Adrenalin rushes through me; I pick up my pace and run faster. It’s a warm day for the winter season, and my shirt sticks to my back as quickly as a gust of cool wind swoops in to remind me that I’m underdressed. I try to breathe in as little cold air as possible. My exhales come out in a shapeless smoke. My hands turn into fists, and my legs move like a machine, pulling me forward even as my body grows heavier and heavier. It occurs to me that I could have taken the bus, but I doubt my restlessness would have let me.

I nearly drop my keys in my rush to open the front door. Vaguely, I wonder if hyung is even at home. He might be out working one of his three jobs, doing his best to make sure we live a comfortable life; that I live an ignorant life. But that’s not what I want. I have to tell him that.

“Jongin?” I hear hyung say my name as soon as I step inside. Not bothering to take my shoes off, I cross the threshold and find hyung fixing a loose hinge on one of the kitchen cupboards. “It came off again,” he explains to me, briefly taking off his cap to run a hand through his hair. “It’s an easy fix, though.”

“Hyung.”

“Hm?”

I don’t know what to say. “You lied to me” sounds too accusatory, although I do want to accuse him. I’m mad at hyung for not telling me the truth, but I don’t want to seem ungrateful. It would be unfair of me to blame him for caring.

“No work today?” The words come out of me, foreign, as though spoken by another man.

“I do in a bit,” he says, opening and closing the cupboard door to test the hinges.

“And which of your three jobs will you be going to?”

The cupboard door shuts with a bang. Quietly, he asks, “Did Minho tell you?”

“Accidently,” I say. “He saw me at the cafe and though you’d told me since you’d let me have a job.”

“I should’ve made you quit,” he mutters.

“No, you shouldn’t have. You let me stay, and that was right.”

Hyung faces me. His eyes are sunken and dark. He must not be getting any sleep. “I’m still not sure about that.”

“Letting me keep my job was the right thing to do,” I say. “And I didn’t ask you to make decisions for me, anyway.”

Hyung sets the screwdriver on the counter, and then rubs his hands against the pockets of his pants. He doesn’t say anything, merely observes the floor.

“So where do you work?” I ask. He uses his toe to kick at an invisible smudge on the tiles. It nearly makes him slip.

“I still coach,” he tells me. “I tutor, too.  And I work part-time at a restaurant.”

“How many hours, hyung?”

“That doesn’t matter -”

“How many hours do you work a week?”

He considers this, the creases in his forehead disappearing as he calculates the numbers. “Fifty. Sometimes more. It fluctuates, with the tutoring and all.”

Fifty. Fifty hours, give or take, of never being home. Fifty hours where sweat becomes a second layer of skin and time is read as paychecks, not minutes. How had I not noticed? How had I not made a deduction based on the hours he came home, the textbooks he always forgot to bring, the changes in topic?

Because you’re selfish, my head tells me. Because you’re too preoccupied with yourself.

I’m quiet for a long time, mirroring the same vow of silence my brother now practices. I see his eyes travel to my shoes, which I should’ve taken off, but he makes no comment about it. I find myself poring over the magnitude of my brother’s sacrifices. Of my stupidity. Of all his hard work, and of all the classes I’ve skipped and teachers I’ve disregarded. I’ve wasted his sacrifices.

“I’m sorry.”

He looks up. I avoid his gaze. “What?”

“I’m sorry you had to do that.”

“Jongin -”

“I was envious of you,”