Saeri lingers outside Yura's door, her hand resting lightly on the cool wood. It's a normal door.
Unpainted, but polished. Impersonal in the way all of the bedroom doors in the house are, as the personality of each occupant is kept behind these doors. A piece of themselves that can be shown or hidden depending on who's present.
Except for Yura's.
But Yura just joined the family. It's natural that she wouldn't have decorated her room to fit her preferences yet.
In Saeri's eyes, the room is a blank slate. An empty canvas waiting for Yura to express herself through colors, items, and maybe an organization system that only makes sense to her.
Saeri never thought that Yura would see the plain room as a declaration of impermanence. That having a plain room meant she would be pushed out of the house in a matter of time.
How could she have known that the plain room would be seen that way? Saeri never imagined that Yura grew up being shuffled from place to place. It's a concept she can't understand, because she would never do that to her children.
She listens and hears movement inside the room. Not much, but some. She hopes it's the sound of Yura starting to make the room into her own space, but after witnessing Yura at breakfast as she begged to be allowed to stay in the place that should have been her home from the beginning, Saeri knows that this hope is likely futile.
She also knows that now isn't the time to open this door and speak to Yura again. As much as she wants to, she needs to let Yura have time to process after breakfast. She can't be too overbearing without risking that Yura might shut down or become too overwhelmed.
It makes the standard wooden door between Saeri and her true youngest child feel like a canyon that she has no idea how to cross.
She doesn't sigh, even though it would ease the weight of sorrow in her chest slightly. She doesn't want Yura to hear her and open the door, feeling like she has to perform some made-up role if she wants to stay here and finish her general education.
Instead, Saeri waits just a moment longer before she turns and heads to the only other bedroom that's occupied at this time of day: Soraya.
She knocks twice before entering, just the light tap of her knuckles on the door.
She's sitting at her desk when Saeri walks in, her laptop displaying a video lecture that she paused before she swivels to face her mother, pulling out one earbud.
Soraya's room is calm, smelling of lavender and vanilla as her diffuser in the corner puffs out mist. It's been a calm room from the time that Soraya could form her own opinions and requested a space with neutral colors and warm lighting that wouldn't irritate her eyes or give her a headache if she studied for a long stretch of time.
It was such a serious request coming from a little girl, but Saeri hadn't commented on that. She simply started the redecorating process and asked Soraya questions as needed in order to make sure her daughter's room was exactly what she wanted.
And it's still that way.
After all, when Soraya makes a decision, she doesn't waver. When she wasn't quite a teenager, she claimed that she would become a doctor. Now, she's a pre-med student working her way towards that goal one general education class at a time, filling her schedule with the online versions of classes when she can to avoid wasting her time with a commute, and so it's easier for her to multitask without drawing an instructor's attention to herself.
"You want to talk about Yura?" Soraya asks.
"Is it that obvious?"
Soraya shrugs one shoulder. "I was at breakfast, too. And I've known you long enough to know when you're holding back what you really want to say, Mom. There's a lot you need to tell Yura, but you stopped yourself at breakfast because you understand she's not ready to hear it."
Saeri sighs and lets her posture slump until she's half-lying on the bed. "I didn't know what to expect when we'd meet her, but I didn't expect her to be so... wounded."
"It explains why the Quins were so excited to pick up Hirae. They never felt that Yura was their child, and they'd been proven right. She's not biologically related to them."
There's a pang in Saeri's heart again when Soraya says it out loud. Somehow, the Quins knew.
But that also leaves a number of questions lingering in Saeri's head. "Why wouldn't they have requested a paternity test or DNA test or anything to verify that earlier?"
"Who knows?" Soraya pulls her other earbud out and sets the pair on her desk. "Maybe it was a matter of pride. I hear the family is quite arrogant. If they checked and were wrong, that could've been too humiliating for them to risk."
This is the exact reason that Saeri sought out her older daughter after breakfast. She can read people and offer plausible explanations even while admitting she doesn't know the answer for sure.
"Maybe." It makes sense, but Saeri doesn't want to dig into the matter too deeply. Only enough to stoke her guilt without being consumed by it.
"It doesn't really matter anymore. What the reasons were."
Saeri has to admit that she's right, but if anything, the reasons no longer mattering feels like a new layer to the already complex guilt she has about the whole situation now that she's gotten a glimpse into Yura's life. "No, I guess it doesn't."
Soraya gets a look on her face that Saeri will always recognize. It's the expression of deep thought—her lips pursed into a thin line as her eyebrows pull towards each other to create a furrow between them. Her head tilted to one side ever so slightly.
After a few minutes, she decides on what she's going to say or how she's going to say it if she already knew the "what" of it.
"I think it would be good for all of us to see a family counselor," Soraya says. "The whole situation is abnormal, and it's clear that we don't understand what Yura needs. She's also made it clear that she's not about to tell us those needs. At least not easily."
Saeri sits with the thought. A counselor. She's familiar enough with the idea. She's had friends and acquaintances talk about family counselors over the years for any number of situations. Plus, Soraya is right. She didn't say it outright, but it's true that they're not equipped to handle this shift in their family. More importantly, Yura doesn't yet trust them enough to open up to them about what she wants and needs. Asking to stay in one place so she can finish her basic education was obviously a lot for her, and it shouldn't have been a question she thought she had to ask at all.
"Okay," Saeri says, standing up with the renewed energy of a solution. Or the start of one. "A family counselor. I'll find the best one in the city."
She doesn't know if Yura will feel worse at first. She doesn't know how well her sons will take to the idea.
But Saeri has spent every day since learning that her youngest child grew up without her mourning the years spent apart. Then, she learned that Yura's childhood was filled with a sense of abandonment.
If counseling has a chance at helping, Saeri will drag them all to the office one by one if she has to.