The car glided through the city, the rhythmic glow of the streetlights pulsing through the cabin in steady intervals of gold and shadow. Doyun gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white, his mind still racing from the impossible dinner they had just shared.
"Your address," Doyun prompted again, his voice tight, sounding like a man trying to maintain his grip on a crumbling reality.
"Where—"
He stopped mid-sentence. His heart nearly seized.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her hand reach out. She didn't hesitate. She didn't fumble. Her fingers pressed firmly against a hidden panel in the center console—a secret compartment that only he and she had ever known about. It was a tiny latch, disguised perfectly as part of the car's interior trim.
With a soft, sickening click, the panel popped open. Chae-won reached in and pulled out a small, strawberry-scented lip balm.
Doyun's blood turned to ice. That lip balm had been sitting in that dark spot for seven hundred days. It was more than plastic and wax; it was a relic. A piece of a dead girl's life that he couldn't bring himself to touch, let alone remove.
As she rolled down the window, letting the cool night air rush into the heated cabin, and began to apply the balm, Doyun's shock curdled into a blinding, white-hot rage.
How dare she?
SCREECH!
He slammed on the brakes so hard the tires screamed against the asphalt, leaving black scars on the road. The car jolted to a dead stop in the middle of the empty street, throwing them both forward against their seatbelts.
"Put that back," Doyun hissed, his voice trembling with a terrifying fury. He turned to her, his eyes dark and predatory in the shadows. "Put. That. Back. Where you found it!"
The sheer volume of his voice made the glass of the car vibrate. Chae-won flinched, the lip balm slipping from her fingers and rolling onto the floor mat.
In the flickering, amber light of a nearby streetlamp, her eyes began to shimmer. Large, heavy tears pooled in her lashes and began to track down her cheeks. She didn't sob; she didn't make a sound. She just looked at him with a silent, devastating hurt that bypassed his anger and struck his soul.
Doyun froze.
The rage vanished instantly, replaced by a suffocating sense of déjà vu. It was the exact same way his Chae-won used to cry—no noise, no drama, just that heartbreaking, wide-eyed stare that made him feel like the most monstrous man on earth.
His heart skipped a beat, then another. The walls he had built around his shattered heart didn't just crack; they disintegrated. Without a single logical thought, Doyun reached out. His thumb brushed against her cheek, his touch uncharacteristically tender as he wiped away a stray tear.
The air in the car became heavy and electric, thick with the scent of strawberries and rain. Doyun leaned in, his gaze dropping to her lips, then back to her glistening eyes. In the shadows of the car, he no longer saw a stranger. He didn't see a junior from H Group. He saw his Chae-won.
Their breath mingled in the small, confined space. Only a few inches remained between them—a distance that felt like a fragile bridge spanning the gap between the living and the dead.