Eunji could see her destination at the end of the street, tucked in a little corner of a fairly busy intersection. Passersby gave her weird looks as she picked up her pace and bounded toward the store, the wind on her side, gliding alongside her.

The convenience store wasn’t busy, just like how it had been when she was last there, and the person she was looking for was right where she had been last time: in the candy aisle, hunched over several boxes of different candies that needed to be restocked.

Eunji’s heart thundered in her chest as she trotted over to the older woman. “Ms. Kim!”

Kim Junwoo’s mother looked up in shock. “Eunji-ah?”

The first time Eunji had seen Junwoo’s mother in person, she had been astounded by just how much Junwoo took after his mother. It was as though someone had taken his mother’s face and pasted it onto his; they shared the same large nose and small eyes and lips. She was thinner and older-looking than she had looked in the pictures in Junwoo’s home, but the resemblance was still uncanny.

When she had been shopping with Bomi, Eunji had decided last minute that she had to pay Junwoo’s mother a visit. She hadn’t had a plan as to what she would say or do, but right after she and Bomi had parted, she had immediately gone to CEO Choi to find out where Junwoo’s mother worked. Plan A had luckily done its research on Junwoo and his family, so within an hour, Eunji had been on her way to a convenience store that was very conveniently located near the hospital that Chorong was staying in. There, she had spent nearly two hours speaking with the older woman, even though she had planned nothing to talk to her about.

“We have to go,” Eunji blurted. 

“Where?”

“Your son,” Eunji gasped, adrenaline coursing through her body too electrifyingly for her to form coherent sentences, “Junwoo. He’s about to jump off a building. We need to go now.”

That was all it took for Ms. Kim to drop the bags of candy in her hands and scramble up. She didn’t even bother explaining her leave to her coworkers before she bolted out of the store with Eunji. Her undisguised fear and worry was almost too much for Eunji to bear. Eunji could tell from the older woman’s labored breathing and uneven strides that her frail body was struggling to keep up. It didn’t help that she had just recovered from a fall. Eunji too, for that matter. Eunji tried slowing down a bit for her, but Junwoo’s mother only gave her a small shove, telling her to hurry. 

She continued on, not paying any heed to her obviously protesting old limbs, and only looked forward, towards where her son stood at the ledge of a roof, mercy to his own destructive thoughts and the relentless wind that whipped past them, whispering promises of despair.

“How did you know I’d be here, Mom?” Junwoo questioned in disbelief. “I thought you were at work.”

“Is that supposed to be your excuse?” his mother demanded. “You thought I’d be at work so I wouldn’t be able to stop you from killing yourself?”

Now they were on the top of the roof whose ledge Junwoo still stood on. The elevator had taken years to carry them to the top floor, and the stairs they had had to climb to reach the roof were definitely an unwanted obstacle, but Eunji and Ms. Kim had made it nevertheless. And in time, too. Eunji never thought that she’d be so glad to see someone standing on the ledge of a roof so high up in the sky, with their feet still planted on the building below them.

For all the time she spent in the gym, she had been nowhere near prepared for the last twenty minutes of sprinting nonstop. Eunji stayed by the door, slightly leaning on it for support, as she tried to recuperate. Her legs shook unsteadily and her ankle felt as though someone had taken a red-hot blade and sliced a searing line from the bottom of her foot up toward her calf.

The helicopters circled around them in the colorless skies above, the whirling of their blades nothing but a dull disturbance amidst the roaring wind. The wind had been a whisper on the streets below, but up here, it was howling like a beast in the sky. Everyone had frozen to look at Eunji and Junwoo’s mother. Eunji disregarded the gazes of the cops and immediately sought her members’ eyes. 

They all looked relieved, but also like they hadn’t doubted that she’d come. Bomi grinned at her, and when she looked between Eunji and Ms. Kim, realization dawning upon her, her grin widened. Eunji smiled back, somewhat smugly.

“Mom, please,” Junwoo pleaded. “Go home. I don’t want you to see this.”

“See what? My only child plummet to his death?” His mother began crossing the distance between him and her. “You get down from that ledge right now!”

Eunji took a deep breath, then limped after her, wincing intensely with each step. She would definitely need to ice her ankle later if she wanted to be able to perform tomorrow.

When she reached the other members, Bomi laid a silent hand on her shoulder. A quiet invitation. Eunji took it gratefully and placed a hand on Bomi’s shoulder, shifted her body weight, and eased the pressure on her throbbing ankle. 

She caught Naeun staring worriedly at her foot, so she smiled and mouthed, “I’m okay,” when Naeun looked up. The raven-haired girl didn’t look convinced.

“No, I don’t want you to see me plummeting to my death! Of course I don’t!”

“Then don’t do it! It’s that simple!” His mother stood shakily in front of him, like if she got any closer, a single breath would push him over.

“My life is over, Mom,” he cried. “I’ve ruined it.”

“How is killing yourself going to make anything better?”

“I don’t know! I...I just know that I can’t keep living like this. I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry. I know you’ve worked so hard to make sure that I had a good life, but in the end I failed you. I’ve been nothing for a burden to you, and I can’t stand doing that to you anymore. This is the best for the both of us.”

“You do not get to decide that!” Ms. Kim shrieked. “Junwoo-ah, you have never failed me. You never will. No matter what, you will always be my precious son and I will always love you. I did not spend all these years working to make sure your future was secure because I thought it was an obligation. I did it because I love you!”

“You would not be working so hard if not for me. You would not be suffering long hours and sleepless nights. You wouldn’t have collapsed at work if it weren’t for me,” Junwoo sobbed. “I have caused you all this pain that you don’t deserve.”

“And I would do it all over again for you,” his mother said, her voice much softer now. 

“I brought you even more trouble with this accident. Don’t you see all the comments? They don’t just hate me, Mom, they also hate you. They’re blaming you for something you couldn’t help, and it’s all my fault.”

Eunji knew which comments Junwoo was talking about. She had come across them frequently, and they had upset her each time. The hate comments toward Junwoo were expected and warranted, as cruel as it sounded, but the hate comments toward his mother were certainly not tolerable. Eunji and the others had even had a talk with their CEO regarding the comments toward Junwoo’s mother and how to deal with them.

“Those comments mean nothing to me.” She took a step closer to her son. “But you? You mean everything to me. You are my entire world, Junwoo-ah.”

“I don’t deserve you,” he said, almost like a whimper.

“Do you know that you saved me?” 

Junwoo sniffed. His cheeks were stained with tears and a bright rosy color. “How could I have possibly done that?”

“When your father left me, I was devastated. The huge amount of debt he’d left and the crushing reality that the man that I had thought would stay with me til the end had truly left me were too much for me to bear. So I made my way up to the roof of a building just like this and stood at the ledge, just like how you are right now. I was pregnant with you at the time.” 

Junwoo stared at his mother, his mouth slightly ajar. Eunji had the feeling that she and the others had the same afflicted expressions.

“I told myself that I had nothing left to live for. That I had failed. That my life was ruined and that the world would be better off without me.” Eunji couldn’t see Ms. Kim’s face, but from the trembling in her shoulders and the breaks in her voice, she could tell that she was crying. “Just as I lifted my foot to jump and end it all, I felt a kick in my belly. It was soft at first, and I thought that I had imagined it, but then you kicked again. And again. And again. It was like you were telling me that you were there for me and would be my reason to live. All my searching for a reason to continue living, and it was there, inside my belly, all along. So I stepped down from that ledge and sought help right away.”

Eunji felt Bomi’s shoulder shaking, and when she glanced over, she found the older girl silently crying. It didn’t surprise her, especially since tears of her own were sliding down her cheeks.

“You...you never told me this,” Junwoo said.

“I never thought that I’d need to. When I gave birth to you and I finally held your tiny body in my hands, I knew that I had made the right decision. I looked into your eyes, and you just broke into the widest smile that I had ever seen. Can you imagine that? The widest smile that I had ever seen...on a newborn baby. You wrapped your tiny little hand around my finger, and I knew that I would love you with my entire heart and would give up anything for you.” 

Junwoo hiccuped, and suddenly, rapid waterfalls were falling from his eyes. He blubbered something between his sobs, but Eunji couldn’t catch his words. She moved closer to hear better, leaving the security of Bomi’s shoulder.

Ms. Kim took another step closer to her son. “You saved my life, Junwoo-ah. So please…,” her voice quavered, “please let me save yours.”

“Mom…,” he sobbed.

“We will get through this together. We always have, haven’t we?”

Junwoo sniffled and wiped his runny nose and tears with his sleeve. 

His mother held out her hand. “Come here, son.”

He considered the hand for a moment, then nodded and began reaching out. Eunji felt her shoulders sag with relief.

Just as Junwoo’s fingertips brushed against his mother’s, a powerful gust of wind swept through the rooftop, ravaging it as it tore through everyone on the roof and announced its presence with a sickening roar. Junwoo’s fingers were torn away from his mother’s as the gust pushed him back.

Without thinking, Eunji sprang forward, her hand outreached. Junwoo’s frightened eyes saw her hand, and he desperately shot his hand out. 

But it wasn’t enough. He was still too far away. So Eunji abandoned all notions of her safety and flung her body forward. Her hand latched onto Junwoo’s wrist, and his fingers curled around her wrist until they were securely clamped on.

And suddenly she was falling too. 

The momentum from Junwoo’s fall and his body weight were too much for Eunji. She felt her body lurch forward over the ledge. 

Behind her, someone screamed. Was it Bomi, Naeun, Namjoo, or Hayoung? She didn’t know. She just knew that it had been one of them. Maybe it had been all of them.

Eunji’s other arm desperately tried to find purchase on the ledge―or anywhere, really. She grabbed at the rough concrete, but her hand only slipped wherever it grabbed. She looked down at Junwoo, who clung onto her desperately and was looking at her with eyes full of despair, like he knew what was coming next. Eunji knew it too. It was an unsettling thought that sat heavily at the back of her mind, and Eunji couldn’t deny the reality of it.

So when the momentum from Junwoo’s fall wrenched Eunji from the safety of the roof and she tipped over the side, she didn’t scream.