No one says his name anymore. We are all very civilized.
The night he left, I made tea and sat on the floor by the door with two cups, because sometimes the smallest rituals bully the world into behaving. I told myself he’d come back. I practiced my lines:You’re late,andI’m still mad,anddon’t you ever do that again.Dawn came. The tea cooled. I poured both cups down the sink and watched the steam rise like a ghost that couldn’t choose which way to go.
If he had asked me to run, I would have. If he had asked me to wait, I would have, too. Instead he gave me silence and a lesson in how heavy quiet can be when it’s shaped like a person.
I am trying to move.
Not on—on implies forgetting, and I don’t believe in lying to myself as sport. Just…forward.
It looks stupid from the outside. I rotate my knives and oil the leather of my holster until it shines because things that work deserve care. I relace my boots with new cord and tie it differently—not the knot he liked, the one that never came loose; a new knot that holds becauseIpracticed it. I take the stairs instead of the balcony because falling is a kind of prayer and I’ve said enough of those. I go to the market with Minji and argue about peaches and come home with apples anyway. I make Seori laugh once—real, unguarded—by telling her the truth about how terrible she is at pretending to hate sweets.
At night I move the bag two inches farther from the door and then move it back because progress is ugly and uneven and sometimes looks like failure until it doesn’t.
Training helps until it doesn’t. My body remembers how to cut and not bleed. It also remembers the weight of his hands steadying my hips, adjusting my stance, voice low:There. Now breathe.Today I hit every target and feel nothing. Tomorrow I’ll miss on purpose until fury decides to be loud instead of polite.
When I can’t stand the walls, I walk the manor and inventory what’s mine. The chipped mug with a gold line through the crack. The blanket Seori “borrowed forever” that still smells like her soap. The plant Minji insists is thriving even though it drops a leaf every time Jisoo lies. I say their names out loud because gods don’t have time for every small prayer, but rooms do.
On the third evening, I take the ribbon off my wrist. Just to breathe. My skin feels naked and honest. The crescent warms like it wants to be touched. I don’t. I lay the ribbon on the sill andwatch the green bead catch the last light, the exact color of the chime we found in the ruins. When the urge to pick it up claws at me, I do something ridiculous and brave: I thread the bead onto a thin chain and fasten it around my neck, whereIcan feel it without checking a door. Not his tether. Mine.
Minji knocks without waiting and slides in sideways, as if she’s trying not to let the hall see me like this. She clocks the missing ribbon and the chain and says nothing because she is best friend enough to recognize sacred ground when she steps on it.
“Soup,” she announces. “Edible. Barely.”
“I love your honesty,” I say, and I mean it more than soup deserves.
“Walk?” she asks later, after I pretend to eat two bites and actually eat six.
We take the long way around the manor. The city has decided to be kind tonight—soft rain, clean air, a cat that allows us to admire it from six paces. I talk about nothing. She lets me. When a courier barrels past with a sack of letters, I flinch just enough to make me mad at myself. Minji bumps my shoulder with hers. “You’re allowed to hurt,” she says.
“I’m bored of it,” I admit.
“Try boredom,” she says. “It’s less dramatic.”
We’re almost back when I feel it: a prickle at the base of my throat, heat licking under the crescent. The bond wakes like it heard its name. I stop dead. Minji goes still beside me. We both listen. Wind. Rain. Night.
And then—nothing.
I breathe again. Not relief. More like accepting the weather.
Back inside, I carry the bag to the closet and open the door. Cedar and wool and a life pretending to be orderly. I stand there with the stupid thing in my hand and thinkthis is not a burial. It is a shelf. It is an act of mercy for my heart so it stops tripping on a shape it can’t stop reading as a goodbye.
I set the bag on the second shelf. Not the top—that’s for legends. Not the floor—that’s for trash. Second shelf. Reachable. Real. When I step back, my chest hurts in a way that feels like a stitch pulled, not a wound reopened.
Seori finds me at the window after lights-out, forehead on the glass, watching our reflections come and go as clouds argue with the moon. She doesn’t ask. She just holds out her handwarmer and I press it to the scar by my wrist where ribbon rubbed a memory into me.
“I put it away,” I say, voice small with the pride of a child showing a scraped knee. “The bag.”
“I know,” she says. “I heard the door.”
“I hate this,” I whisper. “This…choosing myself thing. It’s so quiet.”
“It gets louder,” she promises, then ruins it by adding, “Minji’s soup will help.”
I laugh. It hurts. It feels good to hear myself anyway.
When she leaves, I sit on the sill again and watch the rain carve clean lines down the glass. I catch my reflection—eyes rimmed dark, mouth determined, chain glinting at my throat where a ribbon used to live. The mark glows softly beneath mycollarbone. It doesn’t know he’s gone. Or maybe it does and refuses to be the part of me that learns last.
“I wanted forever,” I tell the empty room. “I got a lesson.”
