Chapter 1: Blood Under Young Nails
The steam from the shower hadn’t fully cleared, leaving the bathroom mirror foggy at the edges. Yunari leaned against the cold sink, the ceramic biting into her palms. She blinked, her own reflection swimming into focus. Young. So young. Skin dewy and unlined, eyes bright with a life she hadn’t lived yet. A life she had, in fact, already wasted.
Her fingers, trembling, went to her collarbone. There, in the hollow of her throat, a constellation of purpling marks stood out against her skin. Love bites. Jinwoo’s signature. A hot, sick wave of recognition crashed over her. She remembered these. She’d gotten them last night. The first last night. A decade ago. A lifetime ago. Just hours before the coughing started, before the hospital rooms with their sterile, lonely light, before the silence that stretched on for seven years.
“Come back to bed, baby.”
The voice, sleepy and thick with satisfaction, slithered under the bathroom door. It was a sound that had once melted her, a token of a secret, stolen world. Now it coiled in her gut like a parasite.
Jinwoo.
He was in the next room. In her bed. In her past.
She gripped the sink until her knuckles turned white. The memories weren’t coming back; they’d never left. They were a film reel permanently grafted behind her eyes: the clandestine hotel rooms that later felt like cages, the empty promises that tasted like ash, the final, gasping loneliness of a death no one witnessed. She had died at twenty-five, a ghost in her own life, and the man who had whispered “forever” into her hair had been long gone, safe in his wife’s arms.
And here he was. Calling for her.
A laugh, brittle and sharp, escaped her. It echoed in the tiled room. She was eighteen again, with the body of a girl and the ruined soul of a woman who’d seen the end of her own story. The absurdity of it was a physical pressure in her chest.
She looked at the marks on her neck again. Not badges of passion. Brands of stupidity. The first links in a chain that would drag her down.
She had to get out.
Yunari splashed cold water on her face, the shock of it helping to ground her in the horrifying reality of the present. She wiped the mirror clear with her arm, staring down the girl she used to be. “Not this time,” she whispered, her voice raw with a conviction she hadn’t possessed the first time. “Never again.”
She wrapped herself in a towel and pushed the door open.
Her bedroom was dim, lit only by the streetlamp glow filtering through the blinds. Jinwoo was a dark shape in her narrow bed, the sheets tangled around his waist. He was thirty, sleek with the confidence of a man who had everything—a career, a reputation, a wife at home—and still took more. He smiled when he saw her, patting the space beside him.
“There you are. I was getting lonely.”
Every word was a trigger. She remembered this script. Her next line was supposed to be a coy giggle, a slide back into the warmth of the sheets, a murmured promise to never leave him waiting. The old Yunari, the one who believed his attention was a prize, would have performed perfectly.
The Yunari who had died just didn’t have it in her.
“You should go.” The words came out flat, toneless.
Jinwoo’s smile didn’t fade; it just shifted, becoming indulgent. He mistook her shock for playfulness. “Go? It’s two in the morning. Come here.” He reached for her wrist, his fingers warm and familiar.
The touch was a electric jolt of revulsion. She yanked her arm back as if burned. “I’m serious. You need to leave. Now.”
This time, the smile vanished. He propped himself up on his elbows, studying her face in the half-light. “What’s wrong? Was it… was I too rough?” He had the gall to look concerned. “You seemed into it.”
Yunari felt the ghost of her older self’s cancer-riddled body, the deep, bone-ache of betrayal that had been her true illness. “It’s not about that. This was a mistake. A huge mistake. You have to go home to your wife.”
He flinched at the word “wife.” It was the forbidden term in their little bubble. Saying it out loud popped the fantasy, and he didn’t like it. His expression hardened, shifting from lover to executive in a heartbeat. The head of the publishing house where she’d just interviewed for an internship.
“Yunari, lower your voice. What’s gotten into you? We had an amazing night. You were telling me how alive I make you feel.” He swung his legs out of bed, starting to dress with annoyed, efficient movements. “Is this a game? Some kind of test?”
“It’s not a game.” She clutched the towel tighter, her body shaking. “It’s over. Before it even starts. It’s done.”
He laughed, a short, humorless sound as he zipped his pants. “You’re young. You get emotional. You’ll feel different in the morning. I’ll call you.”
“Don’t.” The finality in that one word finally seemed to pierce his arrogance. He looked at her, really looked, and saw something in her eyes that unnerved him. It wasn’t the anger of a spurned girl. It was the cold, exhausted desolation of a veteran who has seen the entire war and lost.
He finished buttoning his shirt in silence. The air was thick with his confusion and her simmering panic. He walked to the door, then paused, his hand on the knob. “The internship committee meets Monday. My recommendation carries a lot of weight.” He didn’t look back when he said it. It wasn’t a plea; it was a reminder of power. A final, ugly card to play.
The door clicked shut behind him.
Yunari stood frozen in the middle of her bedroom, the silence roaring in her ears. She waited until she heard the faint hum of his car engine fade down the street. Then her legs gave way. She slid down the wall, the towel coming loose, the cold floor chilling her skin.
She hugged her knees to her chest, rocking slightly. The adrenaline bled away, leaving a hollow, trembling fear. She was here. It was real. She had just sent him away. She had altered the first, crucial event.
But he was still out there. He was still her potential boss. He was still in love with an idea of her, and he’d just been rejected. Men like Jinwoo didn’t take rejection well. They saw it as a temporary obstacle.
A new kind of resolve, cold and sharp, began to crystallize inside the numbness. This wasn’t just about saying no. It was about survival. It was about building a life so far removed from his orbit that he could never touch her again. The internship at his company was now impossible. That dream was ash.
She had to start from zero. With nothing but the terrible knowledge of what zero felt like at the end.
Pulling herself up, she went to the window, peering through the blinds at the empty street. The world outside was quiet, sleeping, oblivious to the minor miracle of a soul shoved back into its broken starting point. She let out a long, slow breath that fogged the glass.
Monday. The committee met Monday. She had two days to figure out how to disappear from a future she’d already lived. Two days to begin the long, hard work of saving herself.
She turned from the window, her eyes landing on the rumpled bed. She walked over, seized the sheets, and with a strength that surprised her, ripped them off the mattress. She would wash them. She would scrub every scent, every memory, every trace of him from this room.
The work started now.
The work started now.
She bundled the linens into a heap, the fabric still holding the warmth of a body that now felt like a historical artifact, something she’d read about in a tragic novel. She shoved them into the washing machine in the hallway closet, pouring in detergent with a reckless hand. The sharp, artificial scent of mountain breeze bloomed in the air, aggressive and clean. It was a start.
Back in her room, she opened the window wide. The chill night air rushed in, scouring the space. It carried the distant smell of rain and asphalt, the real world. She stood there, breathing it in, letting it freeze the last of the disorienting heat from her skin.
Her phone, face-down on the nightstand, glowed. A notification. Her heart slammed against her ribs. Slowly, she flipped it over.
Missed Call: Jinwoo.
Not a text. A call. That was his style—direct, imposing, expecting an answer. The timestamp was five minutes ago. He must have called from the car. She stared at the screen until it went black, her reflection a pale ghost over the dark glass.
The old her, the eighteen-year-old whose memories were currently being rewritten, would have already been typing a frantic apology, a plea for him to understand, a compromise. She could feel that version of herself like a phantom limb, aching to reach for the device.
Instead, she picked up the phone. Her fingers moved with a clinical precision. Block Contact. The action took two taps. A small, digital severing.
The relief was immediate, and so was the grief. It was a stupid, hollow pang, an echo in a vacant room. It wasn’t for him, not really. It was for the fantasy he represented. The fantasy of being chosen, of being special enough to make a powerful man forget his vows. The fantasy that had kept her warm through seven years of lonely dinners and whispered phone calls, right up until it didn’t.
She told herself that she would do her best to avoid him even if a part of her still loved him. The admission was a quiet, shameful truth in the dark. It wasn’t the man she loved—she’d seen the cowardice in him at the end, the way he’d vanished when things got hard. It was the memory of his attention, the drug of his validation, the way he made her feel like the center of a secret, important universe. That addiction had been woven into her DNA for a lifetime. Unraveling it would hurt.
The washing machine thumped into its spin cycle, a rhythmic shuddering in the wall. It sounded like a frantic heartbeat. Yunari walked to her closet, pushing aside the outfit she’d laid out for Monday—a sleek, professional dress bought specifically to impress the internship committee. A costume for a play she was no longer auditioning for.
She pulled on an old pair of sweatpants and a university hoodie. The fabric was soft, worn, anonymous. It felt like armor.
She had two days. Forty-eight hours to dismantle the future she’d meticulously, foolishly, built around one man. She grabbed a notebook from her desk, the cover blank, and a pen. She sat on the floor, her back against the bedframe, and opened to the first page.
At the top, she wrote: DO NOT DO.
The list began easily, fluidly, as if she were taking dictation from a ghost. Do not take the internship at Seojin Publishing. Do not answer any call from an unknown number. Do not go to the café near his office. Do not trust his apologies. They are tactics. Do not believe you are the exception. You are the rule.
Her pen dug into the paper. This was the easy part. The negative space. The real work would be filling the void she was creating. What would she do? Who would she be? The question was a vast, terrifying blankness. The only career she’d ever envisioned was at his company. The only future she’d dreamed of was by his side, waiting for a divorce that never came.
A vibration on the floor made her jump. Her phone, buzzing against the hardwood. A new notification. An email.
The sender address was a generic HR one: hr@seojinpublishing.co.kr.
The subject line: Regarding Your Application.
Her blood turned to ice. It was too fast. Way too fast. The committee hadn’t even met. This was him. This had to be him. Using the company to reach her after the personal block. A show of power that was both subtle and blatant.
Her finger hovered over the screen. The phantom limb screamed to open it. The woman who died knew better. With a swallow that felt like glass, she deleted it. Unread. Then she went into her email settings and added the domain to her spam filters.
The silence after was deafening. He was in the walls now. In the systems. He would keep trying. She had drawn a line in the sand, and he was already trying to step over it.
She looked back at her notebook, at the pathetic, defensive list. It wasn’t enough. She needed a plan, not just a set of rules. She needed to run toward something, not just away from him.
On a fresh page, she wrote: POSSIBILITIES.
She stared at the word until it blurred. The washing machine finished with a final, decisive click. The only sound was the drip of the bathroom tap and the frantic, rustling scribble of her own pen, trying desperately to invent a new life from scratch before the sun came up and the world expected the old one to show up for class.
The list under ‘POSSIBILITIES’ remained a single, accusatory word. The pen tip hovered, then dropped. A blank. Her mind, so full of the detailed map of a life to avoid, was a void when it came to anything else. What did she even like? Before Jinwoo, before the focused, desperate campaign to become someone he would find interesting, what had made her feel alive?
A memory surfaced, sharp and unexpected: the smell of old paper and ink. Her father’s small, failing print shop in the backstreets of Busan, the rhythmic groan of the letterpress machine, the careful alignment of type. She’d found it tedious as a teenager, embarrassing even. Now, the memory was a physical ache. It was real. It was honest. It had nothing to do with him.
She wrote: Printmaking. Bookbinding.
The words looked small and silly on the page. Not a career. A hobby. But it was a thread, something the other Yunari had severed. She pulled her laptop over, the glow illuminating her face in the dark room. She typed in searches for local studios, workshops, art supply stores. She found a community college course called ‘The Physical Book: Art and Craft.’ It started in six weeks. She bookmarked it.
Outside, the sky was shifting from black to a deep, bruised blue. The birds started, their songs like cracks in the silence. Dawn was coming, and with it, the mundane reality of a Monday that was now a minefield.
Her phone buzzed again. This time, a text message. From an unknown number.
Yunari. It’s Jinwoo. We need to talk about last night. You’re being irrational. Call me.
He’d gotten a new number. Of course he had. The casual violation of it, the sheer entitlement, sent a jolt of pure fury through her. This was the pattern. The irritation, the dismissal of her feelings as ‘irrational,’ the demand for compliance. The old her would have folded immediately, soothed by the mere fact of his pursuit.
Her thumbs flew over the screen. Do not contact me again. She hit send before she could think. Then she blocked that number too.
Her hands were shaking. She placed the phone face down on the floor and pressed her palms flat against the cool wood. Breathed in. Breathed out. The confrontation, even digital, had ignited a panic in her chest, a frantic flutter that whispered you’ve made him angry, you’ve ruined everything, fix it fix it fix it.
She closed her eyes and forced herself to see the sterile ceiling of the hospice room. The beep of the heart monitor that only echoed her loneliness. The empty chair beside the bed where a lover, a husband, a friend should have been. This panic now was the poison leaving her body. It had to hurt to get out.
She opened her eyes and picked up the pen again. The ‘POSSIBILITIES’ list grew by one line. Apply for the assistant job at the Arco Gallery.
It was a start. A direction 90 degrees away from publishing.
The sun finally broke the horizon, a blade of pale gold cutting across her floor. It illuminated the dust in the air, the discarded clothes, the notebook open on her lap. The night was over. She was exhausted, hollowed out, but the bed, even stripped, felt like a crime scene. She couldn’t go back into it.
She stood, her joints stiff, and walked to the bathroom. She avoided the mirror this time, turning on the shower to scalding. She stepped under the spray, letting the water pound the phantom feel of his hands from her skin. She scrubbed at the love bites on her collarbone until the skin was raw and red, the purple marks now angry welts. The pain was clean. A reminder.
Dressed in jeans and a simple t-shirt, her hair wet and dripping onto her shoulders, she felt like a stranger. A civilian. She made coffee, the bitter smell anchoring her in the routine. She sat at her tiny kitchen table, the notebook open beside her mug.
The practical terror began to settle in. Money. She had been counting on that internship stipend. Her part-time job at the campus library wouldn’t cover rent for long. She needed a new plan, a budget, a grid of survival that he could not penetrate.
She was deep into calculating dismal numbers when a new email notification popped up on her laptop. Not from Jinwoo’ company. From her university’s department of literature. The sender was Professor Kim, the head of her honors program. The subject: Urgent Meeting Regarding Your Conduct.
A cold, different kind of dread pooled in her stomach. She opened it.
Miss Park,
It has been brought to the department’s attention that you engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a senior industry professional, Mr. Kang Jinwoo, who is also a major donor to our internship program. Given that you are a finalist for a coveted position at his firm, this creates a serious conflict of interest and calls your judgment into question. Please attend a meeting in my office at 10 a.m. today to discuss this matter. Your continued standing in the honors program may be contingent on this discussion.
Sincerely,
Professor Kim
The words swam on the screen. Brought to their attention. By whom? Jinwoo? Had he… reported her? To protect himself, to preemptively smear her, to force her into a corner where her only way out would be to run back to him and beg for his silence? It was a move so calculating, so ruthless, it stole the air from her lungs.
This was the real world. This was his world. Where power wasn’t just about whispered promises in the dark; it was about networks, donations, reputations. He wasn’t just a lover spurned; he was a man whose ego was a weapon, and he’d just fired the first shot across her bow.
The panic returned, but it was colder now, sharper. It wasn’t the flutter of emotion; it was the chill of a tactical disadvantage. She looked at the time. 8:17 a.m. She had less than two hours.
She couldn’t go in there defensive. She couldn’t go in there as the heartbroken, naive girl. Professor Kim was a notoriously rigid woman, a feminist scholar who wrote scathing critiques of patriarchal power structures. The irony was so thick it was suffocating.
Yunari got up, pacing the short length of the kitchen. Think. He said it was inappropriate. He would have evidence—maybe hotel receipts, maybe her own giddy texts from a phone she’d since destroyed. He would frame it as her seduction, her ambition overstepping. She was the student. He was the esteemed alumnus, the donor. Who would they believe?
She stopped pacing. She went back to the laptop and opened a new document. Her fingers rested on the keys. She didn’t write a defense. She didn’t write an explanation.
She wrote a confession.
She wrote it plainly, without self-pity. She stated the facts: she had, indeed, been involved with Kang Jinwoo. She acknowledged the profound error in judgment, the conflict of interest. And then, she pivoted. She wrote about realizing the power imbalance, the unethical nature of the situation, and her decision to terminate the involvement immediately and permanently. She wrote that, out of respect for the department and the integrity of the internship program, she was hereby withdrawing her application for the position at Seojin Publishing. She attached the document to a new email, addressed to Professor Kim, and sent it before she could reconsider.
It was a retreat. A surrender of the battlefield he had chosen. But it was on her terms. She was giving them the scalp they wanted—hers—so they wouldn’t feel the need to hunt for it. She was removing herself from his arena entirely.
The clock read 8:45. She had to get to campus. She shoved the notebook into her backpack, the pages filled with the desperate scribbles of a new life, and slung it over her shoulder. As she locked her apartment door, the morning sun felt hostile, exposing.
On the subway, surrounded by the sleepy faces of other students and office workers, the full weight of it hit her. She had no internship. Her honors standing was under threat. Her reputation was potentially tainted. The careful, promising future of the past week was in ashes. She was standing in the rubble, and the only tool she had was the grim knowledge that the alternative—the slow death she remembered—was worse.
She walked into the professor’s office at 9:58. Professor Kim, a severe woman with her hair in a tight bun, regarded her over the rim of her glasses. She did not smile.
“Sit, Miss Park. I received your email. It seems you are attempting to manage a situation that has already spiraled beyond your control.”
“I’m not trying to manage it, Professor,” Yunari said, her voice steadier than she felt. “I’m ending it. I made a mistake. I’ve ended the personal relationship. I’ve removed myself from the professional opportunity. There is no conflict of interest because I am no longer in the running for the interest.”
Professor Kim studied her. “Mr. Kang suggested you were emotionally unstable. That you had become overly attached and were making reckless accusations.”
So that was his play. Preemptive character assassination. Yunari felt a flash of such pure, undiluted hatred it burned the fear away. She met the professor’s gaze. “I have made no accusations. My only action has been to end something I never should have started. My judgment was impaired. I see that now. I am here to accept whatever consequence the department sees fit.”
It was the right thing to say. It was humble, it took responsibility, and it completely sidestepped Jinwoo’s narrative. Professor Kim’s stern expression softened, just a fraction. She leaned back in her chair. “The consequence, Miss Park, is that you have lost the internship. And you will write a ten-page paper on ethical boundaries in mentor-mentee relationships, due by the end of the term. Consider it a lesson learned the hard way.”
Relief, bitter and thin, washed over her. “Thank you, Professor.”
“Don’t thank me. Your performance in your remaining courses will be under scrutiny. You have damaged your credibility. You will have to rebuild it, word by word, page by page. Dismissed.”
Yunari walked out of the building into the bright, indifferent morning. The meeting was over. She had survived the first skirmish. She was wounded, but not out. She found a bench under a ginkgo tree and pulled out her notebook. She turned to a new page. The list of possibilities seemed naive now, fragile. She needed something harder.
She wrote down the facts. No internship. No stipend. Need new job. Now. She wrote down her skills. Writing. Editing. Meticulousness. Pain tolerance.
A dry, almost laughable sound escaped her. She circled Pain tolerance. It was her greatest qualification.
She opened a job search website on her phone. She filtered for anything that wasn’t in publishing, that wasn’t near his office. Data entry. Office assistant. Café barista. She started applying. Right there on the bench. Each application was a brick in a wall between her and that other life.
As she typed, her mind kept drifting back to the look on his face in her dim bedroom—the confident smirk dissolving into confusion, then into cold anger. He wasn’t used to losing. He would see this not as her choice, but as his failure to control. That made him dangerous.
But she had something he didn’t. She knew exactly how the story ended if he won. She had already lived it. That knowledge was a cold, dark coal in her heart, keeping her will burning when the fear tried to smother it.
She finished another application, her fingers aching. She looked back at her notebook, at the frantic, hopeful, desperate lists. She turned to a fresh, clean page at the very back. The paper was smooth and unmarked. She uncapped her pen, and with a final, definitive pressure, she wrote the last rule, the one that underpinned all the others. The only one that truly mattered.
Lastly she wrote DO NOT LOVE HIM AGAIN.