Her eyes trailed over the large, loopy scrawls, and her eyebrows met in the middle. With a frown, she scrunched up the piece of paper and tossed it behind her. “We’re not playing this.”

“Jesus, Wen!” Johnny backtracked, retrieving his crumpled efforts from the ground. “Why not? ‘You’re y I’m y’, ‘Love Talk’, ‘Cake by the Ocean’ – these are some great hits!”

“Because,” Wendy said, turning her nose up at him, “they’re vulgar and encourage loose morals. They make relationships seem like they’re just about physical attraction, flirting, and .”

Next to them, Jaehyun shrugged his shoulders. “Well, they are.”

Wendy wrinkled her nose. “No one’s talking to you, ing playboy.”

Jaehyun simply shrugged again. He slowed down his pace, joining Yuta and Seulgi behind the lot. It was eight in the evening, they had their radio show in an hour, and none of them had had dinner yet. Jaehyun was one for a good joke, but he wasn’t about to trigger a hungry-angry Wendy Son enroute to Korean barbecue.

“I don’t think we should play those songs either,” Jungwoo declared, eyeing Johnny’s notes.

Wendy threw her hands up in the air in holy worship. “Thank you!”

“But,” Jungwoo added nonchalantly, “we shouldn’t be playing your either.”

“What?” Wendy cried, the look in her eyes a mixture of shock and betrayal. Jaehyun and Yuta muttered a soft prayer for the kid – someone obviously didn’t care for his life.

“We’ve been playing these sappy, dramatic, overly-romanticized C-grade songs for weeks, and our ratings have been plummeting! We should be playing songs about healthy, meaningful relationships and how to stay in them–“

Jaehyun and Yuta automatically took a few steps back as the three outspoken voices in front of them started battling in defense of their agenda – a fight they knew was going to last until they were back at the radio station. Yuta noticed the oddly wide space between him and Jaehyun, tilting his head behind them in search of the missing Seulgi.

Fortunately, she was only a few meters behind, engrossed in the contents of her phone. “What’s got you all distracted?” Yuta asked, reversing and throwing an arm over his friend’s shoulder. He peeped at her screen, noticing the furious exchange of messages between her and some girl whose name he’d never heard of.

“Texting a friend,” Seulgi sighed. She raised her head. “Hey, Jaehyun!” she called. “Are you dating Chaeyoung?”

He briefly turned behind. “No – why?”

“Because she’s been texting me for the past thirty minutes about how you went out with her last week and never called her back,” Seulgi frowned.

Wendy whirled around. “Jung Jaehyun, did you ghost someone?”

He stifled a groan. So much for not pulling the trigger.

“How could you do that? That’s so rude! How could you just ghost someone that you’re dating–“

“We’re not dating,” Jaehyun interjected, before Wendy could fling herself into a lengthy tirade about all her romantic beliefs. “We just went out once, I decided I wasn’t interested, so I just didn’t pursue it any further.”

“If you went out with her once, then it shows that you’re interested in her! You should take responsibility for what you did and–“

 “Chill, Wen,” Johnny said. “It’s not like he cheated on her. It’s college – we have no responsibilities. Stop making a big deal out of nothing.”

Wendy stared at them, reevaluating her choice of friends. “You boys are so toxic,” she spat. “Relationships are about communication, commitment and–“

“Cash?” Johnny cut in, laughing and exchanging high-fives with Jaehyun.

“Honestly, you act like Chanyeol’s a saint,” Jaehyun said.

Wendy crossed her arms over her chest. “Chanyeol’s nothing like you lot!” she huffed. “He’s sweet, he’s romantic, he takes me on dates at least once a week – just yesterday we went to that new amusement park that opened downtown.”

“How do you guys have so much time to date? Isn’t it finals season?” Seulgi asked, knitting her brows. “In fact, why are we even going for barbecue now, of all times?”

Yuta clutched at his heart, pretending to be hurt. “Do your books mean more to you than your friends, Kang Seulgi?”

“God, Yuta. Shut up. You’re the only person without finals – you don’t get to talk.”

They reached the front of their usual barbecue joint, pushing the sliding glass doors and stepping over the threshold. Wendy was about to start on how Seulgi needed to take her nose out of her books and actually get a life, when her eyes fell on a familiar lanky boy with his arms around a very unfamiliar long-haired girl.

She stood rooted to her spot, breath frozen in . The boy must have felt a presence, because he turned around at such an apt timing. His eyes met hers and widened.

“Oh, Wen,” Chanyeol said, quickly holding his hands up, “it’s not what you think–“

Yuta and Johnny dashed forward, using all their strength to try to pry Wendy and her arms off Chanyeol and whoever the the girl was. Jungwoo and Seulgi cleared the vicinity of all sharp, hard and throwable objects before Wendy could get her hands on them. Amidst the tussle, Jaehyun ambled to the cashier, pilfered a few crisp notes from his wallet and casually placed them on an empty bill holder.

Jungwoo had conducted therapy sessions in places other than his office. Contrary to popular belief, out-of-office experiences were starting to gain traction, especially in the form of adventure therapy. He had visited a plethora of venues – parks, nature reserves, even the snow-peaked mountains in Pyeongchang, in order to accompany his clients and facilitate their healing.

However, conducting a session at the police station had to be a first.

Jungwoo watched Minho and Yuri fidget restlessly in their seats, heads lowered in front of the attending police officer. They seemed starkly out-of-place amidst the gangsters and petty thieves kicking up loud brawls in all corners of the hall. He knew it was probably a first for them, too.  

Wendy winced, feeling her skin burn as Jaehyun dabbed an alcohol-soaked piece of gauze on her scraped knee. Seulgi rubbed her best friend’s back concernedly. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the ER?” she asked.

“I’m fine – it’s just a small scrape,” Wendy assured, squeezing Seulgi’s hand. But talking meant moving her face, which was puffed up and swollen on one side. Wendy winced again.

Seulgi cast her gaze at Jaehyun, who wordlessly read the look her eyes. “I’ll take her to ER after they finish the paperwork,” he nodded. Seulgi smiled at him gratefully, which he reciprocated.

Yuri watched Wendy with remorse reflected in her eyes. As much as the sight of Wendy flinching in pain nipped at his heart, the mind-reading part of Jungwoo told him that the entire ruckus Yuri had singlehandedly caused was not characteristic of her at all.

“Why did you tell me that you were at your sister’s wedding planning appointment?” Yuri turned to Minho, seething at him through gritted teeth. “I was waiting for you at the clinic the whole time!”

He whipped his head around annoyedly. “It just ran late, and you shouldn’t have just assumed things!”

Yuri’s lower lip quivered. “Well,” she half-mumbled, half-protested, “she was touching your arm like that in public – what was I supposed to think?”

That I was a salesgirl, Wendy thought, flinching. It was apparent on Minho’s exasperated expression that he probably thought the same. “If you didn’t know what to think,” Minho hissed, “you could’ve asked, like a normal ing person, instead of jumping into conclusions and pulling someone’s hair out like a–“

“Like a what?” Yuri challenged, leaping to her feet. “Go on, tell me – like what?”

If that was an official session, Jungwoo would take the escalating argument as a cue to jump in and start his mediative efforts. Even though it wasn’t, his instincts kicked in. He rushed forward, ready to calm his clients down.

“Cool it!” The officer shouted, before Jungwoo could intervene. Right, Jungwoo remembered – he wasn’t there as their therapist, but a witness to an assault. He was out of his depth.

Clicking her tongue impatiently in the chair next to them, Kwon Boa crossed her legs. “Excuse me,” she said, her voice high-pitched, piercing, and seeming like it struck the policeman’s raw nerve. “How long will this take? We’re all busy people – we have things to do and places to go.”

The policeman turned to her, eyes steely and unfazed. “Well, ma’am, with all due respect, you probably should’ve thought about that before you slapped someone in the face.” As Boa huffily looked away, he averted his eyes to Wendy. “So, Ms. Son, do you want to press charges?”

Wendy looked up to half of the room staring at her. In that moment, her mind blanked out, and she could discern if her earlier ordeal had finally brought about a concussion, or if she was still shocked out of her wits.  

Boa rose, approaching Wendy in a way that made her recoil. “If you do, you know who my lawyers are,” she said silkily. “State your amount. They’ll arrange things accordingly.”

She didn’t utter a word of apology, not even some semblance of acknowledgement that she had humiliated an innocent woman in public over a false accusation. With her nose in the air, she simply her heel, threw Johnny and Seulgi a look, and exited the police station.

Wendy watched in silence, her cheeks still stinging. Jaehyun put a comforting arm on her shoulder. “Come on,” he said softly. “Let’s get you to the ER.”

“You should ask for a ton. A -ton.” Mark hauled out his laundry from the drier and dumped them into his duffel bag, unintentionally accentuating his point.

Wendy felt all her Marie Kondo senses go off at the sight of Mark force-zipping his crumpled and unfolded clothes into his bag. She had the compulsive desire to scurry over and rectify the entire mess he was making out of his life, but she still recalled Yuta’s words of advice to leave her brother to himself, and she was also busy scrubbing away at the pile of dishes Mark had conveniently left in the sink. More of the latter than the former, but she was trying.

Wendy sighed, rubbing at a stubborn stain. “I don’t need the money,” she said.

“It’s not about whether you need the money or not – it’s about them paying up for what they did to you,” Mark said, irked. “God, if I were there, I would’ve just–“

“–and you weren’t there, so thank god,” Wendy interrupted. They both had similar, impulsive temperaments, and she wouldn’t want to know what would have happened had her brother witnessed the entire series of events. They’d be in the police station for a lot longer, with a lot more casualties. “Look, it was just all just a misunderstanding. No point harping on it.”

Mark stared at his sister in disbelief. “I don’t get you these days, Wendy-noona,” he said.

She didn’t either, but she figured he might have a different reason. “Why?”

“When we were kids, you used to rat on me all the time when I took your dolls, your stationery, whatever. Hell, you used to throw hands like you were a professional fighter,” he reminisced. Wendy laughed a little, and felt a prickle across her cheeks where they were still swollen. “You used to be the biggest proponent for standing up for yourself, fighting for the right thing. Now you don’t even want the right thing if it’s handed to you on a platter.”

She was wrong – it wasn’t a different reason. He was still right, though.

In her younger days, Wendy was on a moral crusade. She fought the biggest bullies, stood up against unreasonable authorities, even beat her cheatin