Lee Jiyeon had seen a lot of things in the span of the seventeen years she’d been alive.

She was the one who saw her father do drugs and drink himself to death, sometimes at the same time, sometimes in succession, and sometimes separately, but always every night.

She was the one who saw her father hit her mother, first a light slap, then harder and harder, until the slaps turned to punches and kicks, and red marks turned to bruises and open wounds.

She was the one who saw her mother cheat on her father, tricking a man into sleeping with her, getting pregnant, and using that as an incentive to divorce her husband and escape, leaving her children to their addicted, abusive father.

Lee Jiyeon had seen a lot of terrible things by the time she was eleven. By the time she was thirteen, she wanted it all to end, wanted to escape as easily as her mother had. All throughout this, however, the girl had one person she could trust to protect her, to be by her side always, and take care of her as she could take care of him: her older brother by three years, Lee Jihoon.

He was the one who had pulled her out of the room whenever she discovered their father drinking or doing drugs. He was the one who had hidden her away whenever their father went on a rampage. He was the one kept a lookout while she called children protective services on their father. He was the one who kept their father away from her when the police came to take him away. He was the one to take care of her when they were both in the orphanage and foster homes—together, always together—and the one to take custody of her as soon as he came of age.

For the past two years, she and Lee Jihoon have been living together in an officetel that straddled the border between decent and shabby. Jihoon was in university and Jiyeon was in her last year of high school. For people their age, this was a normal progression of life, but these two were struggling to stay in school. They worked hard and got good grades in school, but sometimes they just couldn’t afford to pay for the tuition without making some huge sacrifices. There had been several times where the two wouldn’t eaten a full meal for weeks in order to continue their education, despite Jihoon being in an online university and Jiyeon not being in a hagwon. Both of them were taking classes during the day and working at night, Jihoon as a DJ and occasional bartender, and Jiyeon as a waitress at a café, almost never having time to do homework, let alone relax.

In all of her seventeen years, Jiyeon had thought she had seen everything.

Then she--and Jihoon--met Hong Jisoo.