Jisoo awoke to the sound of Dalgom barking. She groaned and rolled around in the oversized sleeping bag that she shared with Rose and tried to her dog to shut up. They were all bundled up in layers of clothing to combat the nightly chill. Dalgom continued barking. Jisoo’s eyes flickered open stubbornly and she looked around for her dog.

“Dalgom-ah,” she said groggily. “Shh, please be quiet.”

But the little white dog was still yapping off, barking at a squirrel in the tree. Jisoo groaned.

“Dalgom, shut up, please,” she said again. When the barking suddenly died down, Jisoo became alarmed. She shot her eyes open and looked up just in time to see Dalgom escaping his leash and running down the path. 

“!” she said, springing up from the sleeping bag. She stuffed her feet into her shoes and took off down the dirt road after the little white dog.

“Dalgom-ah!” she shouted after him. “Stop! Get back here! Sit!”

How could a dog with such little legs run so fast? Jisoo was already going as fast as she could without tripping over loose stones and raised roots. It must have been very early since the sky was still dim and the world around her was gray and colorless and the air was damp with vapor.

“Sit, boy!” she shouted, but Dalgom had disappeared into a thicket, and Jisoo had to run in after him. Branches and leaves scraped her clothing and she threw her arms up to keep the brush from hitting her face. “Ugh, damn dog,” she cursed. She heard him barking again, just a few feet ahead. She prepared herself to pounce on the puppy and trap him in her arms when the bushes and trees cleared away. She found herself in the midst of another forest clearing, a meadow, and she went completely quiet.

There were thousands of them. Thousands of small flowers covered every bit of ground as far as her eye could see. Pale purple with petals spread out like rays of light from a star. One thousand pale purple stars exactly like her lucky flower, swaying gently in the morning mist and taking up every bit of space in her line of sight.

She didn’t know why she felt so overcome with emotion. They were just flowers after all. She stepped forward carefully, bringing herself closer to the center of the field until she was properly surrounded by the little violet blooms. 

Her mind traveled back through time in the few minutes she spent taking in her surroundings. Back through the years who the moment her lucky flower came to her. The moment she crouched in the gravel of her driveway and took its delicate purple petals into her palm and how much better she felt knowing that hope could come from practically anywhere even in the most hopeless of times. 

But something was different now about that memory. Looking around at the thousands of purple flowers, the memory became more vivid. The boy’s face became clearer. 

Jisoo thought about their date by the river. He was the one who told her she should take this camping trip. He talked about a flower field that he thought she’d like.

Jinyoung. He was the little boy.

Jisoo crouched down then reached out and touched the soft yellow center of one of the purple blooms and smiled. All these years, she kept that flower as a charm for good luck. Here she was discovering that it wasn’t luck at all, but fate. 

No more moping around, Jisoo thought. 

Her camping trip with friends was exactly the kind of refreshing start she needed to the next chapter of her life. Yes, her situation at Hanguk Lighting and being stuck back on her family farm wasn’t what she had planned for herself after graduation. But as she descended Mt. Sol that day, she made up her mind that she was going to be a writer anyway. To hell with Embrace and to hell with all the red tape and community politics. She wasn’t going to sit around and wait for someone to give her a chance anymore.

If she wanted to write, she was going to do it.

She dug up some of the flowery shrubs from the field and potted them when she got home. She set them on her desk, to remind her to look on the bright side of things. That night, she went home and dug out her laptop computer and all her diaries and all her notebooks. Somewhere buried in all these pages was the story she wanted to tell, the story she had been holding back all these years. She opened up old documents on her computer and revived old plot bunnies, brought back her comatose characters, re-read old random bits of prose, rediscovered old drafts. 

For three weeks, she came straight home after working at Hanguk Lighting and sat at her desk, coaxing her novel into existence. She couldn’t sleep from all the ideas running through her brain. She ate here and there but was too engrossed in the story that was coming together to sit down to a proper meal. She kept up appearances for the sake of work, but heart, mind, and soul were purely dedicated to writing.

At night, after a long session of drafting and brainstorming and researching, she would sit back in her chair and feel completely spent. She could feel her heart beating in her chest and she flushed with pride over her own work.

She had forgotten. 

She’d forgotten what it felt like to give herself over completely to a new project. How it could be both exhausting and energizing at the same time. How she could lose herself completely in her writing and lose all sense of space or time. She forgot how good it felt to go to bed after pouring her out into her words, how good it felt to type a period into the last sentence of a chapter and see the finished product. 

No one is taking this from me.

In just two months, Jisoo had a 175,000-word manuscript. She had set out to write a romance, but the story she held in her hands wasn’t exclusively that. It ended up being a mother-daughter story, a multigenerational mystery novel and a bit of a ghost story with a sprinkling of romance. So many times throughout the writing process, Jisoo surprised herself with what she could come up with. The story had taken her to parts of her mind that she hadn’t explored before, rooms in her world with doors that hadn’t been opened in years. 

In the end, looking down at the finished product, she was slightly terrified. There were parts of her in this manuscript that she hadn’t revealed to anyone before. This might be truly the most honest writing she’d done in her life. She didn’t know how people would react. She didn’t know how she would feel letting people into her secret world. 

The thought was mortifying. And yet thrilling all at once.

“Sugar… sugar… sugar,” Jisoo muttered to herself as she wandered the neighborhood grocery mart in search of ingredients to make a cake. It was her father’s birthday, and she wanted to surprise him, so after work, she headed straight to the market.

She pushed the cart around absentmindedly as she looked up at the aisle signs, looking for the one that would have sugar stocked. Meanwhile, she grabbed random snacks and foods that caught her attention. Frozen waffles and chocolate bars and bottles of soda. She opened a box of glazed donuts and sneakily started to nibble on one as she searched for the sugar. As she rounded a corner, however, she stopped clear in her tracks. 

Dara was standing right in front of her.

Jisoo nearly choked on her donut. 

“What the ?” she accidentally said out loud, and a piece of half-chewed donut fell out of , along with a bit of drool. Jisoo wiped with her sleeve as Dara approached. When she got close, Jisoo physically shrank back from her old boss. What the hell is she doing here? Jisoo thought. Her mind started coming up with the wildest reasons for Dara’s appearance at the grocery store. She must have been here to exact revenge. That’s definitely it, she thought. 

Dara crossed her arms and grimaced as she looked Jisoo up and down. Jisoo was too tongue-tied to speak. Dara didn’t look as tired as Jisoo remembered her while working at Embrace. She actually had makeup on: a sharp cat-eye liner and red lipstick that made her look like a millionaire. But she was dressed comfortably in a warmer autumn outfit. Jisoo must have looked like an idiot, mutely waiting for Dara to speak. Finally, after what felt like a decade of awkward staring, Dara cleared .

“Come with me,” she said.

Jisoo asked a grocery clerk to hold her items as she followed Dara to the coffee shop located inside the shop. The coffee was just average, but it was quiet inside, which is probably what Dara was going for. 

This whole thing felt so surreal to Jisoo, who still couldn’t get over the fact that her old supervisor was in her hometown, sitting in a coffee shop in her rundown neighborhood grocery mart. This was downright unnatural, and it was kind of creeping her out. Dara was so quiet and cryptic. Jisoo took the seat in front of her carefully, watching Dara’s face for any clue as to what she wanted.

“What are you doing here?” Jisoo finally asked, taking a sip of the god-awful coffee. Dara raised her brow.

“What?” she said. “Shouldn’t I be allowed to hang around my hometown?”

Jisoo nearly spat out the coffee.

“Your hometown?” Jisoo g