It began with a note that shouldn't have been there.
He was practicing in Room 214, late, long after most of the students had left. The conservatory halls had quieted into a hush that only old buildings knew—walls that remembered better days, echoes of concerts long since faded. The kind of silence where the only thing louder than sound… was memory.
Ji-hoon's fingers drifted over the keys, brushing a melody he hadn't written. He didn't know where it came from. It had found him, not the other way around. A lullaby made of shadows and fractures. It clung to the air like fog, familiar and wrong.
C—D—F sharp—E.
He froze.
That combination. That peculiar dissonance that bled into something warm.
His mother used to hum that.
But he had no recording of it. No sheet music. It was something she'd sung beneath her breath while folding laundry or stirring soup or tapping her fingers against the car window during long drives. He hadn't heard it in over a decade.
And yet—
He heard her voice.
"Ji-hoon… baby, slower, slower. You're rushing through the bridge. Let it breathe."
He turned. There was no one.
His stomach turned ice.
It wasn't a hallucination. Not exactly. It was clear. Crisp. Like she was standing just behind his shoulder, the way she used to when she watched him play at home. The warmth of her breath brushing his neck, the weight of her hand on his back when she whispered encouragement.
His heart thudded painfully in his chest.
"Who's there?" His voice cracked, hoarse and small.
Silence.
Then her voice again, clearer this time. Humming the same lullaby.
He slammed the piano shut and stood up too fast, knocking the bench backward. It clattered against the floor with a loud crack. His cane caught on the leg, and he stumbled, catching himself with his hands against the bench edge.
He breathed hard. Too hard.
Something in him fractured. Not like a break, but like a fault line waking up.
"You're not real," he whispered. "You're not—"
But he wanted her to be.
A sob escaped before he could stop it. The kind that chokes you from the inside out. His mother's lullaby. Her voice. Her presence. It was more than memory—it was now. It was here.
And it was tearing him apart.
He didn't go back to the dorms.
Instead, he walked for hours. No cane. He didn't care. He let his hands skim railings, walls, the rough bark of trees. The city's breath against his face. The honks and brakes and rushing water from sewer grates. He kept hearing her.
Not just in song now.
In full sentences.
"I missed you, Ji-hoon…"
"Why didn't you play it sooner?"
"You were always afraid of silence, weren't you?"
"Why didn't you look for me?"
By the time dawn painted soft gold across the skyline, he was sitting in the alley behind the conservatory with his knees pulled to his chest, shaking.
It had rained lightly. The air was wet and smelled like rust.
He was soaked, but didn't care. His head throbbed, and he hadn't slept.
The world had pulled a thread in his mind and watched it unravel.
Someone found him there.
He didn't remember who. Maybe a professor. Maybe a janitor. They'd spoken to him gently, like he was a child, and told him everything would be okay.
But it wasn't.
He ended up in the infirmary for three days. Hye-jin came to see him, but he didn't say much. Just stared at the ceiling, listening. Not for her. But for his mother.
She kept humming.
In the quiet. In the whir of the ceiling fan. In the footsteps of the nurse changing his IV bag.
Sometimes she was crying. Sometimes she was laughing.
He couldn't tell what was worse.
"Ji-hoon," Hye-jin whispered during one visit, "you need to talk to someone. Please."
He finally turned his head toward her, the dark rings under his eyes deepening. "She was real."
"I believe you," she said, though she didn't sound sure.
"She was standing behind me," he whispered. "She told me I missed the bridge. She told me I left her behind."
Hye-jin swallowed. "Maybe your mind is—"
"Don't." His voice was soft, but final.
She didn't finish her sentence.
He sat up later that night, alone in his narrow cot. The room was dim. The medicine left him dizzy, detached.
But then he heard the piano again.
Not outside.
Inside.
Somewhere deep in his chest, where grief turns to hallucination, or maybe something more.
He heard her playing.
The same melody.
The one she used to call hers and his alone.
He curled his fingers into the blanket and wept silently.
He wasn't sure anymore what was memory and what was madness. Only that they'd begun to sound the same.
And if her voice was madness—
He didn't want to be sane. Not if sanity meant losing her again.
The next day, he checked himself out of the infirmary.
He said nothing to the nurse. Nothing to Hye-jin.
He walked back to Room 214.
And began to play.
Ji-hoon didn't speak to anyone for the rest of the week.
Not to the professors who knocked on his door offering soft inquiries. Not to Hye-jin, who lingered outside Room 214 with a lunchbox and trembling fingers. Not even to Joon-won, who sent him a voice message every evening—"Just checking in, bro"—always with a shaky breath at the end, like he was scared the silence that came back would confirm his worst fears.
Ji-hoon stayed in the music room like a ghost bound to a piano, possessed by something heavier than grief. He was pale, his hair unbrushed, his clothes unwashed. He barely ate. He barely moved unless it was toward the keys. There was only the music, and whatever haunted him between the notes.
He kept playing the melody. Over and over. That same combination—C, D, F sharp, E. He improvised around it, built walls with it, tore them down again. Each iteration felt like reaching into a wound he refused to let heal.
Sometimes, she spoke between the chords.
Sometimes, he spoke back.
"You should've let me go," he murmured to the empty room.
"No," her voice answered, soft as silk. "You weren't ready."
He didn't know if it was real. But he wanted it to be. Because if this was madness, it was the only thing in his life that still felt like hers.
He remembered her fingers brushing his temples when he had migraines. Her breath warm against his hair when he'd cry after a rough recital. The scent of her—clove and clean cotton. The way she hummed when she cooked. All of it was back now, like memory had come home with a vengeance.
But even more than her voice… it was the silence after that left him raw.
The room would fall quiet, and the stillness that followed was unbearable. He would freeze, his fingers hovering over the keys, his throat locked in place. Sometimes he thought he felt her hand on his back. Other times, it was a whisper in his ear.
And once, once—it was breath against his face.
He screamed that night.
A single, sharp cry that echoed through the conservatory walls. No one came. Or maybe they heard and chose to stay away. Either way, he didn't blame them.
By the time morning broke, Ji-hoon was on the floor, curled beneath the piano, his head against its wooden frame. His fingers were twitching against his palms, trying to hold on to something they could no longer grasp.
When he opened his mouth to speak, only a dry, cracked whisper came out.
"Don't leave."
But she already had.
The haunting came and went in waves. Days when the voice was strong, alive. Nights when it faded into static and left him hollow. He hated the in-between. It was like losing her all over again. Like the death repeating itself with every sunrise.
He knew it wasn't normal. He wasn't stupid. Ji-hoon understood what hallucinations were. He knew how grief could carve out the mind and leave it echoing with things that used to matter. But it didn't feel like madness. It felt like punishment. Like the universe had chosen this way to remind him he hadn't done enough. That the night she died—the night he smelled the man who killed her—he should've fought harder. Should've remembered more.
He should've seen.
He gritted his teeth at that thought. It lodged in his chest like splinters.
He couldn't see. He never had. And for so long, that had been the shape of his rage. Not at the world. At himself. At the darkness that never lifted. At the laughter of other children describing fireworks, clouds, the way his mother smiled. He could never hold any of it. He only had her voice, and now even that was warping into something he couldn't trust.
Ji-hoon lifted his hands to his face, dragged them down slowly. "Am I losing it?" he asked no one.
No answer this time. Only the hum of the radiator.
He tried to get up. Failed.
He stayed there another hour, breathing slowly, counting the seconds between heartbeats.
When he finally got up, he went back to the piano.
He placed his fingers on the keys—tentative, trembling—and played a note.
Then another.
And the melody came again. This time slower, sadder. As if even the ghost in his mind had grown weary of clinging to him.
He let it echo out.
Then stopped.
His fingers curled into fists, and he slammed them against the keys with a loud, angry discord.
The sound shattered through the room.
"I need to know what happened," he whispered. "I need to remember more than your voice."
There was no response.
But something stirred in him.
A shadow.
A smell.
Rain.
And cologne.
Not just any cologne—the same one he smelled the night she died. It struck him like a slap to the face. Sharp. Musky. Unshakable.
It hadn't come from memory.
He smelled it now.
He froze.
His hands gripped the edge of the piano. His breath hitched.
Footsteps.
They were distant. Slow. Measured. Coming down the hallway outside Room 214.
His pulse skyrocketed.
He waited.
But the steps stopped just before the door.
He heard a rustle—paper sliding under the door.
Then the footsteps retreated.
Ji-hoon waited a full minute before moving.
Then, slowly, carefully, he dropped to his knees and felt along the floor. His hands touched paper.
He lifted it.
It was thick—an envelope. No name. No markings. Just the scent of rain and that same cologne.
His skin crawled.
He opened it with shaking hands.
Inside, a single note.
Typed.
> "Do you remember now?"
His blood ran cold.
He backed up slowly, fingers trembling, the letter slipping from his grip.
He pressed his back to the wall and slid down it, heart pounding.
He wasn't imagining it.
He wasn't crazy.
Someone else knew.
Someone who had been there.
The scent wasn't in his head. The question wasn't part of a hallucination.
Someone had been standing outside that door.
And they wanted him to remember.
For the first time since the lullaby returned to him, Ji-hoon wasn't sure if it was his mother haunting him…
…or the man who had killed her.
Ji-hoon's mind raced as his fingers gripped the paper tighter, the edges crinkling beneath his anxious grasp. His breath came in shallow, erratic gasps, his pulse pounding in his ears. The smell of cologne clung to the air, thickening with each breath, as if the very scent was tying him to something darker—something that refused to let him go. He had never been able to fully explain why the cologne haunted him so, why it felt so connected to his mother's death, but now, standing there in the silence, he knew.
The note. The footsteps. The presence that had lingered at the door, just out of his reach, was no coincidence. His mind was a haze of confusion and fear, but the one thing that pierced through all of it was a chilling certainty.
Someone was playing with him. Someone who knew the truth. And someone who wasn't going to let him forget.
Ji-hoon's fingers trembled as he crumpled the note in his hands, his heart beating wildly against his ribcage. He stood up shakily, ignoring the way his legs threatened to give out beneath him. The room felt too small, too suffocating. His mother's voice still echoed in his head, but now it was accompanied by a new, sharper edge—fear.
He wasn't alone in this. And that terrified him.