Jisu was peacefully sleeping in her own bed. This was one of the days she could sleep in until whenever since she had nothing planned. Her sleep was bothered when someone knocked on her door rather loudly. Her eyes peeled open and she looked at the time. It was only 9 in the morning. She was hoping she would sleep in by 11. She got up and answered her door without bothering to check her appearance.

Soohyun was outside her door when she answered his knocks. He almost laughed when he saw her messy bed head and her small eyes that could not open. He thought it was cute to see her like this, unlike the strong front he usually saw. "Morning," he smiled.

Jisu realized who was in front of her door and closed it. Soohyun wouldn't let her get away so easily so he placed his foot inside, causing the door to close on his foot. "Just let me say something."

"You said everything you wanted to yesterday," she said a bit more awake. "And I made it clear that I never want to see you again."

Soohyun moved himself more into her apartment. Now, Jisu was wide awake. "Get your damned foot out of my apartment."

"No. I'm going to keep seeing you. Why? Because we have the same goal. We want to find my father's murderer." His hand stuffed into his jacket pocket and fished something out. He held it out for Jisu to see. "This recorder is something that will help us. This is my father's. He gave it to my grandfather to keep. I haven't listened to it yet and I was hoping you would like to listen it together."

She looked at the small rectangular recording device in his palms. Then, she looked at him. She took the recorder and headed to the living room. Soohyun took that as an invite to come in, so he took a step inside her apartment and closed the door behind him.

He was slow to follow Jisu into the living room which was only several meters away. The structure of her apartment was the same as his but he wanted to look around with no real judgment on her interior design. From the last time Shi Yoon was there, she had cleaned up the papers, thanks to his help.

In the living room, Jisu had already taken out her laptop and placed it on the short coffee table. She had taken out the memory card and pushed it into the SD slot in her laptop. Then, she the volume and pressed play. Jisu felt nostalgic when she heard Detective Kim's voice. She remembered this voice recorder. He had shown her the device when he bought it. It was quite a rare thing to have back in the day, especially one that had an SD card. Usually, the voice recorder had film in it.

"Ah, ah, testing 1, 2, 3. Testing, testing. Hello, hello! Here, Jisu, you try."

A young girl's voice said, "Hello? Can you hear me? Kwon Jisu and Detective Kim here! What do you say in a recording?"

"Start off with the date," Detective Kim chuckled.

"Oh okay. March 17, 2001. It's a Sunday. No leads on anything today. We just sat at the office all day and ate some Jujubes." Detective Kim's laughter was heard in the background before the recording ended. Jisu shook her head and laughed lightly. It was funny hearing her voice from more than a decade ago. No one would have known that was her if she didn't state her name.

"You two were really close, weren't you?" Soohyun asked. Jisu had momentarily forgotten he was there. She nodded. "We were close. We treated each other like family."

Soohyun let out a breath and leaned his back on the couch behind him. "I wish I was close with him. He usually never comes home and when he does, I'm always stuck in my room studying or sleeping. He never comes home at the right time. You're lucky you got to spend more time with my father than I ever did. No wonder you visit his grave every year."

Jisu turned to him. She did feel a bit guilty. While Detective Kim's family rarely ever saw him, she would see him maybe three times a week. She would be in his office, organizing his papers and sometimes, he would even let her resolve some of his closed cases. Although he couldn't be with his family as much, there was one thing she knew. "Your father loved you a lot. He loved your mother a lot." He looked at her. "In his office, he had a family photo in the picture frame. He doesn't talk to me about his family too much but whenever I catch him off guard, he would always hold the picture frame and stare at it. You think I was the lucky one to be with your father more than you do in a week but really, I thought you were luckier. You had a father who actually thinks of his family."

"...and your father?" Soohyun asked, not wanting to say the wrong words.

"My father is strict. I'm an only child so he wanted me to be everything he couldn't be when he was young. He wanted me to be a politician. I was in high school when I met your father. Whenever I met up with him, I'd go to the library and sign out a book on politics and head over to your father's office. I'd come home late at night with the politics book in my hand. I've been doing that for three years before I told him. Before I told him I didn't go to Seoul University and had no intentions of going into that school."

Soohyun didn't mean to probe any further but he was curious. He asked anyway, having a 50/50 chance of her actually answering the question. The topic was already sensitive enough. "He abandoned me," she answered, scrolling down the files Detective Kim had on his SD card. "Once he found out I got accepted at Hankang, he stopped talking to me completely. He acted as if I were a ghost in the house. He didn't look at me; he didn't acknowledge me or anything." She suddenly let out a laugh. "Now that I think about it, it's funny how the day before we were talking and joking around and then the next day, we totally forgot each other." She scrolled down to the last recording and played it but it played her voice.

"What about your mom?" he asked, still on the topic.

"She abandoned me, too but only after I graduated. So I got a job, lived with someone for a while before I moved here." Jisu clicked on a random file and fast forwarded it to the end. In the middle of someone else's voice, detective Kim's voice was heard, saying, "Lee."

"But why after you graduated? Shouldn't she have abandoned you from the beginning? I mean, you had to live in the same house as your father while he had already ignored and abandoned you. Shouldn't she just have gotten rid of your misery?"

She looked at him. "Watch what you're asking."

His mouth was slightly ajar, after realizing what he just said. "Sorry," he apologized. Jisu went back to her laptop and began clicking on the video recordings. She wasn't sure she heard Detective Kim's voice, so she had to plug in her earphones.

"What is it?" Soohyun asked. She held up her hand, telling him to be quiet. After clicking on a couple more files, she pulled her ear phones out from the laptop. Jisu clicked on specific files so Soohyun can have a head at it. She clicked on the first file and fast forwarded it to the five minute mark. Ten seconds after that, there was a short but distinct voice. "Did I just hear, 'Lee’?” Jisu replayed it again and again. "That is definitely 'Lee'."

"Listen to this." Jisu opened up another file. She fast forwarded it to the same mark as the last recording. The other name that was heard was, "Jaesuk." "This is definitely Detective Kim's voice. He added his voice over the recordings. It is common to hide messages inside a recording file. He did this to hide whatever he wants to say. This is an important part of the case but..." She kept clicking on the other files and listened to the 5:10 mark but there was nothing. "This is going to take a while."

"I thought you weren't going to work with me anymore," Soohyun said. "I thought you wanted to avoid me. Here I am, in your living room, the place you never allowed me to be."

She stopped clicking on the files. "This is the case I've been working on for a very long time. I will never quit this case because I got fired for it." That was new news to him. "Since you've already given this to me," she took out the memory card and gave it to him. "Get out."

"You know...you're very harsh with words," he observed. "But what can I do? I'll leave. I'll leave you this one fact before I get out of your apartment. The man named Lee Jasek is my secretary and my dad's friend."