Every time I considered bringing it up, I couldn’t bring myself to, because I knew why.
Part of it was because he’d been advised by his management not to acknowledge it, but another part ran deeper. Entrenched in trauma that he didn’t want to admit to.
I knew in my gut that when his fans sent condolence wreaths to be mounted outside the dorms to grieve his broken heart that all he saw were the funeral wreaths the anti-fans had sent to his Grandmother’s house when his uncle and aunt had died.Wreaths with his name on them. I knew he was remembering how they’d chanted that he should have died, instead. I knew he remembered how the reporters had harassed his family.
How could anyone move on from that?
I felt a pang of guilt that I wasn’t there with him. The feeling of being pulled in two opposite directions achingly familiar.
I took a breath, and tried to draw myself back in, to push aside the memory of seeing those wreaths outside the dorms.
The reason Jihoon had stopped going out the front door.
I refocused on the screen, dragging myself back to the present.
“Have you heard anything more about–about Hana?” I was reluctant to say her name. It felt too much like invoking bad luck.
Jihoon paused, his hands clutching a shirt in one hand, a pair of socks in the other. He took a deep breath before he tossed the shirt behind him into the open bag on his bed. He was facing the camera, but his gaze was somewhere else. He tossed the balled up pair of socks between his hands. The question seemed to expand between us.
“They spoke to her,” he finally said. “She denied everything.”
I wasn’t surprised.
“They asked her about the website, theTabs, but she insisted she was just a fan of the site and had nothing to do with it.”
I nodded, because obviously she wouldn’t admit to something like that.
“What about the photo of you and Lee Hyejin?” I forced a degree of levity into my words, and from the slight pinch of his eyebrows, it looked like Jihoon noticed.
“She denied taking the photo, but did admit she’d seen it.”
Seen it? She’d bloody waved it in my face!
Jihoon continued talking, oblivious to my internal frustration. “She blamed it on a person who no longer works for the company, but would not say who.”
“That’s such bollocks!” I burst out, causing my phone to slip off my knee. I grasped for it, only just catching it before it tumbled to the floor. “Sorry,” I muttered.
Jihoon shrugged. “There’s nothing else to be done.”
I paused, running his words back in my mind. “Nothing? How can there be nothing?”
“She was asked to turn her phone over. They found nothing on it.”
“Nothing?” I felt stuck on that word, because how could there be nothing when I’d seen the photo myself?
“She must have the pictures backed up somewhere else,” I wondered aloud.
“It does not matter if she does,” he said, scoffing as he dragged a hand down his face, and for the first time I saw the strain in the lines around his eyes, the unhappy pinch of his mouth. He wasn’t nearly as calm as he was pretending to be.
“The company cannot take her personal computer, and without evidence, the police will do nothing. Without proof the company cannot even fire her.”
“But she knows about you and me,” I protested weakly. At least, I was pretty sure she did.
“It’s her word against ours,” he sighed. “Anything she might say would just be another rumour, and I think there’s enough of those right now.”
“That’s whats been bugging me,” I admitted. “Why hasn’t she said anything? She could have easily put my name on theTabs, or anywhere else. Why hasn’t she?”
He sighed again, and it made me feel like an asshole for even bringing it up.
