It was already six in the evening when Jiyong stumbled into the dining room and carelessly threw his drained, beat body on one of the dining chairs. It almost toppled from the force he exerted on it before, miraculously, it righted back up. But he didn’t even blink; he yawned instead. Heck, in the condition that he was in right now, he would be eternally grateful if he could fall on his , have the chair tumble on him and hit him hard in the head. Maybe then, he would pass out and finally could have the rest he desperately needed but couldn’t have.

It’s been a week since Taeyeon disappeared from his life. The most hellishly grueling week in his life. He had only been able to get snatches of sleep since that morning Suzy gave him the goodbye letter she said she had found in Taeyeon’s room. The moment the content of the letter had managed to pierce the incredulity clouding his mind, he immediately ran out of the house and began his exhausting search for her. When he couldn’t find her in the house or in the orphanage or in any other place he could think of, he had gone to search all the hotels and motels in Vegas, even the dingy, seedy ones. 

He used all the manpower he could spare to help him, and yet, it had still taken him three days to finish his thorough search and be sure that she wasn’t hiding or being hidden from him. She had really left town.

His search went farther to the neighboring cities then, even neighboring states. He even tried to do some tracking on his own about her whereabouts, in addition to hiring a fleet of investigators. He hadn’t slept for the last two days, he hadn’t had a decent meal in a week, and he was at his wits end now when after four days, the investigators still couldn’t give him a definite answer about who she really was and where she could be found. One of them said she’s this famous Oscar-winning Hollywood star with strings of brokenhearted men on her trail, while another said she’s the heiress of some oil baron in Texas. He seemed to get a mix of an actress, an heiress, an dancer, a cowgirl, and the President’s niece’s friend as a fiancée, he thought humorlessly.

With a resounding crack, he b