“This is it,” she says, crossing her legs, a faint smile on her lips. Seunghyun finally feels as though he can relax and sit upright in his chair. He breathes like he’s never breathed in the past year. It really feels like oxygen is coming through his lungs—fresh, crisp, life-sustaining oxygen—as opposed to the stuffy, thick, pseudonym it felt like he’d been breathing before.

“I must say, it’s a bit different than what I expected from you,” she says, knitting her brow ever so slightly.

“But you do like it,” Seunghyun says, though his statement is posed with the air of a question.

“No of course I do,” she says quickly. “I wouldn’t dream of changing a word. I suppose it’s just different in the sense that you usually try to throw some sort of fantastical element in your work, as though you’re afraid of getting close to your reader, or perhaps you’re afraid your reader will get close to you as a narrator and really know you. But you’ve completely torn down that barrier with this book, Mr. Lee, and I must say, it’s quite refreshing.”

“I suppose this novel was a bit close to home,” Seunghyun laughs nervously. In short, he is lying. That novel is home. That novel details all of the places he’s been for the past year. In it, he’s bared his entire soul—through the disguise of an unfortunate main character, of course. But no one would really know that. No one needed to know that. It was kind of a secret he shared with his muse, whether his muse knew about it or not.

“Regardless,” she says, gently placing her hand on the large stack of papers that constitute the details of Seunghyun’s life for the past 365 days, “I’m very pleased. We have plans for this to go to print as soon as possible, with your consent of course.”

“That’s why I wrote it,” Seunghyun lets out a little forced laughter. He’s impatient, crossing his fingers that this really is it. This book just might be his break. This book would be the proof that he needed to show that he is going places, achieving things, moving past the person he was. Granted, there’s only one person he really has the desire to show the proof to, but he keeps telling himself, day after day, he’s not quite ready to dig up that shallowly buried past. Not yet, anyway. Then again, to be fair, Seunghyun hasn’t really buried it. It’s always at the back of his mind, seeping its way through the cracks in his consciousness when he isn’t careful enough to push it back. He’s almost crying for attention. Though he’s told himself he moved on, he’s more than aware that the dedication of his damn book is laced with a reference for his muse. Does his muse care? Probably not. Will his muse even read the book? Even less likely.

“Are there copies you’d like to have, or maybe have delivered to friends or family members?” his editor asks, scribbling away on a memo sheet.

It’s a horrible question. All self-restraint Seunghyun has dissolves in a flash. All promises of ‘live and let live’, or ‘I’ve moved on’, or ‘I’m going to be the bigger person’, or ‘you owe him nothing’ are forgotten. Will his muse read his book? Who knows. But at least Seunghyun can be one- hundred percent certain he’s received a copy.