I wasn’t very sure that what I was doing wasn’t against the law, but I still did it. Keeping my sun glasses on and my fingers around the binoculars, I watched Kim Jongin going in and out of his garage, watched him walk back home with heavy bags, analyzed every person he’d speak to. Nothing implied that he was the same man as the one that spoke so harshly to me back then when he found me on top of his desk, nor that he was lacking human affection as I saw him clearly interacting with what seemed to be a little girl around five years old. Instead, he made me admit that the human nature is so much more layered than one’s eyes can see.

“Hot chocolate?” Siwon’s voice interrupted my trail of thoughts.

“Thank you,” I accepted the paper cup in his hands, placing the binoculars on top of the car’s board.

“How’s he doing?”

“Working,” I smiled to the bittersweet flavour that played on my tongue. “What are you thinking about?”

Siwon leaned against the car’s door and looked at me with worried eyes. “Are you sure this is what you want? We’ve been watching him for about a week now and you’ve become less and less talkative. What’s wrong, Seon Yul? Talk to me, please!”

How was I supposed to tell him that I was ignoring Chanyeol’s calls, that I had changed the lock on my door and asked the dorm’s guard to refuse any visitor that came looking for me? How was I supposed to explain him the doubt that I was carrying around? For I knew that with only this little, Siwon would storm to my boyfriend and tear him apart. And then there was Jongin and his multitude of masks I was still discovering.

“Nothing’s wrong, really,” I finally spoke, carefully smiling at my beloved brother. “I’m just wondering if it could be possible to have misunderstood Jongin. You saw him – did he seem a bad person?”

To that, Siwon gave a bit of thinking, tapping the plastic lid of his coffee cup. “He’s a person with a past, that’s for sure. But whether his attitude towards you was just a show or it was a moment in which he displayed what he really feels related to you, I really couldn’t say.”

“I wish he hadn’t shown me that much hatred,” I heard myself speaking. “But then again, I’m the one who originally started this game, am I not? Maybe if I had treated him better back when was with Chaelin, then –” Guilt strangled me from the inside and I couldn’t go on. And it dawned on me:  I was going to live a life of regret, a life in which I would never be able to do something for myself, to feel a little better without feeling the iron claws of guilt trapping my heart. ‘What a sad life,’ I thought to myself as I watched Jongin entering his garage.

“Where are you going?” Siwon inquired, watching me surprised as I stepped out of the car.

“I need to stretch my leg,” I limped to the wall of the building across the sidewalk.

Looking at my brother, with his simple v-cut t-shirt and a pair of blue jeans, reading the newspaper that was resting on the hoof of the car, I couldn’t help but admire his growth. Compared to him, I was still small, an adult under the form of a pixie child, frail and powerless, completely confused and incapable of understanding all the feelings inside. I should have stayed back then. I should have been a good daughter and stay put. I should have listened to mommy…

“Hey, hey, are you alright?” Siwon’s arms caught me before I reached the asphalt. “Seon Yul, look at me! Are you alright?”

I swallowed the juices of my own stomach and nodded.

“We’re going home. You’re not fine,” he carried me back to the car and placed me on the passenger’s seat. And for a fraction of second, right before I was deposed on the soft leather of the seat, between the stripes of fog that were clouding my vision, I got to see a silhouette across the street.

Kim Jongin had seen me.

×  ♣ ×

However, nothing stopped me from returning to my watch by myself, as Siwon refused to give in to my feverish pleas. Until one afternoon, I started to get a blurry vision. I ignored it and focused on Jongin's open garage from the other side of the road. I thought it would go away and that it was the fatigue saying its word. But it was bigger than expected. Or so I had heard from the doctors that came in and out of my ward, while I was passing out often enough not to feel the pain that was digging in my flesh. In one of the few moments of lucidity, I heard one of them talking to my brother about some kind of infection. Apparently, during the accident, because the bone had pierced through the flesh and exposed to the outer environment, it caught some kind of virus that otherwise is inoffensive to the humankind.

So, after my soul and scarred skin, now it was all about my bones. Just awesome!

“She should be alright after the antibiotics do their work. Don’t worry too much, Mr. Choi!” I heard the doctor whisper next to my bed.

And then nothing.

I never believed in Heaven. Not in that Heaven that the books and movies made so mainstream: the  kingdom of fluffy clouds and unicorns, rivers of honey and milk flowing to satisfy hunger. But I always trust the soul would return home – home being the place where you felt the safest and coziest during your life, that is.

That’s probably how I woke up in Chaelin’s room from way before, when she was still a child of wind and wild flowers, the odd kid that hid me in her room after making me sneak out of my own. Only that I was still me, still a girl in her twenties. And Chaelin… there she was, beautiful as ever, sitting on the si