“Do you know him?” the doctor asked bitterly as she put down the syringe.

“Yes,” Arin replied. She climbed off the bed and headed for the door.

The truth was that Arin welcomed the interruption, even if the doctor was irritated by it. Arin was not quite ready to lose consciousness and wake up without a voice, so it was a consolation to hear him through the door. It gave her an excuse to avoid her fate, even just for a minute.

When she unlocked the front door of the apartment, she was face to face with Woozi. He was panting heavily, as if he had been running, and his oversized glasses were crooked on his nose.

He sighed in relief when he saw her. “Thank God,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “How did you find me?”

“When you talked to me on the phone, I… uh… I tracked you down,” Woozi explained. “I just couldn’t let you do it, Arin.”

Arin lowered her head. She was not as touched by that as she was scared. He stalked her again and followed her against her will, and now he was trying to stop her from doing something she chose to do.

The doctor stood over them, frowning as she waited. “Are we having the operation or not?” she said.

“Yes,” Arin replied. “Just give me a minute please.”

“I don’t have a minute,” the doctor replied. “Now!”

“I have to go,” Arin told Woozi. “I can’t lose this chance, so you should probably leave.”

“Wait! I didn’t come all the way here just to stop you. I came here because I have a theory!”

“What theory?”

“About your curse. A way you can bypass it without losing something as precious as your voice. It’s just a hunch, but I really believe in this hunch. Please let me test it.”

The doctor was losing her patience at this point. “Leave, now!” she said, scowling. She even attempted to shut the door in his face, but he stopped it with his foot.

He reached into his pocket for a wad of cash and placed it in her hand. “Ten minutes,” he said. “That’s all I ask.”

The doctor looked at the money, and then at them. “Five minutes,” she allowed, then went into one of the rooms and slammed the door.

Woozi inched into the apartment and shut the door behind him.

Arin didn’t know what to think. She didn’t know if she trusted him, or if this was all just some elaborate part of another plan he had up his sleeve to maybe frame her for murder.

“I want you to trust me, just this once, okay? I want to try something, and I need you to cooperate.”

There was something genuine about the way he implored her, his eyes deep and serious beneath the large glasses. He waited for her to say something, anything, to indicate that she trusted him. That she would listen to him.

And she wanted to listen to him. What he was offering sounded tempting and perhaps more hopeful than she should have allowed herself to believe. She wanted to keep her voice, but she also wanted to nullify her curse. She didn’t know how Woozi, a hacker who didn’t even know magic was real until a few weeks ago, would find a solution to her problem before Hoshi even could.

“What’s your theory?” Arin asked.

Woozi looked relieved to hear Arin ask that. “As you now know, I’ve been investigating S.Coups’ death for a while now. The song that he died performing… all the other members of Chilli also performed. All of their names are in the fanchant, but only S.Coups died, not the others. But you do love the others, right? Mingyu, Wonwoo, and Vernon.”

“Of course I do, but I loved him the most…”

“True, but here’s the thing… Joshua, surely the ‘love’ you felt for him could not compare to the love you felt for the other members of Chilli. So why only S.Coups? That’s what I was trying to figure out. What happened that saved the other three members from your curse?”

Woozi then took out a pair of binoculars from his pocket and showed them to her.

“They weren’t before your very eyes,” he said.

The night of the concert flashed through her head in fragmented images. She watched Chilli through binoculars most of the time. She said all of their names as part of the fanchant, but the binoculars were in the way, a barrier between her eyes and them. But when it came time for S.Coups…

“The thing about binoculars is that they help you see things more closely,” Woozi explained. “But you won’t be experiencing the image directly before your very eyes. Now I can imagine a fan looking through binoculars to see her favorite artist closely, but when it came time for her absolute favorite, she would put the binoculars down to see him before her very eyes…”

Arin held her breath.

“I had a lot of security footage from that night on my computer,” Woozi told her, taking one step toward her. “I hacked into the database and grabbed all of the surveillance footage for my investigation. One camera caught you enjoying the concert, and I saw it, Arin. You put down the binoculars when you said S.Coups’ name, but not with the others. If that’s really the reason none of the others died that night, then you don’t need to lose your voice at all. All you need is glasses.”

“Even if that were true,” Arin replied carefully, gulping in all the pent up trauma from the memory of that night. “There’s no way I could ever test this theory now. I need to have the operation, Woozi. I can’t risk it over a hunch…”

“Do you hate me?” Woozi suddenly asked.

“What?”

“Do you?”

“No,” Arin answered honestly.

“Do you… do you care about me more than you cared about Joshua at least?” Woozi asked.

“Of course,” Arin answered.

“Then let’s test it,” Woozi said. “Right here. Right now.” Woozi took off his glasses and carefully put them over her eyes, blurring her vision. Arin held his wrist, heart beating wildly out of control in her chest.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

He took a deep breath.

Arin understood what he wanted to do. He wanted to test the theory, and he wanted to risk his own life to do it…

“No, Woozi–”

“Jihoon,” he sputtered before she could say anything. “My real name is Jihoon.”