet Jisoo’s in the rearview mirror.

“I know,” Jisoo said, looking out the window at the passing industrial complexes. “We discussed it.”

“Are you…” Seri trailed off, then seemed to rethink her question. “The blocking is finalized. Hajin’s team has been briefed. It’s closed set, essential crew only. Kwon’s orders.”

“Good.” Jisoo’s fingers found the edge of the moon socks in her purse again. A talisman. A lifeline.

“Jisoo-ya.” Seri’s voice was softer now. “You know you can… if you need a moment. However you need to handle it. We can make it work.”

However you need to handle it. The unspoken understanding hung in the air between them. Seri had listed her evidence months ago. She had seen the cracks, the discrepancies, the haunting in Jisoo’s eyes. And then, wisely, terribly, she had stepped back. She was in waiting mode. Watching. A silent guardian at the door Jisoo kept locked.

“I’ll be fine,” Jisoo said, and it wasn’t a lie. She would be fine. She would be exceptional. That was the terrible, beautiful irony of it all.

Soundstage 4 had become a second home, a world of fabricated reality that was, in its own way, as vivid as either of her real ones. The air smelled of sawdust, fresh paint, coffee, and the peculiar ozone scent of hot lighting equipment. Today, the bookshop set was dressed for Episode Four. It looked more lived-in than ever. The prop books on the shelves had been subtly rearranged between shoots, some left leaning open, a bookmark tucked between pages. The counter had a new, barely-visible scratch near the register—an accident from last week that the set decorator had decided to keep for authenticity. The wind chime, a perfect replica of the one in Gunsan, had developed a faint, real tarnish. It was no longer a set. It was a place. And standing in the middle of it, strapped into the prosthetic belly that was both a costume and a mockery, was profoundly disorienting.

The silicone weight was familiar, the way it pulled her center of gravity forward. But it was hollow. A shell. When she put her hands on it, as Soo-jin often did in moments of thought, she felt nothing but cool, unyielding latex. No kick. No flip. No Dalbi. It was the physical manifestation of her dissonance: performing motherhood while her real child existed in a different timeline entirely.

“Places for Scene Twelve, Episode Four!”

The scene was her negotiation with the publisher. The fictionalized, polished version of her own desperate, triumphant call in her other life. The rotary phone was a perfect replica, heavy and satisfyingly clunky in her hand. As she waited for the cue, her fingers traced the dial. The muscle memory was real. The wait between digits, the metallic click-whirr as the dial spun back—it was a rhythm written into her bones from another life.

“Action!”

Jisoo lifted the receiver. The sound of the dial tone was a specific, tinny buzz. “Yes, hello. This is Lee Soo-jin from The Moonlight Stationery Shop in Mirae.” Her voice was different as Soo-jin—softer at the edges, a little less sure. She pitched it slightly higher, let a thread of nervousness run through the professional veneer. The real Jisoo on that call had been all steel and desperate strategy, a CEO backed into a corner fighting for her shop’s survival. Soo-jin was just a wife, discovering she had teeth.

She negotiated. She held firm on the discount percentage, conceded gracefully on the delivery timeline, and sealed the deal with a polite but firm thank you. As she spoke, she was aware of Hajin—Seok-woo—lingering in the doorway of the set’s back room, watching. The script called for his expression to move through stages: confusion, surprise, dawning respect, a flicker of masculine pride being gently punctured, and finally, a soft, wondering admiration.

Hajin was a master of micro-expression. Jisoo saw it all play out on his face in her peripheral vision as she hung up the phone with a decisive click. The silence on set was perfect. She turned slowly, letting Soo-jin’s own surprise show—she hadn’t known he was there.

Their eyes met across the quiet shop.

“Did you just negotiate with a publisher?” Hajin’s voice was a mix of awe and bewilderment.

“Yes.” A simple, quiet word.

“On the phone.”

“That’s where publishers live,” Soo-jin said, and a tiny, defiant smile touched her lips. It was a line Jisoo had written, borrowing her own wit from a different conversation.

Seok-woo stared. Soo-jin stared back, the smile fading into something more vulnerable, a silent question: Is this okay? Am I still the woman you married?

The camera held on their locked gaze.

“Cut! God, that’s perfect. Print it. Moving on!”

The spell broke. Crew members shifted, lights were adjusted, the sound tech lowered his boom. Jisoo let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She walked to her producer’s chair, marked with her name, and sank into it. The prosthetic belly pressed uncomfortably against her ribs. Between her feet, she saw a stray fleck of faux sawdust from the shop floor. The detail was immaculate.

Her hand dipped into her open purse beside the chair. Not looking, she found the inner pocket. Pressed her thumb against the cotton. I’m here. You’re there. This is all for you, in a way I can never explain.

Tae-woong materialized, his face pale with sustained exhaustion, his clipboard a shield. “We’re ahead. If we break for dinner and come back, we can get the first scene of Five. The… you know.” He couldn’t even say it.

“The kiss,” Jisoo supplied, her voice flat.

“Yeah. That. Kwon thinks the momentum is right. The emotional continuity from today’s scene… it flows.”

Kwon approached, his hands shoved in his pockets. He didn’t mention his symphony metaphor. He just looked at her, his director’s eyes seeing too much. “The energy is right, Jisoo-ssi. It’s alive today. But only if you are.”

She thought of the real bedroom. The real lamp. The real man who was, at this moment in 1994, probably deep in sleep beside her, one hand protectively dropped over her belly.

“I’m ready,” she said.

The transformation of the set for Episode Five was a quiet, reverent process. The bookshop was shrouded in protective cloth, and the crew focused on the small bedroom constructed in the far corner of the soundstage. Jisoo watched from the shadows as they worked.

They hung the curtains—the floral pattern she had sketched from memory, the fabric sourced from a vintage market in Incheon. They dressed the nightstand: a simple wooden lamp with a rice-paper shade (they’d swapped the bulb for a warmer, lower-wattage one at her request), a paperback book with a cracked spine, a glass of water. The bed was made with plain cotton sheets, slightly rumpled. The set decorator, a woman with kind eyes named Min-kyung, placed a pair of wire-frame glasses on the nightstand. They were a generic prop, but the way she angled them, folded neatly with the arms outstretched, made Jisoo’s throat tighten. It was exactly how Suho placed his.

“Does it look right, Jisoo-ssi?” Min-kyung asked, stepping back.