The larger windows were dark, shades drawn all the way down, but through the stained glass was a dim glow that told Eunjae he wasn’t too late. He knocked. A minute slipped by, and then two. Another knock couldn’t hurt. Eunjae raised his fist again, then dropped it when someone approached from the other side. Someone wearing red.
“I have no idea why I came here,” Eunjae heard through the door. Jiyeon had her back turned to him again, but the tense line of her shoulders was visible through the glass panels.
“Because it’s my birthday!”
“I offered to take you out for dinner. That’s what we should’ve done.”
“You guys are fighting about the stupidest thing in the history of all stupid things. Buying me dinner at the Cheesecake Factory was not gonna make it better.”
“The Cheesecake Factory? Denny.”
“I love that place. Don’t start.”
“Nothing in there even makes sense except for the cheesecake,” argued Jiyeon. “The five hundred menu items, the decor —”
“The decor,” Denny argued back, “is Venetian.”
“What? How is it Venetian, like what even counts as a Venetian aesthetic?” Jiyeon threw her hands up almost before she’d finished the sentence. “Actually, no. I’m not sticking around any longer. I’m sorry your birthday turned out like this. I love you, but this was a mess and I regret it. I’ll try again in another month, I guess. Maybe they’ll be over it by then.”
She stepped backward into the door, pushing it open without turning around. Eunjae was forced to lurch away, off the stoop and onto the sidewalk. Denny’s face appeared over Jiyeon’s shoulder. His eyes went wide, almost as wide as a signature waffle.
In an instant, he’d shunted his sister behind him and blocked the doorway, seemingly growing another three inches taller as he glared at Eunjae.
“Can I help you?”
6
“Ifthisisanotherwacko from the Internet, I’m calling a full Code Blue, no holds barred, special forces and SWAT team —”
“Denny, stop.” Jiyeon shoved past her brother, moonlight turning the tiny flowers in her hair into silver stars. To Eunjae, she said, “It’s the mystery man. Did you forget something, Ryan Kim? I can double check with Jeannie. She might have found it before she left.”
“Mystery man? You’re talking to some new man already, Han Jiyeon?”
The siblings exchanged looks as their father stomped onto the scene, Mrs. Han following close behind. He made an abrupt switch from Korean to English. “You broke up with Arthur Junior one month ago, now it’s a new man?”
“Does Arthur Junior know our parents are obsessed with him?” muttered Denny.
“And who is Ryan Kim? I’ve never met a boy named Ryan Kim. Is he from church?”
Eunjae’s gaze darted back and forth between the various family members before landing, finally, on Jiyeon’s apologetic smile. He smiled back. At least, he tried. Truth be told, he felt much too queasy to manage it very well. The mask prevented anyone from seeing this pathetic attempt, which was a small mercy. He dropped into the lowest bow he could execute without tipping over and commenced an apology of his own. A deluxe apology, Max would call it.
Max would be the authority on that subject, what with all the apologies Eunjae had helped him draft over the years. His younger brother really needed to quit running his mouth so freely on public broadcasts.
Eunjae had never generated enough of a scandal to warrant such an elegant apology on his own behalf. In fact, he’d failed to drum up any scandals whatsoever. He practiced composing apologies nonetheless. His eldest brothers, Jaehwan and Kazu, had given many a speech about how they were bound to disappoint their legions of fans at some point down the line. Maybe they’d be seen chatting too long with the members of a girl group backstage at a music show. Maybe they’d cause an uproar over an Instagram post. Or maybe there would be dating rumors dutifully reported by the tabloid press, true or false. It was best to master the art of saying sorry. Eunjae saw the sense in that.
His apology that evening was apparently so epic in nature and composition that it left all four members of the Han family speechless. Eunjae remained as he was, bent at the waist with the bucket hat fallen to the ground at his feet. “I apologize for my inadequacy,” he reiterated in Korean, in case they missed it the first time. And then he translated it back to English, just for good measure.
Jiyeon recovered first. “It’s okay,” she said faintly. “You got lost and you don’t have your phone. Nothing to be sorry about.” This last sentence shook her out of the stupor. She took a few steps forward, pausing to collect the bucket hat and hold it out to Eunjae. “I’m here. Whatever you need, I’ll help you.”
Fans loved to extol the virtues of Eunjae’s smile. They liked to say that it was the kindest, the warmest, the most reassuring smile they’d ever seen. And why wouldn’t they? This girl had never smiled at them. They didn’t know any better.
Eunjae stopped staring, accepted the hat, and jammed it back onto his head. “Sorry. Thank you. I’m just… I’m really grateful. I think I’ve missed my flight, but if I could just call our —” He stumbled, coming close to saying manager. That wasn’t going to work if Nami had gotten on the plane with the others, so he should think of something else. “If I could just call someone, that would be a good place to start.”
“Of course. Here you go.” Jiyeon dipped a hand into her bag and produced a phone. She unlocked the screen before passing it to Eunjae. “You know the number, right?”
Eunjae did not, in fact, know the number. It wasn’t that he hadn’t bothered to memorize any of his brothers’ numbers, since he did know one of these by heart: Jaehwan’s number, because he was leader, and because he made the whole group memorize that string of digits ages ago. Then they’d been bombarded with pop quizzes for weeks afterward. If Eunjae knew anything, it was Jaehwan’s phone number.
This was the sort of emergency that Jaehwan had been preparing them for, by searing those digits into their brains, but it would be no use to call him now. Apollo’s leader was completing mandatory military service, having enlisted back in April. Jaehwan would want to help Eunjae — and probably also flay him alive — but there would be very little he could do about it.
