When she first started down this road on her own, a one-off contact told her to look at everyone with suspicion, because you never knew who was an anonymous lead. It was good advice, and, when their clumsy, thick fingers touched the bare skin of her hip, she thanked them for it with a bullet to the temple.

Chaerin is reckless and wild, prone to fits of caprice - this is what Jiyong knows.

After she left him behind - after taking his useless glasses and making him blind - he should have stayed in the rearview mirror with everything else; but, when she peered over her sunglasses, he followed, a mirage pressing against the glass of her eyes at each and every town. Chaerin had planned to stop, but her heart demanded more.

She imagined how his face would look when she dogged him; it warmed her when cold wind whipped against her face on empty highways.

When it came to life, it burned, like her bare skin had been grated against gravel. She challenged him to do better than perfection, and he scoffed. The sound captured how he knew he was good, but who was she to say that to him?

Her fist curled into a ball that was driven into his shoulder. The ring cut open her finger as he winced.

It turned out she liked that look better.

He could have called it strategic, he could have called it smart, he could have called it anything, but when five months went by with nothing, she knew a coward when she saw one.  She threw an ultimatum, a lit fuse. He could have thought the phone number was fake, or, worse, real, but neither stopped him from brushing it carefully with the tips of his fingers as she left.

Chaerin does not hide. She gives her name and phone number away to dangerous criminals who bear grudges against her; she walks into police stations and looks into security cameras; she knows that when she’s caught she will be caught as Lee Chaerin for all of Lee Chaerin’s crimes.

The worst thing Kwon Jiyong has done, in Kwon Jiyong’s name, is a traffic ticket, paid promptly and without commotion when he was 17.  She wants to split him open when she sees that’s all he has ever owned. She wants to crowbar open his mouth and feed him the long, long list of his deeds as an emetic and make him vomit up all of his lies.

Here they were: her looking at him, at how predictable, how neat, how organized he was, standing there – so slick in infiltration he couldn't pick himself out of a crowd. If he wanted to be normal, she gave it to him as a gift, perfumed in a heady mix of panic, fear, and anxiety that would blotch his face like an allergy.

She deliberately chose the worst time for a robbery, the exact nadir of success. It would be an inevitable hail of bullets – the security guard who was too gun-happy; the manager too close to the panic button; the wrong mixture of tellers who would be emboldened by the adrenaline, not paralyzed; and all for a measly amount of cash. It was a perfect storm of bad decisions.

She would drag him into the middle of it with her, tied forever to a failure, if he wouldn’t claim his successes.

He looked at her, the panic and fear in his eyes reaching out at her greedily, and she felt like a riptide was dragging her out to sea. She pulled at the second note she had written, frantic fingers rifling through her pocket for an afterthought, a contingency:

Je rigole.

His shoulders slumped down, his hands bent around the papers, and she wanted to run, further and faster and harder than she ever had before, until there were miles of false identities between them – but he looked at her, and it was like watching a foreign language bloom into familiar characters, to recognize it as relief and longing on an imperfect face.

She could not stop herself. She had given him a lit fuse, once, and she wanted to see it detonate – but it instead sputtered:

“There’s nothing left.”

And then she ran, turned a coward by his cowardice.

And – this is what Jiyong will find out – Chaerin is cruel.

Six months later, of morning silences and empty passenger seats, her hands are stained black with dye and she donates all the unopened perfumes scattered on the hotel sink to charity; folds away the clothes she likes the best into the bottom drawer. She bows her head and signs a lease in small delicate letters and looks around with sharp, intelligent eyes as the manager gives her the key.

The next morning, she squares her shoulders and reaches behind her. The scissors echo quietly as her hair falls to the floor and leaves her shoulder blades exposed. The computer she has open shows a young woman in her twenties, innocent and beaming, and Chaerin experiments in the mirror.

When she shows up for work – when her smile is soft and pretty and harmless – Jiyong’s jaw drops, sharp and ugly.

It's not a large bank, or a small one, but she can see why he's making his nest here. There's complacence written in the manager's walk, and a certain resignation leaking from the watery eyes of the lead teller, but that won't change between today and a month from now, when Jiyong plans, like clockwork, to walk away.

Chaerin thinks -  waiting - as she uses her trigger finger to rifle through the employee handbook with politesse.

waiting - she wants to scream by the end of the week, when the security guard holds the door open for her as the rain beats at her back.

waiting - she says before she sleeps beneath low-grade sheets, but the words falter when she pictures Jiyong, how in each day his lips are thin and white and there is gossip already about how he's been so cold to her, the new girl who hasn't been anything but professional to him.

So - she wakes up and walks up and offers him coffee and counts down.

So – he looks between her and the clock and the calendar, and she gives him cataracts from paranoia.

So – there are other eyes seeing him seeing her, brittle and sharp and noticeable.

So - waiting, but waiting is worth it when he splinters as their fingers graze.

At 18, Jiyong tweaked every aspect of himself methodically, until the person who boarded the empty morning bus wasn’t the person on the missing posters.

After two weeks, he knocks on the window of her car in a one-two pattern, where it’s sitting on the street in front of her apartment. It’s an hour before the bank opens, thirty minutes before she’s supposed to be there, and his restraint is something to be admired. She rolls it down hesitantly and bites her lip, innocent and nervous. There is a security camera pointed directly at them.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Going to work,” she says, and there are circles around his eyes as he takes in her appearance, looking for something to find lacking. She hears his fingernail tapping against the roof of the car. “Do you need a ride?”

“You’re not an employee,” he says, flat, factual.

“My paycheck disagrees,” she says. She tugs on the door handle and then throws it open, sharp, before pulling it shut again. The same moment he gasps from pain, his hand closes between the frame and the roof of the car, and he leans his body against it. “Same rate as you. Or are you not an employee either?”

There’s a security guard watching them from across the street, a drug store cowboy looking to be a hero, and he’s already taken out his half-smoked cigarette between dry lips and he’s crushing it beneath his shoe. Chaerin has a gun in her glovebox, and a smile on her lips.

“What’s your game?”

“You,” she crosses her arms and hangs half out the window, looking up at him through eyelashes. She grins, sharp and serrated. “It didn’t have to be so one-sided. But you didn’t want to play, remember?”

His face colors at that, like a passing cloud, before he stiffens and steps back. She could reach out for him, wrap her fingers around his belt loops, but she instead interlaces them and rests her chin. No rings rub against the soft skin of , and she misses the weight of them on her fingers as she drives.

“Walk away,” he says and turns, and she throws a worried look at the security guard and beckons him to come over.

Chaerin comes into work weeping, and tells her motherly co-worker that one of the other employees followed her home. The other woman begs her to say who.

She blows her nose and shakes her head, and before she leaves for the day she sees her duck into the manager’s office and close the door. When she walks past Jiyong’s station she scrawls XOXO on his notepad and tucks a photo of herself into the corner of his monitor.

There’s a staff meeting the next morning, and she makes a point to hesitate at the doorway and find where Jiyong is sitting before choosing her seat, as far from him as possible.

Whispers grow.

Jiyong spent his twenty-second birthday in a hospital, unconscious, with a name that wasn’t his on the patient chart. He spent the day after forging signatures, tentatively feeling the foreign, clean buzz of his hair, forcing his fingers to memorize the path of the scar there. When he went to bed, he thought an inch to the left and....

He denied the path that the and… pointed towards. He moved on and, when his hair grew back, uneven, his face twisted only for a moment before he focused on how he could hide it best. He never considered using it.

Jiyong is fired by a disgruntled middle manager who looks at him from behind smudged glasses that slip periodically down the sweat-slick bridge of his nose. Chaerin gnaws on her fingernail from the first stall in the bathroom, twisting her feet on the point of her toes.  The bathroom is right next to the manager’s office, and the walls were put up too thin. Jiyong’s voice is soft and polite up until it’s exposed, cut in half by the man’s emotional accusation that names everything but Chaerin.

She thinks of the man’s beloved daughter, who puts up photos of herself on the internet, who unwittingly leased the outline of her identity.

(It’s uncanny to the manager - her hair is just like Chaerin’s; her smile is just like Chaerin’s.)

She counts – one, two, three, four – and pushes open the door to the hallway just as Jiyong passes in front, the manager watching from the doorway. She ducks her head, her hair making a curtain of privacy, and smiles salt into the wound. His step half-stutters before his gaze flickers behind her, and he balls up his hand into a fist and rubs it into his eyes as if he could make her disappear. When he opens it again, she’s sniffling into her sleeve down the hall, her shoulders shaking.

Her victory is unidentifiable as a victory. She thinks he would like that.