It was an hour before Seulgi spoke again. There was a bitterness in her voice that hadn't been there before. "How is this possible? Yoongi is dead. He's been dead for three years."

"That's why I came looking for you, Seulgi," Jihoon said. "To find answers."
"Answers? You came for me for answers? I don't even know what damned questions to ask. How? What? Why?"
"Actually, 'who' might be a good place to start."

Seulgi looked out the window. The row of town houses across the street looked exactly as it always did. And so did the parked cars and the people walking past them. This was odd, she thought, considering how her world had just turned upside down.
"You do know that this is crazy, right?" Seulgi said. "I can’t believe we're even letting ourselves think for one second that what you're suggesting could be true. There must be some logical explanation. A relative, perhaps? A look-alike? A clone, perhaps?"
"A clone? This isn't science fiction, Seulgi."
"Oh, and your theory that I was married to a remarkably resilient and well-preserved old man is more plausible?"

Jihoon walked over to her and held her by the shoulders.

"Seulgi, when you saw that photograph on the computer, you knew in the same way I did that that was the person we loved and lost. I know it's him. And so do you."

Jihoon was right. If there had been any doubt in Seulgi's mind of the identity of the man on her computer screen, the pendant around his neck had torn it into a million pieces.

But knowledge and acceptance are two very different things. Seulgi rejected the truth not because it challenged reason but because admitting that Yoongi was alive was more painful than believing he was dead. That he was alive only meant one thing---that he had chosen to leave her---and that she could never accept. She buried her face in Jihoon's chest and wept.
 

Seulgi shoved the remnants of her breakfast down the drain. She had thoughts of jumping in after them. But then she couldn't be shredded more than she already was.

"Tell me everything," she said, "from the very beginning."

Jihoon stared at her from the kitchen island. "Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Very well." He inhaled deeply. "The short version begins with the egg rolls on your garbage disposal now. The long version begins with a car crash along a blind curve in Osaka. Which one would you like to hear?"

Seulgi looked at the dregs disappearing in her sink. "Car crash."

"Car crash it is," Jihoon said. "My parents were in a car accident when my mother was pregnant with me. My father died instantly while my mother survived long enough to deliver me through an emergency C-section."
"Oh, I'm sorry. Um, maybe we should have started with the egg rolls instead."
"It’s okay. Chickens saved the day."
"Excuse me?"
"French chicks, to be precise," Jihoon said. "Luckily for premature me, French chicks and their incubators at the Paris zoo inspired a doctor in the late 1800s to develop a similar incubating apparatus for humans. Basically, chickens saved my life, my grandfather used to say."

Seulgi smiled despite herself, remembering the way Yoongi had doted on his hens. "Well, Yoongi did love his chickens."

"And eggs." Jihoon grinned. "Grandpa made the best egg rolls. It was sort of a tradition with us. The last time he made the dish for me was when he attended my college graduation, he said. "A week after he returned to Korea, his fishing boat was found capsized in a lake. They never found his body."

Seulgi thought about the empty casket she had buried at Yoongi's funeral.

"Soon after that, I learned about the will Grandpa had left," Jihoon said. "I couldn't---and still can't---grasp the amount of money he left me."

Seulgi nodded. She did not feel like volunteering information about her own inheritance or about her life with Yoongi. She did not trust herself to stay as calm as Jihoon if she did.

"After graduating, I decided to remain in Beijing. I found a job at a publishing company. That was how I discovered Atypical Traveler. Our magazine has a section on travels and readers could send their reviews and articles. Someone wrote about that hole-in-the-wall café in Siem Reap and I literally fell off my chair when I saw Grandpa's picture posted on the website. At first I thought it was illogical but then any other logical thought does not pass. I looked through our old photo albums, hoping to get a good laugh at my own expense. But as I scrutinized each picture, seeing the same, unchanging face, I realized it was far from funny."

Seulgi looked at him with a question she was not sure she would ask.

"Why didn’t I see it before, right?" Jihoon said. "How could I grow up with a man and not notice that he wasn’t getting any older? I asked myself the same thing. But I suppose if you see someone every day, you don’t really notice him getting older or, in this case, staying the same."

She was surprised that Jihoon could read her so well. His similarity to her husband did not end with his looks.

"Grandpa was always just grandpa. He was