Ailee stood stiffly in front of the oak door.

She had not come home for over a year, and it wasn’t because it was so far or she just didn’t have the time. She could have visited the place as much as she wanted to. It’s only a thirty-minute drive from her workplace even with the traffic, and she wasn’t always so busy.

But for some reason, she just didn’t want to step inside the place. She just didn’t want to see her. She just didn’t want to have to remember anything.

Before she could decide against it, the door creaked open and a man in his early sixties looked at her with a small smile plastered on his wrinkled face. It was like he was expecting her to arrive so he wasn’t surprised at all.

Or that her visit didn’t matter much.

“Is she here?”

“You were crying.” It wasn’t a question, and she didn’t want to give any answer anyway.

“I said is mother here, dad?” Ailee asked again.

“She’s not here. She’s living in her clinic again.”

Ailee exhaled in relief. She did not even notice she’d been holding her breath for the last few minutes.

“I’m sleeping here tonight dad.”

“Good.”

----------<3

As Ailee laid on her bed that night, she found herself thinking about someone.

The person had began occupying her mind since she drove her way home.

Her helping hand, her dependable shoulder, her sweet smile, her calming voice... And her scent that she somehow found familiar.

It was a fragrance that she inhaled deeply while she was letting the agony spill out, the agony that was not all because a certain tomboy rejected her for somebody else.

She wouldn’t cry for something as petty and foolish as that. She barely even knew Amber.

She broke down because when she saw how Amber and Krystal looked at each other, or how Jessica genuinely cared about her sister, or how the lady boarders seem to move like one big family, she realized how alone and lonely she really is.

And how she could only remember the late fragments of her life.

And how her mother can’t even look her in the face.

“Kwon Yuri.” She found herself calling out the name.

The girl had made her flip so unexpectedly.

For as she inhaled that familiar scent, her head and her heart sweetly ached. She almost felt like home, really at home.

----------<3