The elevator doors parted like a veil to another world.
A hush had settled across the corridor—not silence, but something softer, like breath held just before a confession.
Low lights kissed the marbled floor, and the air on the 19th floor hung heavy, crowded not with people, but with feelings left unsaid, unreleased.
Jinwoo stepped forward.
Not hurried, not hesitant—a man adrift between knowing and not wanting to know.
Even his shadow seemed unsure of where to land.
"...sometimes I wonder if I should just disappear."
Her voice—so offhand, almost playful.
But the words had seeded themselves deep within him, and now, they sank.
Slowly.
Irrevocably.
Noah's words had struck truer than he cared to admit.
Without her, there was no breath.
Not the metaphor of poetry—the certainty of biology.
To live in a world absent of her touch, her gaze, her quiet presence—was to die by degrees.
He had sensed it long ago.
The current between her and Daniel.
It didn't need names, or touch, or declarations. It simply existed—a language of glances, a silence too full to ignore.
When her eyes lingered too long in Daniel's direction, when her voice trembled as if mourning something she hadn't yet lost, he knew.
She was changing. And that change was not for him.
But still—he looked away.
Because pretending was easier than unraveling.
And perhaps, he already knew the ending.
Twenty years of shared breath and memory.
A history that predated his arrival, that outweighed even his fiercest tenderness.
His love—too sudden, too wild, too young.
What cut deepest wasn't that she might choose Daniel—but that she still looked at him with affection.
And that part of him, the quiet, aching part, had clung to that affection like a lifeline.
A fragile hope.
A bitter comfort.
A pride crumbling beneath the weight of longing.
Still—God, how he longed for her.
To bury his face in the crook of her neck, to inhale that devastating scent of her, to rest in the shelter of her warmth as if she were the only place in the world he could call home.
He leaned back against the hallway wall, the weight of love now heavier than its absence.
And strangely, he envied Noah.
Noah, who didn't pretend to be her friend.
Who looked at her with calm affection—like someone who had already accepted that to love her was to let her go.
Jinwoo picked up his phone, his fingers trembling faintly with a grief that had not yet found language.
He sat on the edge of the sofa, and typed slowly, deliberately:
Just got home. See you tomorrow.…I love you.
He stared at the final line as though it were the last thing he'd ever say to her.
Then, softly, he pressed send.
That night, more than any night that had come before—he missed her like breath.