After waking in her familiar 2026 world, Jisoo returns to 1994 — this time knowing it’s all real. Faced with the husband she was never supposed to touch and the life she accidentally claimed, she must learn the rules of a world she didn’t choose… while carrying the memory of his hands on her skin.
1994 | Gunsan
The porcelain was cold and slick under her palms, the only anchor in a world that had just dissolved into impossible, terrifying reality. Jisoo stared into the mirror, into Sooya’s face—her own face, but not. The same dark eyes were now wide with a panic no skincare routine could fix. The same lips were parted in a silent, breathless gasp. But the context—the soft, unstyled black hair, the faint sunspot on the left cheek, the gentle, unmistakable curve of the belly stretching the thin nightgown—transformed her reflection into a living crime scene. Her crime scene.
Okay. Okay. Let’s organize this.
Her internal monologue clicked on, a survival mechanism honed through a hundred high-pressure interviews and live broadcasts. It was a voice that sought control through categorization, even when faced with the uncategorizable.
Fact one: I am Kim Jisoo.
Fact two: I am currently inside the body of Lee Soo-ya, who is pregnant, married, and lives in 1994.
Fact three: this is not a dream.
The evidence was irrefutable. The chill of the bathroom tiles under her bare feet. The smell of mildew and ginger and wood polish. The profound, residual warmth in her muscles, the ghost of a weight against her back, the memory of a sleepy nuzzle against her neck. All of it was textured, specific, and continuous with the memories from before. This was not a dream’s fuzzy logic. This was the brutal, granular clarity of reality.
Fact four: I slept with her husband.
The thought landed like a physical blow, a nausea that had nothing to do with morning sickness. Heat flooded her face, a full-body cringe of retrospective horror so intense she had to grip the sink harder.
FACT FOUR IS THE ONE THAT’S KILLING ME.
Fact five: he thinks I am his wife.
Fact six: technically, to him, nothing unusual happened.
Fact seven: to ME, everything unusual happened. I am a stranger who climbed into his bed and thought it was a theme park ride. I am a horrible person. I am the worst person in two timelines.
She splashed cold water on her face. It dripped down her chin and neck, soaking into the cotton at her chest. Real water. Real cold. Real.
Focus. Information first. Panic later. You are Kim Jisoo. You have survived debut, you have survived Inkigayo live stages with a broken in-ear, you have survived Lisa stealing your food for ten years. You can survive this.
She forced a breath into her lungs, held it, let it out slowly. The woman in the mirror mimicked her. She studied that face, looking for clues. It was younger than her 2026 face. Softer. The skin had a lived-in quality, no trace of weekly dermatologist visits or layered serums. There was a quietness in the eyes that her own reflection, perpetually braced for cameras and scrutiny, never had. This was the face of someone who belonged here, in this small bathroom, in this life.
That was the problem.
She needed to move. The bathroom felt like a shrinking box. Cautiously, she unlocked the door and peered out. The bedroom was empty, morning light painting stripes across the wooden floor. Suho was downstairs; she could hear the faint clatter of pans.
Her eyes fell on the small, framed wedding photo on the dresser. She’d avoided it before. Now, she picked it up, holding it to the light.
A younger Sooya and Suho, standing in front of a modest restaurant. Sooya wore a simple white dress, not a gown. Suho was in a dark suit that fit him awkwardly in the shoulders. They were both smiling, squinting a little in the sun. Sooya’s smile… Jisoo tilted the photo. It was her smile. The exact shape of it. But it was softer, unfiltered by the awareness of a lens. It was the smile of someone sharing happiness with one person, not performing it for millions.
She carried the photo to the mirror, holding it beside her reflection. She tried to mimic the smile. Pulled her lips back, showed teeth. It looked like a grimace, the expression of someone being photographed against their will. She tried again, aiming for gentleness. Better, but her eyes were still wide with panic. She practiced, whispering to her reflection.
“Hello, Suho-ya. Good morning. The weather is nice. Yes, I slept well. No, nothing is wrong. I am your wife. Everything is normal.”
Her voice sounded brittle, fake. A poor actress reading lines for a drama she hadn’t studied for.
A louder clang from downstairs. She jumped, hastily replacing the photo. He was making breakfast. For her. For his wife, who was not his wife, who was a woman from 2026 hiding in his bathroom, practicing smiles and trying not to hyperventilate.
She couldn’t go down yet. She needed time. Space. Intelligence.
She cracked the bedroom door and called out, aiming for a weak, morning-illness voice. “Suho-ya?”
His footsteps were immediately at the bottom of the stairs. “Sooya? Are you okay?”
“I’m… a bit dizzy. Give me a few minutes?”
“Should I come up? Do you need water?”
“No!” The word came out too sharp. She softened it. “No, I’m fine. Just… pregnancy stuff. Give me ten minutes.”
A pause. She could picture his worried frown. “Okay. I’ll keep breakfast warm.”
His footsteps retreated. She exhaled, leaning against the doorframe. Ten minutes. She would treat it like a reconnaissance mission.
The bedroom first. She moved systematically, touching nothing at first, just observing. The sliding wardrobe: his side was messy, flannels and work pants tumbled together, smelling of paper, ink, and something faintly woody—pine, maybe. Her side—Sooya’s side—was neat, dresses and blouses arranged by color. A dresser with a small mirror, a hairbrush tangled with long black hairs, a jar of simple, rose-scented hand cream.
The bed. She forced herself to look at it. The sheets were rumpled, the indent of two bodies clear. The memory of the previous night—their night—was a physical presence in the room. The lamp clicking off. The darkness that became a universe contained within his arms. The whispered Sooya-ya against her skin. She turned away, her face burning.
The second room was a tiny space, barely a closet. It was being prepared. A folded crib, still in its cardboard box, leaned against one wall. A bag of what looked like handmade baby clothes sat on a lone chair. And on the windowsill, facing out toward the quiet street, someone had placed a small, slightly worn stuffed rabbit. It sat there, one ear flopping forward, as if keeping watch.
Jisoo approached it slowly. She reached out and touched the rabbit’s soft, matted ear. A wave of emotion, sudden and shocking in its intensity, hit her in the chest. It wasn’t just the symbol of impending motherhood. It was the smallness of it. The quiet, hopeful love evident in this single, secondhand toy placed on a bare windowsill in a tiny room. This was a life built not on grandeur, but on intention. It felt more real than any luxury nursery in a magazine spread.
She retreated, closing the door softly behind her.
Downstairs, the shop was still and silent, the CLOSED sign facing the street. She moved through the living area—the brown couch, the small TV, the low table with magazines about parenting and small business management. Everything was modest, clean, cared-for. There were wildflowers in a vase on the windowsill, their stems cut unevenly. The curtains were homemade, the stitching a little wobbly. It was a home where love was the primary currency, spent freely on wildflowers and handmade curtains.
The kitchen was a masterpiece of miniature organization. She opened cabinets and drawers. Every pot had its place. Every spice jar was labeled in neat, feminine handwriting. The refrigerator hummed loudly, and inside, leftovers were stored in matching containers, each with a piece of tape noting the date. Doenjang jjigae, 3/12. Spinach banchan, 3/13.
Jisoo stared at the organized contents. A cold dread seeped into her. She couldn’t cook. Not like this. Her culinary skills peaked at ordering expertly from delivery apps. This kitchen, this life, expected a competence she did not possess.
She was standing in the middle of the living area, absorbing the profound, terrifying domesticity of it all, when her gaze fell on the nightstand drawer upstairs, visible from where she stood. Something compelled her back up.
The diary was there, exactly where a part of her knew it would be. A simple, floral-cover notebook, the kind sold in the shop downstairs. Soo-ya’s Journal was written on the first page in that same neat hand.
She sat on the edge of the bed, the diary heavy in her hands. This was the ultimate violation, reading the secret thoughts of the woman she was displacing. But she had to know. She had to understand what she had stepped into.
The entries began a year ago, just after the wedding.
"Suho burnt the rice today. He was so embarrassed he tried to scrape the burnt parts off and serve it anyway. I ate it. It tasted like charcoal and love."
"We had our first argument. He wanted to spend savings on new shelves for the shop. I wanted to save it for emergencies. We didn’t speak for three hours. Then he came to me with tea and said, ‘You’re right, but can we at least get one shelf? A small one?’ I laughed. We got the shelf."
Jisoo’s lips twitched despite herself. She could see it. His earnest, negotiated compromise.
The entries deepened. The discovery of the pregnancy.
"I’m pregnant. I took the test three times. Suho doesn’t know yet. I’m going to tell him tonight. I’m scared. I’m happy. I’m scared of how happy I am."
"I told him. He cried. He actually cried. He held my face in both hands and said ‘thank you’ seven times. I counted."
A lump formed in Jisoo’s throat. She remembered the awe in his voice in the dark. Hello there.
More recent entries, snippets of ordinary life:
"Suho sang in the shower again today. He thinks I can’t hear him. I can always hear him."
"The baby is the size of a peach this week. I bought a peach at the market and held it and cried a little. Suho ate the peach later. I didn’t tell him why I was crying."
"Halmeoni Ok-soon gave me her dumpling again. She’s coming up to the store more frequently with different foods. I think she’s lonely. I should visit her more."
And then, the entry from a few nights ago:
"Last night Suho held me so tightly I could feel his heartbeat against my spine. I never want to sleep any other way."
Jisoo’s breath hitched. She knew that feeling. She had felt it. On a night she had no right to. The memory was no longer just a guilty, confusing phantom; it was a direct echo of this woman’s documented love. She had participated in a sacred, private ritual, thinking it was a fantasy.
The final entry. The day before her first swap.
"Suho brought home a new notebook for me today. He said I should write down everything so our baby can read it someday. I think I’ll start tomorrow."
There was nothing after. The following pages were blank, white, and waiting for words from a woman who was gone.
Jisoo closed the diary gently, as if it were a living thing she might hurt. She held it against her chest, where Sooya’s heart beat a steady, frightened rhythm. She slid down to sit on the floor, her back against the bed, the curve of her belly making the position awkward. A small, firm pressure pushed against her ribs from the inside—a kick, or a turn.
The reality finally, fully, crushed her.
She wasn’t visiting. She wasn’t dreaming. She was occupying. She was a squatter in a life, a body, a love story.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the empty room, to the diary, to the woman whose absence was a tangible presence. “I’m really sorry.”
The apology was a layered thing, each repetition a different stone dropped into a deep, dark well.
I’m sorry I’m here instead of you.
I’m sorry I’m in your bed, wearing your skin.
I’m sorry I touched your husband. I’m sorry I let him touch me. I’m sorry I thought it was a game with no consequences.
I’m sorry I’m starting to understand why you loved him. I’m sorry that understanding feels like a deeper betrayal.
I’m sorry you never got to write tomorrow.
She placed the diary back in the drawer, under the pen, beside the tissues. She closed the drawer with a soft, final click.
When she went downstairs, Suho had left breakfast on the table—rice, soup, a perfectly fried egg, a small assortment of banchan—all covered with plates to keep warm. A note was propped against the teapot.
Sooya-ya,
Went to get some things for the shop. Eat well, both of you.
—Suho
Both of you. Her and the baby. Jisoo read the note three times, tracing the blunt, masculine handwriting with her eyes. The casual intimacy of it was a knife twist.
She ate slowly, mechanically. The food was simple, nourishing, good. She ate for the baby, a being that was becoming less of an abstract concept and more of a demanding, kicking reality with each passing hour in this body.
After, she dressed in one of Sooya’s loose blue dresses and a pair of sandals, and ventured outside. The town of Gunsan in 1994 unfolded around her like a meticulously built film set. The air was different—cleaner, salt-tanged, carrying the distant smell of the sea. The buildings were lower, the signs hand-painted, the pace of life visibly slower. Mountains rose in one direction; in the other, she could just make out the glint of the harbor.
And everyone knew her.
“Sooya! How’s the baby? Getting big!” a man outside a hardware store boomed.
Jisoo summoned Sooya’s smile, Version 3.0. “Getting big, yes!” she called back, her heart hammering against her ribs. He nodded, satisfied.
“Sooya-ya! Come eat watermelon with us!” two women beckoned from a produce stand.
She waved, the gesture feeling alien. “Next time! The baby’s making me walk today!” The excuse, born of panic, worked. They laughed and waved her on.
A boy on a bicycle swerved past her, yelling “Sorry, Imo!” as he disappeared down the lane.
Imo.
The word landed with a dull thud. In 2026, she was Kim Jisoo, global ambassador, idol, it-girl. Here, she was Sooya-imo, a pregnant wife who got nearly run over by children. The absurdity was so profound it almost tipped over into laughter. The universe, she decided, had the sense of humor of a particularly cruel variety show PD.
Then, she met Mrs. Choi.
The woman seemed to materialize from the very atmosphere, emerging from behind a cart of vibrant cabbages like a social event horizon. She was in her fifties, with a sharp, discerning face beneath a practical visor and an energy that suggested she was the central broadcasting hub of all Gunsan gossip.
“Sooya-ya! I’ve been looking for you! Did you hear about Taeshik’s cousin? The one with the seafood business in Jeonju? Gone. Bankrupt. His wife is devastated. Three kids and no income. And you know what caused it? Bad partnerships. I told his mother years ago, I said, ‘That boy doesn’t know how to pick business partners,’ but does anyone listen to me? No. And now—”
The monologue was a force of nature, requiring no input, pausing for no breath. Jisoo stood, buffeted by the torrent of other people’s misfortunes, her mind still reeling from diaries and identity crises. The sheer, overwhelming normality of this social interaction, juxtaposed with the cosmic abnormality of her situation, short-circuited her filter.
When Mrs. Choi finally paused, not for an answer but merely to inhale, Jisoo heard her own 2026 voice, blunt and bewildered, say: “That’s really sad about his business. But—why are you telling me this?”
Silence.
A profound, shocking silence fell over the corner of the market. Mrs. Choi’s mouth remained open, but no sound emerged. Her eyes widened, then slowly, a brilliant, delighted smile spread across her face, as if Jisoo had just performed a spectacular magic trick.
“Sooya-ya!” she exclaimed, grabbing Jisoo’s arm with newfound fervor. “You’re so different today! So direct! Something about you is very… refreshing.”
Jisoo found herself swept along the street, arm-in-arm with the town gossip, who now regaled her with even more detailed scandals, treating her as a confidante. By the time she extracted herself using the universally accepted pregnancy-bladder excuse, she had accidentally become Mrs. Choi’s favorite new source of entertainment.
She returned to the shop in the late afternoon, emotionally winded. Suho was behind the counter, sorting a delivery of notebooks, humming that same, endearingly off-key tune. The shop was quiet, bathed in the golden, dusty light of a sinking sun.
She took the high stool behind the counter—the one, she now noticed from wear patterns on the floor, was permanently placed there for her. For Sooya. So she could sit and keep him company during slow hours.
She watched him work. His hands were capable, moving with an efficient grace as he checked invoices, stacked supplies. There was a quiet contentment in his focus, a man immersed in the simple, tangible world of paper and ink.
She began her investigation, masking it as casual conversation.
“Suho-ya, how long have we lived here again? I keep losing track of time with the pregnancy brain.”
He glanced up, a soft amusement in his eyes. “Two years this spring. You okay? You’ve been forgetting things a lot lately.”
“Pregnancy brain,” she affirmed, tucking the excuse firmly into her arsenal.
“We moved in right after the wedding,” he continued, a fond nostalgia in his voice. “You cried when you saw the apartment upstairs because the kitchen was so small.” He grinned. “Then you organized it in one day and said it was perfect.”
That sounded exactly like the woman from the diary. Adaptable. Making a home from scratch. A wave of inadequacy washed over Jisoo.
She steered the talk to safer, more informational ground. “How are things going? With the shop?”
A subtle shift crossed his face—a flicker of something weary, quickly smoothed over. “Fine. Steady. You know how it is.”
She didn’t know. But she saw the way his eyes followed the only customer—a teenager flipping through a manhwa—as they left without buying anything. The resignation in that glance was practiced. “Fine” meant “struggling.” “Steady” meant “barely holding on.”
She asked about the baby’s due date, though she’d read it in the diary. He gave her a gently puzzled look. “You know when the baby is due, Sooya.” But he answered anyway. “July. Dr. Yoon said mid-July.”
Four months. She calculated rapidly. She would be here, in this body, every other day for four months, growing progressively more pregnant. The reality of it—the medical appointments, the bodily changes, the birth—was a cliff face she couldn’t even look at directly yet.
“Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” Suho asked, his concern cutting through her thoughts. He’d stopped sorting and was looking at her fully. “You’ve been asking me things you already know. And you’ve been quiet. You’re never this quiet.”
I’m trying to learn how to be your wife without breaking either of us. I’m trying to understand a world that shouldn’t exist. I can smell your shampoo from here and my body remembers the exact callous on your right thumb and I want to either scream or cry.
“I’m fine,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Just thinking about things.”
“What things?”
Everything.
“Baby things,” she said.
He accepted it. He always accepted it. Nodded, his worry softening into a sympathetic smile. And that acceptance—that gentle, default trust—was somehow worse than suspicion. Suspicion she could combat. Trust was a landmine she was slowly, clumsily traversing.
The distance between them began to manifest in a hundred small, painful ways through the rest of the day.
In the afternoon, he brought her a cup of barley tea, setting it on the counter beside her. His fingers brushed against hers as he transferred the cup. A simple, domestic touch. Jisoo flinched, pulling her hand back as if shocked. He noticed. He didn’t say a word, but his shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly as he returned to his work.
At dinner, he’d made doenjang jjigae. He reached across the small table to put more seasoned spinach on her plate. “You need the iron,” he said softly. His hand passed close to hers. She moved her hand to her lap, staring at her bowl. He carefully deposited the spinach and withdrew, the silence between them suddenly loud.
After eating, they sat on the small brown couch in the living area, watching the three available channels flicker on the TV. A news broadcast, a variety show, a rerun of an old drama. She sat on one end, he on the other. The middle cushion was a vast, unspoken no-man’s-land.
He tried, once. It wasn’t even a conscious attempt; it was muscle memory, the ghost of a thousand other evenings. He shifted slightly, his arm beginning to lift, to rest along the back of the couch behind her. It was what he did. It was how he sat with his wife.
Jisoo went rigid. She leaned forward abruptly, pretending to be intensely interested in a commercial for laundry detergent featuring a overly cheerful ajumma.
His arm stopped. Hovered in the space between them for a suspended second, then returned to his own side. He didn’t sigh. He didn’t ask what was wrong. He simply adjusted, making himself smaller, giving her the space she so clearly demanded. And the quiet grace of that adjustment—the uncomplaining way he reshaped his own comfort to accommodate her sudden, inexplicable coldness—was what finally broke through her panic and touched a deep, aching chord of guilt.
She thought, This man’s wife has vanished, replaced by a stranger who shared his bed and now recoils from his touch, and his response is to be kind. To be patient. What kind of person does that?
The answer was in the diary. In the burnt rice and the single shelf and the seven "thank yous." It was the kind of person Sooya had loved. The kind of person anyone would love.
And Jisoo was not going to fall in love with him. That was a line, a boundary, a rule of this impossible situation she would not cross.
Almost of its own volition, her body shifted on the couch. One inch closer to the center. Then two. She didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes glued to the television, where the laundry detergent ajumma was now ecstatically hanging a blindingly white shirt on a line.
“This commercial is ridiculous,” she muttered, as if explaining her movement.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him go very still. Then, slowly, he relaxed. He didn’t close the distance, but the space between them no longer hummed with such tense electricity.
By nine o’clock, she had begun to catalog the rules of her new existence. She had been in 1994 continuously since waking. A brief, head-nodding doze at the shop counter had not triggered a return. Conclusion: natural, nighttime sleep was the catalyst. Not rest, not naps, but the full surrender of consciousness.
She tested the boundary, fighting to stay awake as the evening wore on. But the pregnancy was a powerful ally to the phenomenon. Her body was a furnace burning fuel for two, and by eleven, exhaustion was a physical weight, dragging at her limbs and fogging her mind. She calculated she’d been awake for nearly eighteen hours. If there was a forced-sleep limit, she was approaching it, accelerated by the biological demands of the life growing within her.
The realization settled, heavy and final: she could not avoid this. She could not choose to stay in 2026. She was on a pendulum, and the arc was set. She would wake up as Sooya every other day, for a duration that was terrifyingly unknown.
The bedtime ritual was an exercise in silent tension. She brushed her teeth with Sooya’s toothbrush, a intimacy that felt more violating than anything that had happened in the bed. She changed into a nightgown and slipped beneath the covers, pressing herself as close to the edge of the mattress as possible, her body turned to the wall, a rigid line of defense.
She heard him come up, felt the bed dip with his weight. He settled on his side, maintaining the careful distance she had established. The silence was thick, broken only by their breathing. The space between them in the small bed was a chasm, and yet she could feel the heat radiating from him, a steady, living warmth that seemed to mock her self-imposed isolation.
He was quiet for a long time. She thought he’d fallen asleep.
“Sooya.”
Her name in the dark, soft and tentative. She didn’t turn. “Mm?”
“You’ve been quiet today. All day.”
“I’m just tired.”
“You’re always tired lately, but you’re not usually quiet. Tired-you talks more, not less.” A pause, filled with the sound of the old house settling. “Are you upset about something? Did I do something?”
The question was so earnest, so devoid of accusation, it shattered her remaining composure. Yes. No. You existed. You were kind. You made me breakfast and didn’t ask why your wife flinches from your touch. You did everything right, and that’s the problem, because I have no defense against someone who does everything right.
“You didn’t do anything,” she whispered to the wall. “I’m just thinking about the baby.”
“What about the baby?”
Everything. Whether I’ll be here when it’s born. Whether I have any right to hold it. Whether it will know its mother has been replaced by a fraud.
“Just… everything. It’s a lot.”
“It is a lot.” His voice was a low rumble in the dark, a soothing sound. “But we’re doing it together, right?”
She squeezed her eyes shut, hot tears pricking at the corners. She could not answer that truthfully. The lie felt like ash in her mouth. “Right.”
Silence descended again, deeper this time. She began to unclench, muscle by muscle, exhaustion pulling her toward the abyss of sleep. She was almost gone when she felt it.
A shift under the blankets. Then, the touch.
His hand, crossing the cold expanse of sheets between them. It didn’t grope or grasp. It simply arrived, palm up, an open question in the dark. It found her hand where it lay clenched at her side. His fingers, warm and slightly rough, threaded slowly through hers. He squeezed once—a firm, warm, undeniable pressure—then relaxed, his grip loosening into the heavy warmth of sleep.
He said nothing. His breathing evened out almost immediately.
Jisoo lay frozen, her heart pounding a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She could feel his thumb resting against her pulse point. She wondered if, even in sleep, he could feel the frantic truth beating there.
She could pull away. He was asleep; he would never know. She could reclaim the distance, the wall, the fragile safety of separation.
Her hand did not move.
She lay there in the dark, in a bed that was not hers, holding the hand of a man who was not hers, and thought with a clarity that was both terrible and beautiful: The first night, he held all of me, and I could pretend it was a dream. Tonight, he holds only my hand, and I can pretend nothing. His hand in mine means he loves someone he thinks is me. My hand in his means I’m letting him.
What does that make me?
Sleep claimed her before she could find an answer.
2026 | Seoul
She woke in Gangnam. The first, muted light of dawn was bleeding around the edges of her blackout curtains. Dalgom’s soft snore came from the foot of the bed. Her phone on the nightstand glowed: 5:47 AM.
For a disorienting second, the feel of a warm, calloused hand was still wrapped around hers. Then it was gone, replaced by the cool emptiness of her 2026 bedsheets.
She sat up immediately, a surge of adrenaline clearing the last cobwebs of sleep. She grabbed the sleek, leather-bound journal from her nightstand—the one she’d bought after the first swap—and a pen.
For twenty minutes, she wrote in a furious, barely legible scrawl. Everything. The layout of the 1994 house, sketched in quick, boxy lines. The contents of the kitchen cabinets. The names: Halmeoni Ok-soon, Mrs. Choi (with a double underline and “GOSSIP TSUNAMI”). The baby’s timeline: Due mid-July. Four months. She described Suho’s face in detail, drawing a hopelessly bad stick figure with glasses and messy hair, annotating it: Eyebrow scar, left side. Says he got it falling out of a tree at seven, but the story changes sometimes. Eyes are warm, especially when he smiles. Smiles with his whole face.
She transcribed the rules she was piecing together, the lines stark on the page:
Trigger: Nighttime sleep only. Not naps.
Rhythm: One full day/night cycle per world. Seems fixed.
Memory: Continuous. I remember everything.
Secrecy: No one else appears to know.
Control: None. Can’t start it, can’t stop it.
Cause: Unknown.
Duration: Unknown. (This one she circled three times.)
Finally, at the bottom of the page, the pen slowed. She wrote one last sentence, pressing down so hard the tip nearly tore through the paper.
He held my hand. Just my hand. And it meant more than the other night. What does that say about me?
She stared at the words, the ink dark and accusing. She had no answer.
Closing the journal, she held it against her chest, a mirror image of the way she had held Sooya’s diary on a bedroom floor in another time. Two journals. Two lives. One woman, caught in the tide between them, running out of shore to retreat to.
The dawn light grew stronger, painting her sterile, beautiful apartment in shades of pale gold. Another day in 2026 awaited. Meetings, schedules, the life of Kim Jisoo. But a part of her was already gone, left behind in a small bed in Gunsan, her hand curled in the warm, sleeping hand of a man who loved a ghost.