Nana arrived at Bom’s apartment with a bag of groceries and quick, idle chatter so out of tune with the glumness of Bom’s own silent state of temporary exile.

“What are you here for?” Bom asked once she’d buzzed the insistent younger girl into her apartment, “I don’t mean to be rude, but my manager did say I’m not meant to have unexpected guests,”

“I’m not unexpected,” was Nana’s easy reply, “How could I not come?”

The question would have been rhetorical if Bom hadn’t been bothered by exactly that for the past couple of weeks. No-one had come. She hadn’t been allowed out in case paparazzi followed her, and people hadn’t come to visit her because, she guessed, they didn’t know what to say. They didn’t want to pop by her apartment to sit across from her in awkward silence after either avoiding the issue that hung there silently between them, or addressing it by saying, “it must be so hard for you”, and then getting that look on their face, that one that begged her to say something to dissolve their obligation to show any more difficult-to-word sympathy. She would have, of course. She didn’t want to make people uncomfortable or feel sorry for her. But, most people had chosen not to come anyway. She hadn’t realised how busy the lives of everyone she knew were until her own life ground to a halt.

Everyone’s lives apart from Nana’s, it seemed, who had somehow made the time to come and was now busying herself in the kitchen. She’d shooed Bom over to a sofa to sit down as soon as she’d got through the front door, promising that she’d brought a surprise with her, she just needed to prepare it.

“Everyone misses you on Roommate,” Nana was saying from the kitchen, as she bustled about, rustling a plastic bag and clinking plates.

Bom watched her back view as she worked, temporarily taken up by how pretty she was from this position. Well, how pretty she was from every position, really. Caught up on the thought, it took her a moment  to realise the younger girl had mentioned Roommate. Within five minutes of arriving, she’d already brought up the topic that her own manager had danced around awkwardly when delivering the news that she’d be pulled from the show. It somehow didn’t hurt at all to hear Nana mention it. If anything, it gave her one of the few sparks of happiness she’d felt recently.

“They do?” Bom called back, “I miss them, too,”

She did. She’d enjoyed Roommate much more than she thought she would. The disjointed, odd family they’d built up there had begun to feel like a refuge, with so many good people that she could have fun with and who would look out for her. Then, once her scandal broke, that broke along with it. She didn’t feel like she could contact the Roommate members, even to apologize, and none had contacted her apart from Mama Shin sending her a text that read, “are you okay? Stay strong”, that she had saved to look at whenever she needed the reminder. She’d thought that the friends she’d made on Roommate would have been lost along with her space on the show, yet Nana appearing from her kitchen, holding a big bowl and a pair of spoons, said she’d been wrong on that count.

“Strawberries and cream?” Bom said, looking into the bowl that Nana placed onto the coffee table between them. The strawberries were ruby red, brilliantly ripe, only half visible under the snow mountain of whipped cream squirted neatly on top. They looked delicious.

“Yup!” Nana said cheerfully, all bright smiles once again as she handed Bom a spoon. Bom took it, distracted for the second time by the other girl. Her lips formed a perfect curve the color of cotton candy. The smile alone had an effect on her something like a searchlight through thick fog. After weeks of no-one smiling at her, not truly, a week of everyone watching her like she might break, to have someone grin at her so widely without pretension or attempts at reassurance, she suddenly felt like she might cry. In that moment, she could easily have broken down. She could have let out all the hurt and frustration and fear, set loose by  the relief of a sign that life wouldn’t always be this way, a beacon that she would get through this and that there were people, was someone, who would be waiting for her on the other side and look at her unchanged.

Instead, because she didn’t want to scare Nana away or ruin her make-up, she poked her spoon into the strawberries and cream and began eating. Her heart was beating, forceful and fast, and she couldn’t explain exactly why.

The pair of them joked, gossiped, talked like that was the only place for them right in that moment, a bubble of joy and lightness in the midst of despair and loneliness, just the two of them. Bom contemplated the pretty girl sat opposite, who had smiled at her and made her smile in return, who had come to her when no-one else had, openly and sincerely, with a bowl of strawberries and cream. She couldn’t explain what it meant to her, calling it everything was too dramatic, but to define it in black-and-white terms would trivialize the importance of Im Jinah to her in that moment.

It was better to say, Nana was fruit juice clinging to lips, tongue darting out to it off. She was cheeks flushed pink, swooping breathes from giggling too long and too loud on a warm spring evening. Nana was bold red strawberries and whipped cream, asking “aren’t you going to kiss it off?” when the creamy fusion decorated her upper lip. She was the bright eyes that caught Bom’s. She was the sweet voice that asked, “why not?” like it was the most natural thing in the world. She was the discovery that Bom made as she leant forward and tasted strawberry.