Chapter 3: The Unexpected Visitor
The call came through at 11:47 AM, and Leonid's phone buzzed against the library table with a violence that made the girl across from him jump. He flipped it over instinctively, saw Jennie's name glowing on the screen, and excused himself with a muttered apology, weaving between the stacks toward the emergency exit stairwell.
The door hadn't even fully closed behind him before he answered. "Hey, I'm in the middle of—"
"Who is Jiyeon?"
Her voice was silk wrapped around a blade. Leonid's stomach dropped.
"What?"
"Jiyeon." The name came out precise, each syllable clipped and cold. "Architecture student. Pretty, I'm sure. Long brown hair, dimples when she smiles. Uses that strawberry lip balm that smells like a teenager's diary. She came to my restaurant today, Leonid."
Leonid pressed his palm against the concrete wall of the stairwell, the rough surface grounding him. "She's in my study group. We have a project due next week. I told you about it."
"Did you?"
"Yes. Last week. You were half-asleep when I mentioned it, but I did tell you." He heard his own voice pitch up, defensive, and hated it. "Jennie, what did she say?"
The line went quiet for a moment. He could hear her breathing, slow and measured, and something else in the background—the clink of glass, the murmur of restaurant staff.
"She said," Jennie finally replied, "that you've been distant. That you've been skipping study sessions. That she was worried about you."
Leonid ran his hand through his hair, tugging at the curls in frustration. "I skipped one session because I was with you. Remember? We went to that gallery opening, and you wanted me to stay the night."
"I remember."
"So then you know there's nothing—"
"I know what I know." Her voice sharpened, cutting through his words like a scalpel. "And what I know is that this girl came to my place of business, to my restaurant, asking about you. She knew your name. She knew you were seeing someone. She wanted to make sure you were okay." A pause. "Why would she be worried about you, Leonid? What have you told her about us?"
The accusation hung in the air between them, invisible but heavy.
"I haven't told her anything." He lowered his voice, even though the stairwell was empty. "She's just a classmate, Jennie. A nice person who noticed I seemed tired. That's all."
"Tired." Jennie repeated the word like it was a foreign concept. "Tired because you were up half the night with me. Tired because you're working yourself to exhaustion trying to finish your degree while also being the perfect boyfriend. She doesn't know any of that. She just knows you seem tired, and she decided to insert herself into your life."
"Jennie."
"Don't 'Jennie' me." Her voice cracked, just slightly, and he heard something beneath the anger—fear, maybe, or something close to it. "I have watched you for fifteen years, Leonid. Fifteen years. I watched you grow from that scrawny little boy who used to eat lunch alone in the schoolyard into the man you are today. I know every scar, every story, every secret. I know how you take your coffee and how you crinkle your nose when you're annoyed and how you hum in your sleep when you're having a good dream." Her breath hitched. "No one else gets to know those things. No one else gets to learn you. That's mine."
Leonid's chest ached with the weight of her words. He leaned his forehead against the cool metal of the stairwell railing, closing his eyes.
"Nobody's trying to take that from you," he said softly. "I'm here. I'm always here. You know that."
"Do I?"
"Do you?" He echoed, a note of frustration creeping into his voice. "I spend almost every night in your bed, Jennie. I canceled plans with my friends to be with you. I skipped that study session because you asked me to. I do everything you ask, and I do it gladly, because I love you. But I can't have you treating every woman who looks at me like a threat."
The silence that followed was so heavy he thought the line might have gone dead.
"Come home tonight," she finally said, and her voice had shifted—softer now, almost fragile. "Come home and show me that you mean it. Show me that she doesn't matter, that no one matters but us."
"Jennie—"
"Please." The word came out broken, stripped of all her usual polish. "I need you to make me feel safe, Leonid. Can you do that for me? Can you come home and remind me that I'm the only one?"
He wanted to argue. He wanted to point out that he had a studio critique in the morning, that he needed the evening to work on his models, that this pattern of reassurance and suspicion was starting to feel less like love and more like a cage.
But he heard the tremor in her voice, the desperate edge that reminded him of how fragile she truly was beneath all that armor.
"I'll be there," he said. "After my last class. I'll come straight to you."
"And you'll prove to me," she murmured, her voice dropping to honey, "that I have nothing to worry about."
"Jennie… I swear to you, there isn't anything to worry about. She's nobody."
"She's somebody who was brave enough to walk into my territory. That makes her dangerous." A pause, then a soft, humorless laugh. "But you'll handle it, won't you? You'll come home and make me forget all about her."
"Anything you need. I've told you that."
"Then I'll see you tonight, baby. And we'll see just how much you mean it."
The line went dead.
Leonid stood in the stairwell for a long moment, the phone still pressed to his ear, listening to the hum of nothing. His reflection stared back at him from the darkened screen—tired eyes, furrowed brow, the weight of something he couldn't quite name settling across his shoulders.
When he finally returned to the library, his study group had already started without him.
Across the city, Jennie set her phone down on the mahogany desk and stared at the wall of photographs behind it. There he was, at ten years old, holding up a drawing he'd made of a house. There he was at fourteen, awkward and gangly, smiling at something off-camera. There he was last year, graduation cap perched on his curls, his arm around her waist.
She traced the glass with one manicured finger.
"Jiyeon," she said aloud, tasting the name like something spoiled. "What a pretty name."
She picked up the framed photograph of Leonid's graduation, holding it close to her chest. Her eyes drifted to the crumpled pregnancy test she'd left in her bag, still blank, still waiting.
Not yet, she thought. But soon.
And when the time came—when she had his child growing inside her—no ambitious little architecture student with her strawberry lip balm and her dimpled smiles would be able to take him away.
Because he would be hers. Completely. Irrevocably.
Forever.