I knelt by his bed, and the world came back to me.
For two years, I had been living in a silent, grey photograph. Now, suddenly, there was sound and scent. The sharp, sterile smell of the hospital felt like a slap, waking me from a long dream, while the damp, salty scent of the sea still clinging to my uniform was the ghost of the nightmare I'd just escaped. My tears had stopped, but the space they left behind in my chest wasn't just empty—it was a vast, echoing cavern, scoured clean by a relief so total it was almost painful.
He's real.
The thought wasn't a whisper; it was a physical jolt, a current that shot through me, restarting a heart I didn't realize had stopped beating. He's real. My stubborn, foolish heart hadn't been wrong after all. The world could turn, the sea could rage, and the entire town could drown in their pity, but none of it was strong enough to take my Jun away from me.
I moved as if in a trance, leaning forward until my cheek could feel the cool, crisp texture of the cotton sheet beside his hand. I refused to look at the blinking, rhythmic lights of the machines. They were just noise. I focused everything I was on his face—the still, perfect profile I had kept alive behind my eyes for an impossible length of time.
Up close, the changes were a beautiful, cruel shock. His eyelashes, impossibly long and dark, rested against skin so pale it seemed to glow with a strange, otherworldly light. The soft lines of his face were gone, carved into the sharp, handsome angles of a seventeen-year-old. He had the face of a stranger, yet I knew every plane, every shadow, as if I had mapped it with my own hands. He had become the man I'd always dreamed of, but he had done it somewhere far away from me. A sharp, unexpected pang of loss cut through the joy. Two years. Stolen.
He's so handsome. The thought was possessive, a fierce, primal claim. A hot spark of defiance flared in my chest. If he had walked into our high school like this, every girl would have turned to stare, to whisper, to dream. The thought was unbearable. They didn't have the right. They hadn't watched the sea for him. They hadn't guarded his memory. He was mine. My beautiful, impossible boy, bought and paid for with seven hundred and thirty days of my own life.
"I knew it," my own voice was a stranger to me, a raw, ragged sound. "I knew it was you, Jun. I never gave up."
My fingers found his, and I squeezed, not gently, but with all the desperate force of my conviction. Feel me. You have to feel me. Know I'm here. I lifted his hand, pressing it to my forehead, needing the fragile, steady rhythm of his pulse as a grounding anchor. "You hated waiting," I murmured, the words tumbling out, a torrent of locked-away truths. "So I did it for you. I waited. Every single day."
I told him everything. About the empty chair, the silent house, the sunsets that were just a dull ache in the sky without him to share them.
"You came home," I finished, the words catching on a laugh that shattered into a sob. "You came home for your birthday. So wake up, you idiot. I'm freezing, and I need you to tell me off for being so reckless."
I held my breath, my entire universe shrinking to the space between one heartbeat and the next. I pleaded with him, with the world, with whatever had brought him back. Open your eyes. Please.
He didn't.
Instead, something so small it almost wasn't real happened. A tiny muscle near his temple, right where his hair was still damp, gave a single, fleeting twitch. It was a tremor, a tiny crack in the perfect, porcelain stillness of his coma.
I stopped breathing. The steady beep of the monitor seemed to grow louder, slower, each pulse a hammer blow against the silence. What was that? My mind raced, grabbing at the fragile hope. Was it just a nerve firing? A cruel trick of my exhausted, desperate imagination? Or had I, through some miracle, actually reached him?
My eyes scanned his face, hungry for another sign. He remained still. Unmoving. And then I saw it.
A single, perfect tear welled in the corner of his left eye.
It caught the cold hospital light, shimmering like a tiny, liquid star, before it broke free and slid down his temple. It traced a slow path right past the small, familiar mole beneath his ear, a landmark from a life I thought was lost forever.
He couldn't speak. He couldn't move. But he could hear me. He was in there.
I lifted my head. The raw, bubbling joy didn't vanish. It changed. It cooled, crystalizing into something hard and sharp. A fierce, unbreakable resolve. The Silent Princess who had spent two years waiting for a ghost was gone. She had died on the beach this morning.
He was back, but he was lost.
My wait was over. My true purpose was just beginning. I was no longer waiting for him. I was going in to get him.