The Glitch

1994 | Gunsan

The shop smelled of old paper, lemon polish, and the faint, sweet scent of the evening rain that had just begun to patter against the windows. It was a Tuesday. A normal Tuesday. The kind of day that should have been unremarkable in the gentle rhythm of their lives.

Lee Soo-ya—her body, her life, her reality for the last sixteen hours—stood behind the counter, her palms flat on the worn wood. The cash register was closed. The ‘OPEN’ sign had been flipped to ‘CLOSED’ thirty minutes ago. The last of the daylight, a watery grey-blue, was leaching from the sky over Gunsan, leaving the shop in pools of warm lamplight.

Suho was in the back, humming something off-key—a trot song she vaguely recognized from the radio. The sound was accompanied by the soft rustle of paper and the occasional thump of a box being shifted. Inventory. He did it every Tuesday evening, a ritual as dependable as the tide. He believed in knowing exactly what they had, where it was, how much it cost. It was his way of loving the shop—through meticulous, tangible care.

Jisoo should have been upstairs. Resting. That was the agreement, the gentle, unspoken rule that had settled over them since her belly had rounded into its unmistakable, eight-month curve. You work the shop, I handle the heavy lifting, you rest in the evenings. A fair division of labor, Suho called it, his hand always finding the small of her back as he said it, guiding her towards the stairs.

But tonight, rest was the enemy. Rest was data not collected.

She wasn’t tired. Not really. Or rather, she was, but it was a tiredness she had courted, a fatigue she was measuring by the hour. Since Dr. Yoon’s visit two weeks ago, a new, chilling variable had been introduced into the already-impossible equation of her existence.

First-time labor can be unpredictable, Soo-ya. Averages are just averages. It could be eight hours. It could be twelve. It could stretch to twenty or more. The body sets its own pace.

Twenty hours. The number had taken root in her brain, a thorny vine of pure panic. Her forced-sleep limit—the wall her body hit when she’d pushed her waking hours in one timeline to its absolute brink—was somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-four hours. She’d never dared to find the exact edge. Not until now.

The math was brutally simple. If she swapped into 1994 at her usual 6 AM, and labor began at, say, 8 AM, she had a theoretical window of fourteen to sixteen hours of consciousness before the mechanism would forcibly shut her down and send her back to 2026. If labor lasted twenty hours… she would vanish from Suho’s side, from the delivery room, from her own child’s first breath, somewhere around hour sixteen. She would collapse into a sleep so deep not even pain could penetrate it, and wake up alone in a future where her daughter did not exist.

The thought was unendurable. It was a form of death she hadn’t considered.

So, she had begun to test. Small, careful breaches of the routine. Staying up an hour later than usual. Skipping her afternoon nap. Noting in her journal how her body felt, where the pressure points of exhaustion first appeared. It was reconnaissance. A soldier mapping the minefield she was forced to cross.

Tonight was to be the final, decisive push. Not a dramatic, flailing experiment, but a controlled, necessary stress test. She needed to know the exact location of the wall. How many steps she had before she hit it. Her own personal countdown.

“Soo-ya?” Suho’s voice called from the back room, cutting through the hum of the rain and her own spiraling thoughts. “You still down there? You should be upstairs with your feet up. Halmeoni brought those dumplings, remember? I can reheat them.”

She made her voice light, a practiced trick. “In a minute! Just… straightening the display up front. The kids’ section is a disaster zone after story hour.”

A soft chuckle. “They’re enthusiastic readers. I’ll take the mess. Come up when you’re ready. Don’t make me come get you.”

“You’re not my boss, Lim Suho.”

“I’m your husband. It’s worse.”

She smiled, a real one that touched her eyes. The ease of it, the normalcy, was a painful counterpoint to the secret calculation running in her head. 13:47, her internal clock ticked. Thirteen hours and forty-seven minutes of continuous consciousness in this body. She’d woken up in Gunsan at 6:03 AM, heart hammering from a dream of a soundstage she couldn’t remember. She’d been awake ever since.

9:00 PM. Approximately 15 hours awake.

Suho came out of the back, wiping his hands on a cloth. His glasses were slightly askew, and a smudge of dust decorated his left cheekbone. He looked warm and real and utterly beloved. He walked over to her, his gaze immediately dropping to her feet. “You’ve been standing too long. Your ankles are going to swell.”

“They’re fine.”

“They’re about to stage a rebellion. I can see it in their puffy demeanor.” He slid an arm around her waist, his hand splaying over the immense curve of Dalbi. “Upstairs. Now. Doctor’s orders.”

“You’re not a doctor.”

“I play one in my dreams. Very convincing.” He began to gently steer her toward the staircase. “Come on. I’ll rub them for you. I bought that lavender lotion Mina-ssi recommended.”

The temptation was profound. To give in. To let the warmth of him and the promise of comfort override the cold, clinical need for data. But the number twenty loomed in her mind.

She planted her feet. “I’m not sleepy yet, Suho-ya. Really. My brain is… buzzing. I think I’ll read for a bit down here. The light is better.”

He stopped, his arm still around her. He searched her face. This was the third night this week she’d claimed a late-night burst of energy. “You’ve been buzzing a lot lately,” he said softly, no accusation, just observation. “Everything okay? Is it anxiety? About the delivery? We can talk to Dr. Yoon again—”

“It’s not anxiety,” she interrupted, too quickly. She forced another smile, patting his chest. “It’s just… nesting, or something. Pregnant lady brain. You go on up. I’ll be there soon. I promise.”

He hesitated, his warm brown eyes seeing too much, as always. But he kissed her forehead, his lips lingering. “Don’t stay up too late. You need your strength.”

“I know.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

He headed upstairs, his footsteps heavy on the wooden steps. She listened until she heard the creak of the bedframe, the soft sigh of the mattress accepting his weight. She waited five full minutes, standing perfectly still in the silent shop, before she let her shoulders slump.

Okay, she thought, walking slowly to the kettle. Phase one: clear. Subject has successfully evaded normal sleep protocol. The experiment continues.

11:00 PM. 17 hours awake.

The buzz had become a drone. A low, insistent hum of fatigue behind her eyes. The shop was dark now, save for the small lamp on the reading table. She had turned off the main lights, a pointless attempt to trick her circadian rhythm. She was pacing a slow circuit around the central display—past the new releases, around the calligraphy corner, behind the counter, and back again. The floorboards whispered under her slippers.

She’d made a pot of barley tea. The nutty, toasted aroma usually soothed her. Now it tasted like lukewarm obligation. She drank it anyway. Caffeine was out of the question; it would cross the placental barrier to Dalbi, and the last thing she needed was a caffeinated fetus kicking her into early labor. So it was barley tea, or water, or the grim acceptance of gathering exhaustion.

She had tried to read. She’d picked up a novel from the recommended shelf—a domestic drama about a family running a boarding house in 1970s Seoul. She’d read the same paragraph seven times. The words swam on the page, losing meaning.

Fine. Mental exercises.

She moved to the cleared space by the children’s rug, where they held story hour. She stood with her hands on her hips, her belly a monumental obstacle in the quiet dark.

“Alright,” she whispered. “Ddu-du Ddu-du.”

She began to move, or as much as one could move at eight months pregnant. She mimed the opening pose, the sharp head turn. She attempted a modified hip roll, which resulted in a clumsy stagger and a profound ache in her lower back. Dalbi kicked, a sharp thump right under her ribs, as if in protest.

“Your mother is conducting scientific research,” Jisoo muttered, steadying herself against a bookshelf. “The scientific question is: how long can a pregnant woman from the future stay awake in the past before the universe intervenes and says ‘enough’? The hypothesis is approximately twenty-two hours. We are currently testing that hypothesis. Your cooperation would be appreciated.”

Another kick. Less sharp. More of a rolling nudge.

“Noted. You’re a harsh critic.”

She gave up on choreography. She recited the lyrics instead, under her breath. Then the lyrics to Kill This Love. Then Earthquake. Her brain, trained for recall, delivered them flawlessly for the first three songs. By the fourth, she found herself substituting words.

“I’m so sick of this… barley tea…” she mumbled, pacing again. “I’m so sick of pretending I’m not… about to fall over…”

She stopped, gripping the edge of the counter. The tiredness was no longer a hum. It was a weight, a physical presence settling onto her shoulders, pressing down on the crown of her head, seeping into her bones. Seventeen hours was a long day for anyone. Seventeen hours while housing a nearly full-term human being was a marathon. Her feet throbbed. Her back was a solid bar of pain. The skin over her stomach felt stretched to its absolute limit, tight and hot.

She looked at the staircase. The path to bed. To Suho’s warmth. To surrender.

No. Not yet. You need to know. For her. For him. For you.

1:00 AM. 19 hours awake.

The house was a tomb of silence. The rain had stopped. The only sounds were the occasional groan of the old plumbing and the relentless, deafening tick of the wall clock above the door.

Jisoo was in the living area of their upstairs apartment, sitting in Suho’s armchair. She had given up on pacing. Her body was too heavy. The baby was restless, a constant, squirming agitation that felt less like movement and more like a silent scream against the confines of her womb. Let me out, let me sleep, let us both rest.

She had resorted to sorting. It was mindless, tactile. She had taken the entire basket of freshly laundered baby clothes—the tiny socks, the bonnets, the stack of cloth diapers Halmeoni had hemmed—and dumped them onto the low table. Now she was folding them. Again. They were already folded. She was unfolding and refolding them, her movements slow, deliberate, pointless.

Each tiny garment was a stab of love and terror. This yellow duck onesie. These white socks with the rabbits. The embroidered blanket. They were for a baby who might be born while her mother was unconscious in another century.

Her vision blurred. She wasn’t sure if it was tears or exhaustion. She blinked hard.

Come on, Jisoo. You’ve pulled all-nighters before. For comebacks. For drama scripts. This is no different.

But it was. It was completely different. This wasn’t adrenaline and ambition pushing her through. This was dread, cold and clinical, performing a destructive audit of her own biology.

She finished refolding a diaper for the third time. She placed it on the ‘finished’ pile. Her hand shook.

3:00 AM. 21 hours awake.

The wall clock’s tick was inside her skull.

She was at the kitchen table, the same spot where they ate breakfast, where Suho did the books, where she had sketched him a hundred times. Her hands were wrapped around a stoneware mug. The tea inside had gone cold hours ago. She couldn’t remember taking the last sip.

She was staring at a point on the opposite wall. A small, faint water stain shaped vaguely like a bird. She had been staring at it for an unknown length of time. Minutes? An hour? Her eyes were open, dry and burning, but she wasn’t seeing it. Her mind had detached. It was floating somewhere above her body, observing the pathetic, stubborn tableau: Pregnant woman. Kitchen. 3 AM. Breaking point approaching.

Her body was a foreign country. A heavy, aching, rebellious territory. Every cell screamed for sleep. Her muscles had dissolved into lead. Her head felt too large for her neck, lolling slightly unless she consciously forced it upright. The baby’s movements had become slow, languid rolls, as if Dalbi, too, was succumbing to the overwhelming fatigue of her host.

But her will was a separate, sharp thing. A scalpel of pure fear.

One more hour. Just one. See what twenty-two feels like. If you can make it to twenty-two, you’ll know the absolute edge. If labor runs to twenty, you’ll have a two-hour buffer. Two hours could be everything. Two hours could be the difference between holding her and losing her.

Two hours. A buffer of 120 minutes against the abyss.

It was worth it. This pain, this dizziness, this feeling of her mind unraveling at the edges—it was worth it for that buffer.

She heard Suho’s soft, rhythmic snoring from the bedroom. The sound was a lifeline and a torture. He was safe. He was asleep. He trusted the world to be intact when he woke. He had no idea his wife was sitting in the dark, conducting a secret, desperate stress test on the fabric of their reality.

A tear finally escaped, tracing a cool path down her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away.

4:07 AM. 22 hours and 4 minutes awake.

It did not come as drowsiness.

It did not come as a gradual dimming of the lights, a gentle sway into unconsciousness.

It came as a physical law asserting itself. A circuit breaker firing.

One second, she was sitting upright at the kitchen table, her spine held in a rigid, desperate line against the chair back, her hands still clasped around the cold mug.

The next second, her vision tunneled violently. The world narrowed to a pinhole of the water-stain bird, then winked out. Not black, but a sudden, profound absence of input.

At the same moment, every muscle in her body—the clenched jaw, the aching back, the legs she’d been pressing firmly into the floor—went completely, utterly slack. It was not a collapse of strength; it was a total, instantaneous withdrawal of the command to engage.

Her grip vanished. The stoneware mug tipped forward, struck the edge of the table with a dull clunk, and rolled onto the floor. It did not shatter. It spun in a wobbly circle on its side, coming to a rest against the leg of a chair.

Her body listed sideways. There was no attempt to catch herself. No hand shot out. Her shoulder hit the table edge, a soft, heavy thud, and then gravity took over. She slid from the chair, a slow, boneless descent. Her back met the lower cabinet doors, her legs splayed out in front of her, her enormous belly cradled in her lap like a separate, sleeping entity. Her head lolled to the side, coming to rest against the cabinet knob, her dark hair fanning across her face.

She was unconscious before the final settling. The forced-sleep mechanism, pushed to its absolute limit, had activated with the finality of a guillotine. This was not sleep. It was a system shutdown. A deep, neural override that plunged her into a darkness so complete, so impenetrable, that not even dreams could penetrate it.

In the last fragment of her splintering consciousness, a final, coherent thought flickered:

Data point recorded. Twenty-two hours. Buffer established.

And then, nothing.

The house was silent again. The clock ticked. The spilled tea formed a small, dark puddle on the floorboards. Upstairs, Suho turned in his sleep, murmuring something unintelligible, and settled deeper into his dreams.

2026 | Seoul

She woke to light. A clean, expansive, neutral light pouring through floor-to-ceiling windows. The ceiling was smooth, matte white. The air smelled of filtered circulation and the faint, expensive scent of linen spray.

2026.

Kim Jisoo blinked. Her mind surfaced slowly, thick with the residue of a sleep that had felt more like being submerged in tar. She was groggy in a specific, familiar way—the forced-sleep hangover. A hollow, wrung-out feeling behind her eyes, a slight metallic taste in her mouth. Her body felt light. Too light.

She sat up. The movement was automatic. The bedsheets were high-thread-count cotton, cool against her skin. The other side of the bed was empty, pristine.

Dalgom was sitting on his velvet cushion by the window, staring at her. His head was tilted, his dark eyes holding their usual blend of canine judgment and vague concern.

“Morning,” she croaked at him. Her voice was sandpaper.

She swung her legs out. The floor was polished concrete, shockingly cold on her bare feet. She stood, a little unsteady, and padded to the bathroom. The ritual was mechanical: flip the light switch (on the left, not the right), blink at her reflection.

Kim Jisoo, 31. No dark circles today, oddly. The forced sleep, for all its violence, was efficient. It left her skin pale but clear, her eyes oddly blank. The face in the mirror was hers, but it felt like a mask waiting for its wearer to animate it.

She turned on the shower, the water pressure perfect and instantaneous. As she stood under the spray, the events of the previous night—the last night—reassembled themselves in her mind with cold clarity.

The shop. The pacing. The cold tea. The counting. The final, definitive slump to the kitchen floor.

I did it, she thought, a spark of grim triumph cutting through the fog. I hit the wall. Twenty-two hours. Maybe a few minutes over. That’s the number.

The data was crucial. It was worth the ache in her bones, the strange emptiness in her limbs. She had a buffer now. A concrete number to plan around. If labor started early in the day… she ran the calculations automatically as she shampooed her hair. If I arrive at 6 AM, labor starts at 8 AM, twenty-hour labor… I have until 4 AM the next day. That’s… twenty hours in 1994. A two-hour buffer before forced sleep. It’s tight, but it’s possible. I can make that work.

The fear that had driven her to the kitchen floor receded, soothed by the certainty of the number. She had pushed the system, and it had responded predictably. It was a hard limit, but it was a known limit. Known things could be managed.

She finished her shower, dressed in soft, tailored athleisure wear—clothes for a day of sedentary, air-conditioned work. She made a single espresso at the machine, the sound a sharp, modern counterpoint to the memory of a whistling kettle in a 1994 kitchen. She drank it standing at the island, scrolling through her phone.

Seri had sent the day’s schedule. A 10 AM conference call with the network’s promotion team to finalize the premiere week itinerary. A 1 PM fitting for the premiere dress—a last-minute adjustment. A 3 PM meeting with Kwon and Junho to discuss post-production publicity for the drama. A normal day. A 2026 day.

The vague unease she felt, she attributed to the hangover. The forced-sleep mechanism always left her emotionally thin, slightly detached, as if her feelings were being viewed through a pane of thick glass. It would pass. By tonight, after a normal sleep, she’d swap back to Gunsan. She’d see Suho. She’d tell him, in some vague way, that she’d had a restless night. He’d fuss. He’d make her tea. Normalcy would reassert itself.

She went through the motions of the day. The conference call was a blur of percentages, audience demographics, and hashtag strategies. Her voice sounded competent, slightly distant, even to her own ears. During the fitting, the designer’s assistant pinned the delicate silk of the gown, murmuring about the “graceful line” of her figure. Jisoo stared at her own reflection in the three-way mirror—sleek, flat-stomached, adorned—and felt a dizzying sense of dislocation.

The meeting with Kwon and Junho was in a quiet, book-lined conference room at the production company’s offices. Kwon was energized, talking about the “critical resonance” of the final cut. Junho was more subdued, watching Jisoo closely.

“You’re quiet, sunbae,” Hajin said, pouring her a glass of water from the pitcher on the table. He’d started calling her ‘sunbae’ exclusively on set and in meetings, a respectful boundary she appreciated.

“Just tired,” she said, offering a small smile. “Pre-premiere brain fog.”

Kwon waved a hand. “Quiet is good. Quiet means she’s listening. The best notes come from silence.”

But the silence in Jisoo’s head wasn’t contemplative. It was the silence of a clock not ticking. A background hum of wrongness she couldn’t pinpoint.

She returned to her apartment as evening settled over Seoul. The city glittered, a vast circuit board of ambition and light. She ordered soup, ate half of it. She wrote a brief, bland entry in her journal: April 9, 2026. Pre-premiere meetings. Successful forced-sleep limit test: 22 hours. Buffer established. She did not write the words that hovered beneath: I am afraid.

The moon socks were in her purse. She took them out and placed them on the nightstand, a tiny ritual. A promise to herself. Tonight, I go back.

She performed her bedtime routine with meticulous care. Skincare. A glass of water. Lights off. Dalgom settling at the foot of the bed with a soft grunt. She closed her eyes. She focused on the memories that usually served as her lullaby: Suho’s off-key humming. The feel of his flannel shirt under her cheek. The solid, living kick of Dalbi against her palm. The smell of the shop after rain.

She fell asleep. Naturally. Deeply.

She opened her eyes.

Light. Expansive, neutral light through floor-to-ceiling windows. A white ceiling. The faint hum of the air system.

Her heart gave a single, hard thump against her ribs.

She didn’t move. She just stared at the ceiling. No.

Slowly, she turned her head. The digital clock on her nightstand glowed: 7:14 AM.

She sat up. The movement was sharp, jerky. She looked at the other side of the bed. Empty. She looked down at her own body, clad in silk pajamas. Flat stomach. She pressed a hand there anyway, as if she could summon the curve by will.

Nothing.

For five full seconds, her brain refused to process the input. It was a system error. A glitch. She had slept. Natural, nighttime sleep. The trigger had been met. The swap should have occurred. She should be waking up to floral curtains, to the sound of sparrows, to Suho’s face on the pillow beside her.

She was in her Gangnam apartment. Alone.

A cold, thin wire of fear threaded through her veins.

Okay. Okay. Don’t panic. There’s an explanation.

Maybe her sleep wasn’t deep enough. The forced-sleep hangover could have disrupted her sleep architecture. Maybe she needed to truly, fully relax.

She lay back down. She forced her muscles to go limp. She focused on her breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth. She counted backwards from one hundred. She imagined herself sinking into the mattress, through the floor, into the earth.

She drifted into a light, anxious doze.

She woke with a gasp forty minutes later. The clock read 7:58 AM.

Still 2026.

The cold wire of fear became a spike, driving up from her stomach into her throat. She scrambled out of bed, her heart hammering now, a frantic drum against her breastbone.

“No,” she said aloud, her voice strange in the quiet room. “No, no, no.”

Dalgom lifted his head, watching her pace from his cushion.

She went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face. She stared at her reflection—wide eyes, pale skin. “This isn’t happening,” she told the mirror. The mirror showed her it was.

Day 1 of being trapped began in earnest.

The only positive thing going for her today was her schedule. It was cleared for the whole day. A rare weekend of some sort—Seri's order. So, she dedicated her whole day to go back to Gunsan somehow. Her first strategy was warmth, immersion. At 11 AM, she ran a bath as hot as she could stand. She poured in lavender oil. She submerged herself, the water enveloping her light, wrong-feeling body. She closed her eyes. The heat seeped into her bones, coaxing a heavy lethargy. Her head nodded. She slipped under the surface for a second, jerking upright with a splash, coughing. She stayed until her fingers pruned and the water lost all its heat. She dried off, wrapped herself in a robe, and lay on her bed.

Sleep came—a thin, unsatisfying sleep full of fragmented images: a stage with no audience, a door that wouldn’t open, a baby crying somewhere far away. She woke an hour later, the room bright with afternoon sun.

2026.

The spike of fear was now a permanent resident, a cold stone in her gut.

Next: chamomile tea. She hated the floral, hay-like taste. She brewed a strong pot, drank two cups while standing at the kitchen island, watching the city below. The caffeine-free warmth did nothing but make her feel slightly nauseous.

Meditation. She opened an app on her phone, selected “Anxiety Release.” A calm voice instructed her to find a comfortable position. She lay on her living room rug. “Breathe in for four… hold for seven… exhale for eight…” Her heart refused to comply. It raced ahead of the count, a trapped bird fluttering against her ribs. She gave up after eight minutes, tossing her phone onto the couch.

The apartment felt enormous. A sleek, sterile cage. The silence was no longer peaceful; it was accusatory. Every tick of the hidden machinery, every faint sigh of the climate control, felt like a countdown to a verdict she didn’t want to hear.

She paced. From the living room to the kitchen, around the island, to the window wall, back to the living room. A tight, meaningless circuit. Dalgom abandoned his cushion and followed her, a small white shadow padding silently at her heels. He knew. He always knew.

After her third lap, she stopped abruptly. He stopped, too, sitting and looking up at her, his head tilted.

“Dalgom-ah,” she said, her voice thin, stripped of all its usual performative wit. “Something’s wrong.”

He blinked.

“The swap didn’t work. I slept—really, properly slept—and I’m still here.” She crouched down, wincing at the ache in her knees that wasn’t from pregnancy. She took his small face in her trembling hands. “I think I broke something. Last night. In Gunsan. I pushed too hard. I stayed awake for twenty-two hours. I hit the forced-sleep wall. I think… I think the mechanism couldn’t handle it. I think I overloaded the system.”

He licked her thumb, a rough, warm swipe.

“What if it’s broken for good?” The whisper was the sound of pure dread. “What if the bridge is gone? What if I can never go back?”

She stood up and walked to the window, pressing her forehead against the cool glass. The view was a panorama of her success: towering buildings, neon signs, the endless flow of traffic. It was the city she had conquered. It had never felt more alien, more hollow.

“Suho-ya,” she breathed, the name fogging the glass. “Dalbi-ya.”

There was no answer. Only the immutable skyline.

By mid-afternoon, desperation adopted a new, grim logic. If natural sleep won’t trigger it, maybe artificial depth will.

She closed all the blackout curtains in her bedroom, plunging the room into a perfect, pitch darkness. She set no alarm. She lay in the center of her large bed, the moon socks clutched in one fist. She focused on the darkness behind her eyelids, on the sound of her own breathing. She willed herself into oblivion.

Exhaustion, both from the previous night’s ordeal and the day’s panic, finally pulled her under. She slept for two heavy, dreamless hours.

She woke at 4 PM. The digital clock’s red numerals were the only light in the room.

2026.

The stone of fear in her gut turned to ice. A full-body chill washed over her, leaving her skin clammy.

She got up. She opened the curtains. The sun was already beginning its descent, casting long, distorted shadows across the buildings. The day was slipping away. A full day in 2026. A day of life in Gunsan, lived without her. What were they doing? Was Suho worried? Had he found her? Was she—Sooya’s body—still asleep on the kitchen floor?

The thought was a physical blow. She staggered, bracing herself against the window frame.

No. He would have found her by now. He would have… He would be terrified.

She had to get back. She had to fix it.

She went to bed at 9 PM, earlier than she had since she was a trainee. The rituals were performed with frantic precision: cleanse, tone, moisturize. Silk pajamas. Glass of water. Moon socks placed neatly on the nightstand. Dalgom watching from the doorway.

She got into bed. She closed her eyes. And then she began to bargain.

Please. The prayer was wordless at first, a sheer force of need directed at the unseen mechanics of her universe. Please, let me go back. I’ll do anything. I’ll never push the limits again. I’ll never test you. I’ll never take a single swap for granted. I’ll be grateful for every second. Just let me go back. Let me see them. Let me know they’re okay.

She thought of Suho’s face, the scar on his eyebrow, the way his eyes disappeared when he laughed. She thought of Dalbi’s kicks, the hiccups that fluttered like butterfly wings. She thought of the shop, of Halmeoni’s dumplings, of the yellow blanket in the crib.

Please.

She fell asleep with tears drying on her temples.

This time, she dreamed. A proper, chaotic dream. She was on a vast, dark stage. The spotlight was on her, but it was cold, clinical. She was supposed to perform, but she couldn’t remember the steps. The audience was invisible, but she could feel them out there, waiting. The stage kept expanding, the floorboards stretching away into infinite blackness, and she was alone in the center, shrinking, unable to move or speak.

She woke with a gasp at 3 AM. The room was dark. The city lights bled around the edges of the curtains. Her fist was clenched so tightly her nails had bitten half-moon crescents into her palm. The moon socks were damp with sweat.

She was still here.

A sound escaped her—a raw, choked thing that was part sob, part scream of frustration. She threw back the covers and got out of bed. She couldn’t lie in the silence anymore.

She wandered into the living room, wrapping herself in a cashmere throw from the couch. She turned on the television, muting it immediately. The screen flickered with the garish colors of a late-night infomercial. A man with improbably white teeth was demonstrating a food processor, slicing vegetables with violent, enthusiastic chops. She stared, unseeing. The silent, frantic pantomime of domestic efficiency was a surreal counterpoint to the utter collapse of her own reality.

Dalgom appeared. He didn’t sit on his cushion. He walked over to the couch where she sat, stared at her for a moment, and then, in an unprecedented breach of his own aloof protocol, he jumped up. He climbed into her lap, turned three tight circles, and settled, a warm, solid weight against her flat, empty stomach.

The gesture undid her completely.

She wrapped her arms around his small body, buried her face in his fur, and wept. Not the silent tears of the afternoon, but deep, shuddering sobs that wracked her entire frame. He endured it, his body tense at first, then gradually relaxing, a quiet anchor in her storm.

“I’m scared, Dalgom-ah,” she whispered into his fur, her voice shattered. “I’m really, really scared.”

He shifted, licked her wrist once, and rested his head on her arm. His heartbeat, rapid and light, thumped against her chest. In the silent, glowing room, with the mute TV casting shifting shadows, it was the only heartbeat she could feel in this entire world. It was the only proof that she was still alive, and not already a ghost in both of her lives.

Dawn arrived not as a gentle lightening but as a slow, inevitable bleaching of the darkness outside her windows. The infomercial had given way to a serene, soundless program about bamboo forests. Jisoo hadn’t moved. Dalgom’s weight on her lap was the only tether holding her body to the earth. The cashmere throw was damp in spots from her tears, now dry.

Her phone buzzed on the coffee table, a violent, mechanical chirp in the silence. It was 7:30 AM. The schedule reminder.

The professional world, indifferent to her private cataclysm, was demanding her return.

She read the notifications with eyes that felt scraped raw. Promotional photo session for The Moonlight Stationery Shop at 10 AM. Network coordination meeting at 1 PM. Final review of the first episode’s broadcast cut at 4 PM. The premiere was in eight days. The machinery she had built—with her money, her memory, her longing—required its figurehead. If she went dark now, Seri would escalate. The network would panic. The launch would wobble. She could not let the artifact of her grief for one world destroy the life she had in this one. The irony was a metallic taste in her mouth.

She moved Dalgom gently, his body stiff from hours of stillness. She stood. Her limbs were heavy, filled with sand. The walk to the bathroom was a marathon.

In the mirror, a stranger looked back. Pale. Hollow-eyed. The face of someone who had been crying in the dark for hours. She reached for her makeup bag, her movements automatic. This was not vanity; it was armor plating. Foundation smoothed over the pallor. Concealer, thick and creamy, painted under eyes so dark they looked bruised. Powder set it. Blush, a faint sweep of peach, imposed a false vitality. Mascara coated her lashes; her hand was eerily steady, a disconnect between the tremors inside and the clinical precision of her fingers.

She dressed in a black turtleneck and tailored trousers—the uniform of Kim Jisoo, CEO. She looked in the full-length mirror. Functional. Professional. Slightly tired, but within the acceptable range for a woman carrying a multi-billion-won production days from its premiere. The mirror showed the armor. It did not show the screaming thing locked inside the suit.

The photo shoot was on Soundstage 4, on the meticulously recreated bookshop set. The air smelled of new lumber and artificial dust. The prosthetic belly, a silicone and fabric construct, was strapped to her with a complex web of harnesses. An assistant adjusted it, her hands impersonal and efficient. The weight settled against Jisoo’s hips—a hollow, dead weight. In Gunsan, her real belly, heavy with a living child, had not felt her conscious touch in over hours.

Hajin, already in costume as Seok-woo in his simple sweater and glasses, gave her a small, professional nod. “Sunbae.”

“Hajin-ssi.”

The photographer directed them with a stream of cheerful commands. “Arm around her waist—yes, there. Both look at the camera. Good. Now, Soo-jin, look up at him. Think of a secret. A happy secret.”

Jisoo tilted her head. She looked at Hajin’s kind, actor’s face and thought of Suho’s scar, the one he got falling out of the persimmon tree when he was nine. Her smile was perfect, camera-ready.

“Now a candid! Hajin-ssi, whisper something funny. Let’s get a real laugh.”

Hajin leaned in, his breath a warm tickle near her ear. He didn’t whisper a joke. He whispered, “Your eyes are very loud today, sunbae. It’s okay.”

She laughed. The sound that came out was genuine, startled and brittle, and the camera shutter captured it in a rapid-fire burst.

Between setups, as an assistant touched up her lip color, Seri appeared. She didn’t speak. She didn’t ask if she was okay. She simply walked to Jisoo’s chair, reached out, and wrapped her hand around Jisoo’s clenched fist where it rested on the armrest. One squeeze. Firm. Warm. An electric current of pure, wordless understanding. Then she released and walked away, already talking into her headset about lighting approvals.

Jisoo stared at her own hand. Seri knew. She didn’t know what she knew, but she knew the shape of the void inside her boss. The recognition was a lifeline and an exposure.

The final commitment of the day was a pickup shot for Episode 8. A simple scene: Soo-jin alone in the shop at dusk, waiting for Seok-woo to return from a delivery. No dialogue. The direction was just to sit, and listen, and wait.

Jisoo sat on the stool behind the counter. The set was silent, the crew holding their breath. Kwon’s voice came softly from the darkness behind the camera. “Action.”

She didn’t need to act. She was waiting. She had been waiting for two days. She let her gaze drift to the prop wind chime hanging by the door. She listened. Not for the fictional jingle of a shop door, but for sounds from a universe away: the creak of their bed in Gunsan, the soft murmur of Suho’s voice reading to her unconscious form, the liquid roll of Dalbi turning in a sleep that mirrored her own. She listened so hard her bones ached with the strain. Her face was a placid lake, but her eyes—her eyes were deep, still pools of pure, undiluted need.

On the monitor, Kwon watched. He didn’t call cut. He let the shot hold, the silence stretching. Finally, he murmured, almost to himself, “Those eyes. Those are the eyes of someone truly waiting.”

When he finally called cut, the spell broke. Jisoo stood, her legs unsteady. She mumbled an excuse to no one in particular and walked to her dressing room. She locked the door. The quiet hum of the stage was replaced by a deeper, more profound silence.

She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor, her back against the cool plywood. She pulled her knees up, ignoring the awkward press of the prosthetic, and wrapped her arms around them.

Forty hours.

In 1994, her body was probably on the bed, laying motionless. Suho had definitely found her. The image was crystalline, torturous in its clarity: him waking to an empty bed, padding downstairs, calling her name. Finding her slumped against the cabinet, pale and utterly unresponsive. The panic, cold and sharp, slicing through his morning calm. His hands, gentle but frantic, shaking her shoulders, touching her face, her neck. Calling her name, over and over. Soo-ya. Soo-ya, wake up. Please.

He would have called Dr. Yoon. The doctor would have come, his kind face etched with concern. He would have listened to Dalbi’s heartbeat with his fetoscope, placed his stethoscope on Sooya’s chest, checked her pupils. He would have found nothing wrong. She’s just sleeping very deeply. The baby is strong. Keep her on her left side. Try to get fluids into her. Call me if there’s no change.

And Suho. He would have carried her to their bed. He would be sitting beside her right now, holding her limp hand, talking to her. Telling her about the weather, about Dohyun’s clumsy help with the deliveries, about nothing and everything. He would be whispering to Dalbi through the taut skin of her belly, his voice thick with fear he was trying to disguise as comfort. He wouldn’t sleep. He wouldn’t leave the room.

She knew this because she knew him. Knew the steadfast, terrified architecture of his love. The thought of him there, in that sunlit bedroom with the floral curtains, holding vigil over a shell, was a physical rupture. She pressed her face against the cool wall of the dressing room and sobbed, soundlessly, her entire body convulsing, the silicone belly a grotesque buffer between her and the floor.

She left the set early, pleading a migraine. Seri, her eyes knowing, simply nodded. “Go. I’ll handle it.”

In the back of the silent car, she texted Seri: If I’m not reachable tomorrow, don’t worry. I just need a day.

The reply came instantly: Noted. Rescheduling your morning. Call me if you need anything. Even if it’s just silence.

Home was not a sanctuary. It was the epicenter of the silence. Evening bled into night, the second night of her entrapment. Desperation, now a familiar companion, whispered new, dangerous ideas.

The rules said natural nighttime sleep only. But the rules were written for a functioning system. Hers was broken. What if the mechanism needed a stronger signal? What if the bridge required a deeper, more profound oblivion to reset?

In her bathroom cabinet, behind the expensive serums, was a small box of over-the-counter sleeping pills. Mild. Herbal. She had bought them during a bout of insomnia last year and never used them. She shook one into her palm. A small, innocuous tablet.

She took it with a full glass of water, standing at the kitchen island. A scientific experiment. Hypothesis: Pharmacologically-assisted sleep may bypass or reset the malfunctioning swap trigger.

The chemical pull was swift and merciless. Within twenty minutes, a thick, woolly drowsiness descended. It felt nothing like natural tiredness. It was a sedative blanket, smothering her anxiety under a layer of artificial calm. She stumbled to bed, her thoughts already slurring. The last thing she felt was Dalgom curling against her side, a warm anchor in the chemical tide.

The sleep was profound and dreamless. A void.

She woke at 5 AM to a dry mouth and a pounding headache. The grey pre-dawn light filtered through the blinds.

2026.

The pill had given her nothing but six hours of blankness and the bitter, definitive answer: pharmaceutical sleep did not trigger the swap. The mechanism was stubbornly, exclusively tied to a natural state she could no longer achieve, or that it no longer recognized.

She sat up, the headache pulsing behind her eyes. The thought she had been fencing with for two days finally broke through her defenses, disarmed her, and pressed its blade to her throat.

What if it’s over?

Not a temporary glitch. A permanent severance.

What if the 22-hour test had been the final straw? What if she had overloaded whatever mystical circuitry carried her between worlds, and it had fried itself? What if that moment in the Gunsan kitchen—the mug rolling, her body sliding to the floor—was the last conscious moment Kim Jisoo would ever experience as Lee Soo-ya?

What if she would never see Suho again? Never see his face crinkle with a bad pun, never feel his arm settle around her in sleep, never hear him say “Deal?” in that soft, sure voice.

What if Dalbi was born into the hands of a father weeping over a mother who would not wake? What if her daughter’s first sound was a cry met with the silence of a body whose consciousness was stranded thirty-two years in the future?

The thought did not enter her mind. It exploded inside her.

A raw, guttural noise was torn from her chest, part wail, part retch. She doubled over on the bed, arms wrapped around her empty, aching middle, as if she could hold in the visceral hemorrhage of the idea. She rocked, gasping, the sobs coming in brutal, shuddering waves that had no sound, only convulsion. This was beyond crying. This was the body processing an extinction-level event.

She did not leave the apartment that third morning. The world outside had ceased to have meaning. Her phone, charging on the nightstand, became a pulsar of ignored distress.

It buzzed and lit up relentlessly.

Seri: Schedule cleared.

Call when you can.

Jisoo-ya please respond.I’m worried.

Seri, two hours later:

I’m going to come over if you don’t answer by noon.

Jennie’s name appeared, a call. Then again. No voicemail.

A voice note from Lisa, her voice uncharacteristically small: “Unnie, please just tell us you’re alive. We love you.”

A text from Rosé:

We love you, unnie.

Jisoo read them all. The words registered as distant flares on a horizon of numbness. She could not formulate a reply. Language had deserted her. To speak would be to admit the reality she was huddled inside, and that would make it true.

She migrated to the living room couch. Dalgom followed, a silent, white ghost. He climbed onto her chest, his familiar weight the only pressure that felt real. She held the moon socks in one hand, the blue cloth journal in the other.

She opened the journal. She began to read, from the very first entry, the shaky pink pen scrawl: I dreamed I was a pregnant woman in a bookshop. It felt so real.

She read it all. The clinical notes. The frantic hypotheses. The grocery lists next to profound existential terror. The sketches—Suho’s face evolving from a clumsy caricature to something alive with love and detail. The floor plan of the shop. The list of baby names. The single, centered page where she had written 달비 and drawn a crescent moon.

Her own words, which had once been lifelines, anchors, proof of her sanity, now read like artifacts from a lost civilization. Like eulogies.

“Two worlds. Both real. Both mine. End of inquiry.”

“That was me. Not dream-me. Not Sooya. Me.”

“I am two people. I am one person. And it is okay.”

She closed the journal, the soft whump of the cover final in the silent room. She held it against her chest, over her heart. Then she brought the moon socks up, pressing the soft, worn cotton against her face. She inhaled, searching for a scent that wasn’t there—the smell of Gunsan, of baby powder, of him.

Her voice, when it came, was a cracked whisper, spoken into the fabric meant for tiny feet that might never wear them.

“Dalbi-ya,” she breathed, the name a prayer and a plea. “Mommy’s trying to come home. I’m trying. I promise I’m trying.”

The apartment, vast and sterile, absorbed the words and gave back nothing but the faint, indifferent hum of the refrigerator. The only heartbeat she could feel was the rapid, fragile flutter against her own, belonging to the small, loyal creature who had not left her side, who was now the only living thing in this world that knew she was breaking, and stayed.

The silence in the apartment was a physical presence, a thick, soundproofed void where even her own ragged breathing seemed muffled. Dalgom was a warm, sleeping weight against her thigh. The moon socks were a twisted knot in her fist. The digital clock on her nightstand glowed 3:47 AM.

Her phone felt cold and heavy in her other hand. The screen’s light was a cruel blue in the darkness. Her thumb moved without conscious instruction, scrolling through contacts until it hovered over a single name: Jennie.

It was almost four in the morning. This was the definition of selfish. Of desperate.

Then she heard the echo of a voice from a dressing room, gentle and iron-strong: “I’m a phone call away. For anything. Midnight. Dawn. Whatever.”

She pressed call.

The line connected, and on the second ring—not the third, not the fourth, the second, as if she’d been holding the phone—Jennie’s voice came through, alert and clear. No sleep in it. “Unnie?”

That one word, the familiar unnie clinging to her name even in this dire hour, shattered the last of Jisoo’s composure. Her voice, when it emerged, was a stripped wire, sparking and raw. “Jennie-ya.”

“What happened.” It wasn’t a question. It was a command, delivered in the flat, focused tone Jennie reserved for backstage crises and personal emergencies.

The minefield of explanation stretched before Jisoo. She couldn’t map it. So she gave the truest coordinates she could. “I’m losing something. And I don’t know how to get it back. And I’m scared I might never get it back.”

A beat of silence. Then, gently, “Is this… the thing?”

“Yes.”

“And it’s gotten worse.”

“It’s not worse. It’s gone. The part I could reach. It’s gone. And I don’t know if it’s coming back.” The vagueness was a shield. The terror behind it was absolute.

Jennie’s breath was a steady rhythm in her ear. “Okay. Are you safe? Physically. Right now.”

“Yes. I’m at home. I haven’t slept. Not really. In two days.”

“Two days.” Jennie absorbed this. Jisoo could almost see her, sitting up in her own dark room, mind working. “Can I ask one thing?”

“Yes.”

“The thing. Is it the kind of thing you might still be able to reach, even if it doesn’t feel possible right now?”

Jisoo closed her eyes. Tears leaked from the corners, hot and silent. “I don’t know. I used to be sure. Now I’m not sure of anything.”

“Okay.” Jennie’s voice softened further, into a tone of profound understanding. “Then listen to me, Unnie. I think I know what’s happening, even without the details. You’re trying to force something. You’re white-knuckling it. You’ve been holding the world together by sheer will for months, and right now you sound like a woman who’s been trying to will a miracle into happening for forty-eight straight hours.”

A small, broken sound was Jisoo’s only reply.

“You told me it was universe-sized,” Jennie continued, her voice a lifeline in the dark. “So let the universe handle it. You’re not the universe. You can’t control it. You can’t make it happen by staying awake or by worrying it into submission. Some things… you only get them when you stop trying to grab them.”

“What if I let go and it’s still gone?” The whisper was the core of her fear.

“Then I’ll be here when you wake up. And we’ll figure out how to live with it, together. But Unnie—I don’t think it’s gone. Things that are universe-sized don’t just vanish. They wait.”

The silence between them was full. It held two decades of friendship, of silent concerts and shared dorm rooms and secrets passed in the dark.

“Here’s what you’re going to do,” Jennie said, her voice shifting into gentle, undeniable authority. “You’re going to hang up. You’re going to lie down. You’re going to stop trying to sleep. You’re going to stop trying to fix it. You’re going to think about what you love. Who you love. And you’re going to just… hold that feeling. And let everything else go. The fear. The forcing. Let it go. Just rest. Just trust.”

“Jennie-ya…”

“I love you, Unnie. Whatever this is. I love you. Now go sleep.”

The call ended. Jisoo held the phone to her chest, the ghost of Jennie’s certainty a warmth against the chill of her own dread. She lay back. She closed her eyes.

She didn’t try to sleep. She surrendered.

She thought of Suho.

Not the idea of him, but the specific, catalogued reality. The scar on his left eyebrow that felt like satin under her thumb. The way he absentmindedly licked his finger to turn a page in an account ledger. The off-key humming that accompanied every mundane task—peeling apples, sorting books, tying his shoes. The weight of his arm around her in the deep of night, a anchor in the strange sea of her double life. The way he said “Deal?” not as a question, but as a quiet, unwavering vow.

She thought of Dalbi. The hiccups that fluttered like moth wings. The vigorous, opinionated kicks that made Suho’s eyes go wide with wonder. The yellow duck onesie waiting on the shelf. The name they’d chosen together: 達斐. To achieve radiance.

She thought of the shop. The smell of old paper and lemon polish. The sound of the wind chime over the door. Halmeoni’s dumplings steaming on the counter. The kids crowded on the floor for story hour. The ledger, its columns finally, triumphantly, in the black.

This is my life, she thought, with a clarity that felt like grace. This is not a dream I visit. It is my life. And I have been trying to control the door between here and there, when all I was ever meant to do was walk through it.

She let go of the trying. She let go of the frantic, fearful bargaining. She unclenched her hands, both literally and in her soul. She held only the love. She held only the trust.

And like a gift given only when the hands are finally open, sleep came. Natural, deep, and unforced.

Consciousness returned not as a shock, but as a gentle surfacing.

Yellow light. Floral curtains. The familiar, comforting smell of old paper and sea salt, undercut by a faint, clean scent of antiseptic. The rabbit-shaped water stain on the ceiling.

Her hands flew to her stomach. The swell was there, immense and solid and real. She pressed down, a silent, desperate plea.

An answer came immediately—a hard, emphatic kick that rolled across the curve of her belly. A kick that spoke of impatience, of presence, of a tiny, powerful will announcing: I am here. Where were you?

A sob broke from her, a raw, grateful sound that seemed to come from the soles of her feet.

She turned her head.

Suho was on the floor beside the bed. He was sitting with his back against the nightstand, his long legs stretched out awkwardly. His head was tipped back, eyes closed. Stubble darkened his jaw, deep shadows bruised the skin beneath his eyes. His clothes were the same ones he’d worn yesterday—a rumpled flannel shirt, worn jeans. One of his hands was stretched up, resting on the mattress, his fingers curled loosely around her own limp hand.

He had been holding her hand. From the floor.

On the nightstand, within Suho’s reach, was a glass of water, a small bowl with a damp cloth, and a plate of meticulously cut persimmon, the edges now slightly dry and curled. He had prepared them for her. He had prepared them, and she had not woken up to eat them.

She tightened her fingers around his.

His eyes snapped open. Not the slow blink of sleep, but the instantaneous, wide-awake focus of someone whose rest has been a shallow pretense for listening, for waiting, for fearing.

He saw her eyes on him.

His entire being seemed to fracture and reform in the space of a single breath. The tension that carved lines into his face dissolved, leaving behind a naked relief so profound it was painful to witness. His jaw, which had been clenched, went slack. His brow, furrowed deep, smoothed and then crumpled again as his eyes filled.

“Sooya.” Her name broke in his mouth.

He moved stiffly, pushing himself up from the floor with a wince, his body protesting its long vigil. He sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight. His hands came up, trembling slightly, and cradled her face. His palms were warm, his touch infinitely gentle.

“You’re awake.” A whisper, ragged with emotion. “You’re here.”

“I’m here,” she whispered back, her voice hoarse from disuse and tears. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“You slept for a full day and a night. More.” His thumbs stroked her cheeks, as if verifying her reality. “I called your name. I shook you. Nothing. Dr. Yoon came. He said… he said everything was normal. The baby’s heartbeat was strong. You were just… deeply asleep. He said to wait.” Suho’s voice hitched. “So I waited. I sat right here. I held your hand. I talked to you. I told you about the subscription for the Park family. I talked to Dalbi. I told her… I told her you were just resting. That you’d come back.”

Of course he did. He sat on the hard floor, holding the hand of a woman who could not hear him, and spun a story of comfort for their unborn child. Because he was Lim Suho. He was the steady, patient center of this world she had fought so desperately to reach.

“Don’t,” he begged, his voice cracking open. “Don’t ever do that again.” And then the tears came. Silent, relentless tracks cutting through the dust and exhaustion on his face. Not the soft tears of joy she’d seen before, but the deep, shaking tears of a fear so vast it had nowhere else to go.

The sight of it unraveled her completely. She brought her own hands up, framing his face, mirroring his hold. They stayed like that, foreheads not quite touching, holding each other’s faces as if they were the most fragile, precious things in all of creation, crying in the warm pool of lamplight.

“I came back,” she choked out. “I’m here. I’m not leaving.”

He pulled her to him then, carefully maneuvering around the great mound of her belly, and wrapped her in an embrace that was both fiercely protective and desperately needing protection. He buried his face in the crook of her neck, his shoulders shaking. She held him, her arms tight around his back, her own tears soaking into his flannel shirt. She held him with the full weight of her two days of terror, with the humbling, awe-filled knowledge that this—this man, this love—was the miracle. Not the swap. This.

A powerful, indignant kick jolted against both of their bodies.

They broke apart, laughing through the tears, a wet, hiccupping, glorious sound.

“Dalbi’s angry,” Suho managed, swiping at his eyes with the back of his hand.

“She has every right to be,” Jisoo said, her voice wobbly. “Her mother was… absent without leave.”

“Very poor form.”

He didn’t let her go far. He kept one arm around her, his hand splayed over the spot where their daughter had just kicked, as if to soothe them both. The lamp glowed on. The morning sun strengthened, turning the floral curtains translucent. The evidence of the crisis—the glass of water, the uneaten fruit—sat quietly in the room, already being absorbed into the history of them.

In the quiet, Jisoo made her vows, silent and solemn.

I will never test you again. I will never try to own you, or master you, or map your boundaries. You are a gift. I will receive you with gratitude, every single time.

And I will be here for her birth. I will be present. Not through force or endurance, but through trust. I will trust this bridge you’ve built. I will trust my body. I will trust this man holding me. I will trust the miracle.

The lesson, learned in the cold silence of a future apartment and sealed in the warm, tear-salty reality of this bed, was now part of her bones: You cannot optimize a miracle. You can only kneel before it, again and again, with an open and grateful heart.

She leaned into Suho’s solid warmth, feeling Dalbi settle into a rhythmic, sleepy pattern of movement beneath his hand. The lamp was on. They were seen. They were together.

She was home.