thirty-seven drawings of the same sky.

one.

The garden was an accident.

I'd been wandering for nineteen minutes — I counted the doors: fourteen patient rooms, two supply closets, one exit that led nowhere — trying to find the stairwell to physical therapy. Every corridor in this hospital had the same face. White walls. Fluorescent tubes humming at a frequency that lived behind your teeth. The smell: antiseptic layered over coffee layered over something floral that the cleaning staff used to mask both.

I pushed open a door marked STAFF ONLY in fading vinyl lettering. Expected a closet. Found sky instead.

It wasn't really a garden. More of a courtyard that someone had given up on mid-design. A single maple tree in the center — leaves just beginning to turn at the edges, like someone had dipped them in rust. A bench with chipped green paint. Overgrown bushes along the east wall, the kind that grew because no one had time to trim them. And the light.

The light was doing something wrong.

Golden. Soft. The kind of light that made everything look like a photograph taken by someone who already missed the moment they were capturing. It hit the maple leaves and came through amber. It hit the concrete and made it look almost kind.

I was crying before I understood why.

Not sobbing. Just — leaking. The way you do when you've been holding the door closed for so long that your fingers cramp and give out. I'd been Yu Jimin for twenty-four years. Karina for six. Somewhere between those two names, I'd lost track of which one answered when someone called.

The burnout diagnosis was supposed to be a pause. That's what my manager said — a pause, a rest, you'll come back stronger. The company had already issued three statements. Karina is resting. Karina will return soon. Karina is fine.

I was not fine.

I hadn't been fine since the debut showcase. Maybe before. Maybe since the DM arrived in my Instagram requests and I thought it was a scam because why would anyone want me?

I found a spot behind the largest bush — not hiding, just collecting myself. The azaleas here were new; I could tell by the way the soil still looked turned. My manager would kill me if anyone saw me like this. Karina doesn't cry in public. Karina is strong. Karina is the leader.

I was none of those things. I was a girl in hospital pajamas, crouching behind flowers, trying to remember how to breathe.

"You're going to crush the azaleas."

I looked up.

A boy was sitting on the bench. Not looking at me — looking down at his hands, which held a pencil and a spiral notebook. Cheap notebook. The kind sold at convenience stores next to gum and hangover cures. His voice was quiet.

Not gentle. Quiet. There's a difference. Gentle is something you choose. Quiet is just how someone is built.

"I'm not —" I wiped my face with the back of my hand. The hospital bracelet caught on my cheek. "I wasn't —"

"You were crying." He still didn't look up. "That's allowed. But the azaleas are new. The nurses planted them last Thursday. If you crush them, they'll be sad."

They'll be sad.

He talked about plants like they had feelings. Like the azaleas were holding it together too, just barely, and sitting on them would be the thing that broke them.

I stared at him. He stared at his notebook. The pencil moved — a small line, then another. Building something I couldn't see yet.

"I'm not going to crush your azaleas."

"Good." He finally looked up. His eyes were dark and tired in a way that meant he'd been here longer than three weeks. His face was pale. Thin. The kind of thin that comes from things happening inside you that you can't control — treatments, maybe, or something worse. Something that shows in the hollows under your eyes before it shows anywhere else.

"Do you want to sit? The bench doesn't have azaleas. It's safe."

I should have said no. I should have gone back to my room, called my manager, pretended this conversation never happened. That's what Karina would do. Karina was good at pretending.

But I was tired. God, I was so tired of being Karina.

I sat.

He went back to his notebook. Drawing. I could see the edge of the page from where I sat — something abstract, lines crossing lines, shadows building toward a shape that wasn't there yet.

"What are you drawing?"

"The sky."

"It looks like lines."

"That's because you're looking at it wrong." He didn't look up. "You have to look at it like — not a photograph. Photographs are about what things look like. This is about what things feel like. The way the light felt at five forty-seven this morning when the nurse brought my breakfast tray. I wanted to remember that. Not the breakfast. The light."

I wanted to remember the light.

Who talks like that? Who sits in a hospital courtyard drawing feelings about breakfast light?

This boy. Apparently. This boy with the cheap notebook and the tired eyes and the voice that was quiet in a way that made you want to be quiet too.

"I'm Jimin," I said.

It came out before I could stop it. Not Karina. Jimin. The name I'd been hiding under stage makeup and in-ear monitors and the weight of four million people having opinions about who I should be.

He looked at me. His eyes did something complicated — recognition, maybe, or just the particular focus of someone who spent a lot of time watching things other people didn't notice.

"I know who you are," he said. "You're on TV. My roommate watches your videos. He's got a poster above his bed. You're doing some kind of move. I don't know what it's called."

"Oh." My ears went red. They always did — genetic betrayal, my mother called it. The one tell I couldn't train away. "I'm sorry."

"Why are you sorry?"

"I don't know. That you know who I am. That I'm famous. That I'm crying in a garden like a normal person and you recognized me anyway."

He shrugged. The movement was small, economical. Like shrugging took energy he didn't want to waste.

"Everyone's someone," he said. "You just happen to be someone on TV. It doesn't matter."

It doesn't matter.

No one had ever said that to me before. Not about my career. My face. My name. Everything I was had always mattered — to fans who tracked my every move, to the company that owned my image, to the millions of people who had opinions about who Karina should be and how she should act and what she should wear and who she should love.

But to him — in this garden, with his convenience store notebook and his treatments-thin face — it didn't matter.

"I'm Y/N," he said. "I'm not on TV."