"But hyung—" Tae-min started, and Jae-won held up a hand to stop him.
"I know," Jae-won said, his voice softer now, the command bleeding into something more vulnerable. "I know it's hard. I know we all want to go to her, to hold her, to fix everything. But that's not what she needs. She needs time. She needs proof that we can be trusted. She needs us to be patient even when patience feels impossible."
"So we wait," I heard myself say, and was surprised by how steady my voice sounded when everything inside me was screaming to run to her apartment and beg her to let me in. "We wait, and we write more letters, and we let her set the pace."
Jae-won nodded, something like approval flickering in his expression. "Exactly. We wait."
I didn't sleep that night.
Instead, I lay in my bed and stared at the ceiling, the golden amber bond pulsing steadily in my chest like a second heartbeat. I could feel her through it — not clearly, not the way I imagined a completed bond would feel, but a distant echo of emotion. Fear. Hope. Exhaustion. The faintest flicker of something that might have been warmth.
She was trying. The words kept cycling through my head, a mantra I couldn't shake. She was trying. She was letting us in. She was starting to believe. There was another phrase that haunted me, one that Tae-min had shared when he'd told us about their conversation at the convenience store.
She knows Hwan is the bright one, even though there's more beneath the sunshine.
She'd seen through me.
Even while running, even while terrified, even while fighting every instinct that told her to let us in — she'd looked at me and seen past the mask I'd been wearing for so long that sometimes I forgot it was there.
I rolled onto my side and reached for my phone, pulling up her lyrics — the ones Jin-ho had found weeks ago, before any of this had started. I'd read them dozens of times by now, but tonight they felt different. Tonight, knowing she was trying, knowing she was starting to believe — the words hit differently.
Smile for the cameras, smile for the crowd.
Paint on the sunshine, make them proud.
They don't see the shadows, the weight of the mask.
They don't know to see them, they don't think to ask.
I'd thought she'd written these words about someone else. Some abstract concept of performance and expectation. But now, reading them again with the golden amber bond pulsing in my chest, I wondered if she'd recognized the same thing in me that I'd always seen in myself.
The exhaustion of being bright. The weight of everyone expecting sunshine. The loneliness of wearing a mask so long you forgot what your real face looked like. I'd started performing "happy" when I was eight years old.
My parents fought constantly — screaming matches that shook the walls, silences that stretched for days, a household so tense that I learned to read the air like a weather forecast. I'd figured out early that when I smiled, when I laughed, when I made jokes and played the clown, the tension eased. My parents would stop glaring at each other and look at me instead. They'd laugh at my antics. They'd forget, for a moment, whatever they'd been fighting about.
So I kept doing it.
I became the bright one. The happy one. The one who could walk into any room and lift the mood just by existing. It was a survival mechanism at first, a way to navigate the minefield of my childhood, but somewhere along the way it had become my entire identity.
By the time I'd auditioned for Narvi Entertainment at sixteen, I didn't know how to be anything else.
The company loved it, of course. A trainee who was naturally cheerful, who lifted the mood during grueling practice sessions, who could make everyone laugh even when they were exhausted and homesick and questioning every life choice that had led them to this moment — that was gold. They built SIRENaround it. Made me the mood-maker, the bright spot, the sunshine that balanced out Jin-ho's quiet intensity and Jae-won's commanding presence.
I played the role perfectly.
Too perfectly, maybe.
Because now, at twenty-five, I didn't know how to stop. Didn't know how to admit that sometimes I was tired, or sad, or angry, without feeling like I was letting everyone down. Didn't know how to take off the mask without panicking about what people would see underneath.
But she'd seen. Keira had looked at me — twice, briefly, in moments of panic and flight — and she'd seen that there was more beneath the sunshine.
She hadn't run because of it. She'd run because of her own fear, her own demons, her own twelve years of walls. But she'd seen me. Really seen me. And in her letter, she'd thanked us for being vulnerable. For showing her who we really were.
Maybe... maybe I could do that.
Maybe I could write her another letter. One that went deeper than the first. One that told her about the eight-year-old boy who learned to smile to survive, about the teenager who auditioned for an entertainment company because performing happiness felt easier than actually feeling it, about the man who was starting to realize that the golden amber bond in his chest was the first thing in years that had made him feel something real.
I reached for the notebook I kept on my nightstand — the one none of the others knew about, the one I'd been writing in since I was a trainee — and I started to write.
