I studied in Paris my junior year, and while I was there, I saw a short article in the International News: Governor George W. Bush of Texas was considering a run for the presidency. I was in the mailroom at the university where I was studying, and as soon as I understood the gist of the article, I stood up, walked straight to the bathroom, and threw up.

Fall of my senior year, with friends, I stayed up to watch the election results in my dorm's lounge. I had a paper due the next morning, so I stepped away from the TV as soon as they'd called the election in Gore's favor. I stayed up the rest of the night writing, set my alarm for early in the morning, printed, proofread, and printed my paper again, and walked to class with my head still buried in it, correcting typos, sliding into my seat at the seminar table five minutes after class had begun. It wasn't until the subject came up in discussion that I heard the news: the networks had made a mistake. The election had been too close to call. Gore was not talking. Bush was not talking. I felt like I had swallow a rock.

The next day I called Jin. I had to call his mother first to find out how to reach him - he was rarely in the same place for long. I left a message and he called me back.

We talked for about half an hour. He asked about my mother, about Shinhye. He'd just broken up with somebody, he said. She was a biology grad student. He'd met her at Sea World.

"How about that election?" I said at last, testing the waters. I'd told him he had predicted the result. Would he remember?

"Yeah, I try to keep my nose out of all that BS," he replied, not missing a beat. "What a messed-up system."

Three weeks later, with about a hundred other students, I was filing into my college's largest classroom to take the LSAT. I made it through two sections of the test before getting to logical reasoning. "The red shirt is hanging on the clothesline next to the blue shirt, but not next to the yellow . . ."

I drew a diagram. I labeled the diagram. G for green, P for pink. I looked up at the board to check the time the test ended. And then at my watch.

And in that gesture, I remembered Jin.

Jin long ago, counting on his fingers, checking his watch, saying, "Two years left of high school, four of college, three at law school," as if he could tell time on his watch in years. He'd accepted that I was destined for law school as easily as he accepted the idea that at some point in the future he was dying.

The sob that came out of me was sudden. A lot of my fellow test takers looked up, but I was able to successfully disguise the noise I'd made as a cough.

Not now, I pleaded with myself.

I looked down at the question. Laundry. Red shirts, green ones, pink. But I couldn't drag my brain back. I couldn't recall the action I was supposed to be taking. I saw letters for each color written down on scratch paper. A grid with six columns neatly laid out.

Slowly, I colored in the squares. I knew time was of the essence, but my breath was coming fast and I thought coloring might help me refocus. I drew a new rectangle of new squares. I colored those in too.

Jin had joined the marines. Jin had been right about Bush and Gore. And here I was, taking the LSAT, marching forward just as Jin had predicted I would.

And okay, I was crying. I assumed that by now, the people around me were aware. I didn't have any tissues and I was sniffing up a storm, so I ripped out a sheet of the test booklet - again, at the tearing sound, heads popped up from exams like gophers coming out of holes. I used the test paper to blow my nose. Then I crumpled it up. I took my answer sheet and crumpled that up too. I stood - everyone was looking now - and I walked past the people in my row. The proctor looked at me questioningly, but I didn't even bother to lie about not feeling well. I just shook my head at her, tossed my snotted piece of paper and crumpled answer sheet in the trash can, and, clutching my water bottle to my chest, pushed through the double doors to the quad, where I had to squint against the sparkling snow.

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I didn't go to law school. I moved to France. I traveled in Africa. Chicago. Seattle. I ended up in New York when Shinhye was living there with her boyfriend. I took a job at a not-for-profit for teen moms, writing policy papers. I made a life for myself. I dated.

I still got the occasional email from Jin, usually something random. Around the time of my graduation, he'd sent me a letter from Heidelberg letting me know he'd seen someone on a train to Germany who looked like me. He'd sent me a postcard from Kuwait on my twenty-first birthday, when I was in Paris. I'm sure I thought of him when the Twin Towers fell, but that day was a blur - Shinhye's boyfriend was incommunicado for six hours that morning, and I sat with her speed-dialing his phone, fielding calls from his family and hers. And then in 2003 came around, and the United States went to war in Iraq. Around that time, Eomma ran into Mrs. Kim in the grocery store and reported that Jin hadn't gone. He'd been fighting in Afghanistan for the past  years and was about to be sent to the Philippines.

I don't remember making a conscious calculation, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I decided that the future as Jin had envisioned it was changing. His coming back has altered history. He'd said I would go to law school, and I hadn't. He'd said he'd be fighting in Iraq, and his only deployment had been to Afghanistan.

More time passed. I went to graduate school in public health. I dated a guy who lived in San Francisco and taught me to rock climb. He gave me a subscription to Out-side magazine. We met for vacations and long weekends in Busan, in Seoul. We went to France. When we were apart, I trained to go rock climbing, and I got as close to having washboard abs as I ever will. But I stopped seeing him when I realized I wouldn't move to San Francisco for him, and he wouldn't move to Gwangju. That essentially we were friends.

Eomma retired from museum fund-raising. With Vivian managing the business side, she opened a knitting store, where they sell yarn and beautiful, expensive, wearable art my mom makes from her own hand-dyed wool. I went through a phase where I convinced myself that Shinhye had been right all along, that eomma and Vivian were an old married couple. But now I'm not so sure. The only thing I can say with certainty is that they have shown me how love can take many forms.

I ran into Jin's brother Seokie at a holiday party back home a month before my thirtieth birthday. I asked if he was finished with college yet, and he laughed. He was out of college three years and married.

Seokie told me Jin was fighting in Afghanistan again - after the Philippines he'd been back in Korea, Hawaii, San Diego. He was leading a unit, and if I breathed a sign of relief that he was not in Iraq, I don't remember doing so. This was after Obama had been elected. Did I make a quick calculation that the Iraq War was ending an it wasn't likely he'd be sent back there before all the US troops pulled out? I don't remember.

I suppose I'd actually managed to forget, as Jin had promised me I would. Or maybe "forget" is the wrong word. The memories were there, but the paths to reach them had been covered with sand.

Two more chapters to go.

Thank you all so much for reading.