She greeted the seller of fruit shop with the traditional nod as she passed the man stacking apples and he returned the same. The same faces greeted her as she passed the shops lining the street one by one, eventually stopping in front of her family store. A narrow, gritty brick building built in the style of the old days, the display windows protruding out of the wall.

  Rushed footsteps slapped on the concrete behind her, and a hand reached out to her shoulder, but she moved one step to the side, and Taehyung tripped and stumbled passed her, unable to stop. She looked at him as he straightened himself, grumbling and shooting her irate looks.

  “It’s been a few days,” she said. “I thought you would have given up.”

  “Shut up, I still want answers,” he demanded stubbornly.

  “Had to wait for your allowance huh?” she guessed, turning to the door.

  “How did you- shut up!”

  She opened the door into the shop and heard the bell ring from above as she stepped foot into the scented room where she saw her mother light a row of fresh candles with a matchstick. “Hi mama,” she greeted.

   “Hi sweetie,” she replied in Chinese. Her gaze fell on the person behind her. “Is he your friend?”

  “Just a customer,” she said.

  “Speaking of customers,” the woman said, maintaining Korean for the sake of the guest. “You have one waiting for you in the room. She’s been here for an hour and she says she won’t leave until she sees you. She paid already, and quite a large sum.”

  “I’ll handle it,” she said. Before she moved any further, she paused for a second, as if considering something, before turning to Taehyung. “Do you mind waiting?”

  The boy looked like he wanted to object, but he groaned and sighed. “Do I have a choice?”

   A shrug rose on her shoulders before she approached the door, with every step the air seemed to grow thicker, and Taehyung felt a rising sense of anxiety yet he wasn’t clear as to why, but Yira carried on unaffected. She pushed open the door to see the silhouette of a woman, hunched over in the chair, her head sunk so low that it barely showed above her shoulders. The shadow turned, revolving slowly in the seat, her hair falling in her face.

  “Hello,” Yira smiled, putting on her professional smile. “I am Yira.”

   “Oh…” the woman said weakly, a parting in her hair revealed an eye weighed down by sleeplessness. “Thank god…” She raised her head to Taehyung, and he was instantly unnerved by the woman’s face. She had all the features of a beautiful woman in perhaps her late twenties; big eyes and plump lips, but there was emptiness in her eyes that struck him as odd. “Who’s he?” she asked.

  Yira pulled out her chair and sat down. “This is Kim Taehyung, he’s apprenticing. Please don’t mind him.”

  Supressing a groan, he inched over to his usual space in the corner. The place was uncomfortably stuffy, the combination of incense and candles made breathing feel unbearable, and he loosened his tie to lessen the heat. He was amazed that the woman could have stayed an hour in this room.

  “Now…” Yira began, in her usual slow voice tinged with a hint of seduction that made Taehyung loosen his tie even further. “What are you here for? It must be something quite troubling for you to wait for an hour.”

   “It’s…it’s…” the woman stuttered, but she seemed unable to draw together a sentence. “I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “Take your time, calm down, and start from the beginning. Tell me your name,” Yira guided.

  The woman took a deep breath, before starting. “My name is Lee Soo Kyung. I’m here because I…I don’t know what to do. Something really strange has been happening to me and…It’s going to sound very strange...”

  “Relax, nothing you say here will be used against you,” she assured. “Continue.”

  “Well…I was engaged to a man named Jung Joonhyun for a year,” she said with a dreamy look in her weary eyes. “We met in early last year and we fell in love in just three months, it was a perfect relationship. But then he had to move to the U.K for his work and so we maintained a long distance relationship. We kept in contact via online messaging; at first he didn’t talk to me for a few weeks because he was settling in, but after that, we talked nearly every day! He was always so kind as to check up on me. He was such a sweetheart, even my daughter loved him and we couldn’t wait for when he returned so we could be a family.”

  “But something must have happened since then or you would not be here,” said Yira.

  “Yes…” Soo Kyung whispered, her lower lip quivering. “Two months…he went quiet for a while. I knew something was wrong so I tried everything I could to contact him but nothing worked. Finally, he sent me a message again. I was so relieved until the sender said that it wasn’t him. His sister borrowed his account to tell me…to tell me… That he passed.” The woman burst into tears and she buried her face in her hands. “She told me he died in a car accident! She showed me pictures of the wreckage, it was horrible! So I went into a deep depression. I could barely get out of bed for weeks. My family did their best to console me but I couldn’t budge, my mother tried everything, and my sister came to see me every day and cooked for me and looked after my daughter. After a while, on my own I started feeling a little better and thought that maybe I could return to normal life…but then, on his account…he messaged me!”

  The expression on Taehyung’s face turned into one of disbelief, unsure if he had heard the woman right. He looked over to Yira for answers but as usual, her face had not changed.

  “You might think I’m crazy, but I’m not!” she insisted. “At first I thought it might be another relative of his trying to contact me, but the person claimed to be Joonhyun! And acted like he never died, asking me how I was doing and how I’ve been. I thought it was some horrible prank, that maybe some person got hold of his account and was purposely trying to upset me. But this person knew things only Joonhyun and I would know; private things no one else knows, so it must have been him! I felt confused and a little scared, and for a moment I thought maybe it was his spirit contacting me from the dead. But then I received a phone call from an unknown number and it was a man named Yoon Ji Hyung.”

   “He said he specializes in dealing with online scams and he tracked me down to warn me that the person messaging me was a notorious scammer that was trying to acquire my personal information, like my bank accounts and such. He told me to be careful and not to contact him anymore. And when he was finished, I was so confused, so I immediately tried to message even though the man said I shouldn’t, but I was just trying to confirm if it was a scam. But he didn’t reply, no matter how many messages I sent.”

  “For a moment I thought he may have really been a scammer, but I tried researching this Yoon Ji Hyung person online and even called a few people, but there was absolutely no information on him whatsoever, I didn’t even know how he found me. So I thought that maybe he was a scammer as well or something, but by then I didn’t know how to contact him, and I couldn’t contact Joonhyun either. My sister and mother tried to tell me to forget about it, and I knew they were just trying to help me, but it was all too confusing and I just couldn’t let it go.”

  “Then, at a friend’s wedding, a co-worker of mine came up to me, asking me why Joonhyun was messaging her. She knew Joonhyun was my fiancé, and she was asking me why he was trying to talk to her. But the thing is, she called him a creep and said that his messages were unwanted. But that’s not my Joonhyun! My Joonhyun was never a creep, in the years we’ve been apart; he’d never been anything but a gentleman to me; so I didn’t know why it was happening. And then finally, yesterday, something happened that pushed me over the edge.”

  She reached into her bag and pulled out her phone, opening it to a screenshot of a conversation. “Yesterday, he started contacting me again, just casually like nothing happened. As soon as I got it, I just had to come here. I needed answers. I haven’t replied, but I need you to tell me what to do, is he a scammer? Is he a ghost? Or am I just going crazy? Please, you have to help me!”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Yira smiled, but even in the dimly lit room, Taehyung could see a lack of light in her eyes, the smile was even more false than usual. She dragged the crystal ball into the centre of the table, and began peering into the glassy surface that showed her warped reflection; her hands rolling slowly around it in a way that Taehyung knew was for show. “Everything you have been through,” she began, in a low, breathy voice, er eyes never leaving the ball. “Has truly happened, you are not crazy.”

  “Oh, thank god!” she exclaimed, wiping a tear from her eye and bringing her hands together and shaking them at the ceiling. 

  “However,” she began in a strong, warning tone. “I highly suggest you abandon all feelings you have about this and move on. You can grieve, you can cry, and then you can heal. Your daughter is feeling the strain from your current state, she is losing a mother. Whether or not Joonhyun-sshi is alive, he has died once to you, and the dead must remain dead. If you abandon this now, I see a modest future ahead where you can be happy with your daughter.”

  “But-”

  “If you chose to pry further into this,” she said. “You will find nothing but despair. You will unearth betrayals and lose more than one highly valued relationship that you can never regain, and a painful blow will be dealt to yourself, which in turn will affect your child. Heed my warning and abandon this now.”

  The dejected woman sat limp in her chair. “I-is that your final advice? Just to give it up?”

  “Yes, it is the best thing you can do in order to preserve all that you have now,” Yira advised. “In your case, the truth is not beauty.”

  The woman stood up, her body swaying a little from weakness and tears cascading over her cheeks. “C-can you please just tell me this?” she whimpered. “Is Joonhyun dead?”

  “He’s dead to you,” she answered.

  “O-okay…” she cried. Soo Kyung shuffled away from the table, her hands rubbing tears away from her eyes as she sniffed and hiccupped out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  Barely a second after she was gone, Taehyung leapt to the table. “What the hell was that!?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, that poor woman was crying like hell!” he yelled, swinging his arm to point to the door. “Even if you don’t know the answer to what’s happening to her, she came to you for help and you just told her to drop it and leave? And how much did she pay for this!?”

  A long, hard sigh left Yira’s lips, filled with the emotion of weariness, a look of distaste in her eyes. “That woman…” she began. “She doesn’t want to know the truth. She isn’t the personality type to handle it or see it despite its obviousness. Everything I said is true, for the sake of her and her poor daughter, she needs to drop it.”

  “But she came to you for help!” he replied angrily. “She put all her trust in you.”

  “Which is foolish.”

  “You’re a psychic who mocks her customers?”

  “Kim Taehyung,” she said with seriousness in her tone, her eyes directly meeting with his. “Most normal people in this world don’t believe in fortune telling and the like. Some believe more than others, but I assure you that almost every customer that sets foot in her has at least one part of them rooted in the normal reality, even if they are hard-core believers, a part of them keeps them from diving blindly head first into it.”

She pointed a finger at the door. “That woman, despite the weight of the problems she is facing, instead of going to family, or he police, or anyone else, her first course of action is to come here. This means that what she hears from other people isn’t what she wants to hear. She was propelled here by desperation.”

  The boy pulled back from the table, grabbing his bag from the ground and backing away to the door. “Well whatever the hell you think, I’m going to help that poor woman.”

  “My suggestion to you is that you drop it,” she advised coldly. “That woman isn’t normal. If you intervene, it’ll end with you watching a fight while you hold a crying child in your arms.”

  “Sorry, but that woman deserves the truth.”

  Yira shrugged. “Do whatever you want to do.”

  “Thanks a lot, I will.” He slammed the heavy door behind him and he sped walked out of the building. As soon as the sun hit his skin, he dashed down the street ducking and weaving between shoppers and nearly tripping over a child. When he reached the end of the road, he saw Soo Kyung, still crying, repeatedly pressing the traffic light button. “Miss Lee!” he called out.

  The woman spun around, confusion evident on her wet face. “Y-you’re the apprentice…”

  Taehyung coughed but he nodded. “Y-yeah I am.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Well, I know Yira told you to just drop it, but I think I might be able to help you.”

  Soo Kyung’s eyes lit up and grew wide. “R-really? You can? How?”

  “Well, if you don’t mind, I can do some investigating for you, nothing much but I think I can be at least a little help, just to give you some small consolation-” Before he could even finish the sentence, he was enveloped in a crushing hug, the woman’s slimy tears wiping off on his skin. He unwound her arms from his torso and pushed her away.

“S-sorry, I want to help, but first, can you tell me a few things?”