The night was unusually quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that felt peaceful, but the kind that hummed with things unsaid, stretched thin between people sitting in the same room but feeling like they were on different planets. Ji-hoon sat stiffly in the corner chair of his apartment, angled slightly toward the faint ticking of the wall clock. The air was still, but his nerves weren't. They sparked like wires left exposed. His fingers twitched on his lap as he waited—waited for her to speak. For Ji-eun to finally finish the sentence she had been trying to say since she walked through his door.
She stood near the kitchen counter, her back turned, one hand trembling slightly as it rested beside an untouched glass of water. Ji-hoon didn't need to see her to know she was struggling. He could hear it in the way her breathing caught and stuttered, like every inhale carried something heavy she hadn't built the strength to lift yet.
"I should've told you sooner," she said at last, voice thin and cracked like an old record. "I should've said it the moment I came here. But I couldn't. I was scared of how much of me would shatter once I said it out loud."
Ji-hoon didn't rush her. He only tilted his head toward the sound of her voice. "Say it now."
Ji-eun turned to face him. Her arms wrapped around herself like armor that wouldn't hold. She looked smaller than usual, her shoulders curled inward, eyes dim. "I was there," she whispered. "That night."
Ji-hoon didn't speak.
"I wasn't just someone on the edge of the story. I was in the room when it happened. I saw her—your mother. I saw her fight him. I saw how she begged."
Her voice broke.
"I saw how he struck her."
Ji-hoon's throat closed. His hands curled tightly, fingernails digging into the fabric of his pants. The words didn't come. Only this vibrating silence that roared in his ears like static.
"I didn't help her," Ji-eun said, tears running silently down her face. "I froze. I stood behind the door. I couldn't move. I couldn't scream. I just… watched."
"You watched?" Ji-hoon rasped. "Watched my mother die?"
"No," she sobbed, falling to her knees like her body gave out. "Not all of it. I ran—I finally ran before he finished. But I knew what he was going to do. And I didn't stop it. I didn't call the police. I didn't go back. I was a coward."
Ji-hoon sat frozen. It was like his mind had gone blank, overwritten by this one image: Ji-eun standing in the doorway, watching his mother's last moments, and choosing silence. A scream built in his chest, but he didn't let it out. It simmered there. It burned.
"Why?" he asked, barely audible. "Why would you do that?"
"Because he was my brother," she cried. "And because I had spent my whole life obeying him. He protected me. Paid for everything. But in that moment, I realized… I'd traded my soul for safety."
He stood now, carefully, his body trembling. "And now you want forgiveness?"
"No," she said quickly. "I don't deserve it. I'm not asking for it. I just—I needed you to know. I needed to stop being a ghost in my own guilt."
Ji-hoon walked closer. Slowly. His steps were steady, but inside him, everything cracked.
"I spent years hating myself," he said, voice low. "Thinking if I had just come home earlier that night, if I hadn't stayed for an encore, maybe I could've stopped him. Maybe I could've—"
His breath hitched.
"And now I find out someone was there. Someone who could have helped. Someone who saw her die."
"I'm sorry," Ji-eun whispered. "I know it means nothing. But I am."
The air was sharp between them. He stood just inches away now, his expression unreadable, his chest rising and falling like he was trying to control a tidal wave with shallow breaths. His hands trembled. And for a terrifying second, Ji-eun thought he might strike her.
But he didn't.
He stepped back, just once, as if distance might save them both.
"She was everything to me," he whispered. "You saw that. You saw what he took from me."
"I did," Ji-eun said. "And I've carried it every single day."
Another silence fell, but this one was fractured—like glass that couldn't decide if it wanted to shatter or hold.
"I can't promise I'll forgive you," Ji-hoon said finally, voice like thunder held at bay. "But I can't un-hear this either. I can't unknow it."
Ji-eun nodded, tears still slipping down her cheeks. "I'm not asking you to forget. I just want to help now. However I can."
His fists unclenched slowly. A beat passed. Then he said, "Then tell me everything. From the beginning. What happened in that room?"
She looked up at him, eyes wide, vulnerable. "Everything?"
"Everything," he said again. "Every word she said. Every sound. Every second."
And so she did.
She told him about the shattered vase. The blood on the edge of the piano keys. His mother's voice, low but firm, telling Si-wan she wouldn't be quiet anymore. The way Si-wan had smiled—cold, calculating. The slap. The scream. The silence that followed. How his mother had tried to protect something in her hand. A locket, Ji-eun thought. She never saw what it held.
Ji-hoon stood still through all of it, breathing it in like poison. He let it fill him. He let it sink. And he cried.
But when she finished, he didn't scream. He didn't break.
He just said, "She deserved better."
And Ji-eun whispered, "So did you."
They stayed like that for hours. Not friends. Not allies. Just two people in the wreckage of a truth that had waited too long to surface.
And outside, the world moved on.
But inside Ji-hoon's heart, something shifted.
He knew now. He knew who watched. Who ran. Who stayed silent. And who finally, painfully, decided to speak.
Truth never came clean. It came soaked in blood, in regret, in confession.
But it came.
Ji-hoon didn't sleep that night.
He sat at the piano in the center of his living room, his fingers resting gently on the keys like they were bones buried in the dirt. He didn't press them. He didn't play. He just sat there, the silence stretching out like an old song with no beginning and no end. The weight of Ji-eun's voice still clung to the walls, even though she was gone. It was in the floorboards. The cushions. The cracks in the ceiling.
The truth was a thing that didn't ask for permission. It didn't knock. It just stepped inside, settled in your chest, and made a home in the hollows of your ribs.
And now, it lived in him.
He had always imagined that night like a black curtain he couldn't reach behind. A blank space his mind filled with guesses—what her last words were, if she cried, if she screamed. He'd tried so many times to block out the images. But now that Ji-eun had painted them in color, he realized how deeply he had longed to know the exact cruelty of it all. And now that he knew, he hated it.
His mother hadn't been killed in a burst of senseless chaos.
No. It had been deliberate. Personal. Close.
She had been murdered by someone who once sat at their dinner table.
By someone she once trusted.
By someone she sacrificed everything to keep away from her son.
Ji-hoon's stomach clenched. His hands tightened into fists over the keys, trembling. Rage started to rise—hot and brutal, like something old and primal had awakened in him. He slammed both fists onto the piano. The sound burst through the room like a scream finally escaping someone's throat. The notes clashed and scattered, discordant and sharp, and when they faded, he was breathing hard, his eyes wet though he hadn't realized he'd cried again.
His mother's voice lived in memory, not recordings. He'd never once been able to listen to her speaking on tape. She hated cameras. Hated microphones. She said some things were too sacred to record.
But now her death was recorded—in Ji-eun's voice. In her guilt. In the image she'd drawn so vividly.
Ji-hoon leaned forward, resting his forehead against the piano. His breath fogged the polished wood.
"I'm sorry," he whispered into the space. "I didn't see it. I didn't know. I was right there, living my life while you… while you…"
The words dissolved.
She had tried to tell him something that night, hadn't she? There had been something in her voice over the phone—strange, clipped. A goodbye tucked in between the I love yous. But Ji-hoon had been distracted. Caught up in applause. The world had seemed bright and wide, and he thought he had time.
He thought there would always be time.
Now he knew better.
Ji-eun's confession twisted in his mind like thorns. Not because she was undeserving of pain—no, she'd chosen silence, and silence was complicity. But because Ji-hoon could feel the truth in her guilt. She had watched. She had frozen. And he saw now how that moment had cursed her just as it had destroyed him.
But the difference was: Ji-hoon had been blind from the beginning.
She had only become blind by choice.
It was strange—he had imagined, when he found out who had been there, who could've helped and didn't, that he would explode. Break something. Break them. But when he heard her voice, small and shattered, he hadn't seen someone evil.
He had seen someone broken, too.
And that made it worse.
Because if Ji-eun wasn't a monster, then what did that make Si-wan?
The answer was obvious.
Si-wan had made a calculated choice.
Not one mistake. Not one burst of emotion.
He had entered that room knowing exactly what he was going to do.
And Ji-eun had spent years trying to undo the seconds she had stood still.
Ji-hoon stood, finally. Walked across the room, each step heavy with exhaustion. He reached for the shelf near the window and took down a small velvet box.
The locket.
It was the only thing the police had returned to him after his mother's death. Everything else had been ruined, or kept for evidence, or simply lost. But the locket—bent at the hinge, bloodstained, but intact—was found clutched in her hand.
Ji-hoon opened it now with trembling fingers.
Inside was a photo, tiny and blurred at the edges. Him, maybe four years old, laughing as she kissed his cheek. She looked tired. But happy.
And behind the photo was something new—something he had never noticed before.
A folded slip of paper, hidden in the back. So thin he'd always thought it was just the backing of the photo. But tonight, as he touched it, it peeled away. Almost weightless.
He unfolded it carefully, heart pounding.
One line, written in his mother's looping, hurried script.
"He isn't who he says he is. Protect yourself. I love you."
Ji-hoon staggered back a step.
It felt like she had spoken to him through time.
Like her voice had found a way through death and silence and guilt.
He sank to the ground, holding the paper, holding the locket, his hands shaking uncontrollably. His heart thundered in his chest. And for the first time in years, he let himself sob without holding back. Ugly, full sobs that bent his body in half.
She knew. She knew she was going to die.
And still, her last thought was of him.
Of keeping him safe.
And all this time, he'd thought she left him without warning.
He realized then how many lies grief tells you. How it paints the dead as quiet, fading things. But his mother had gone out fighting. She had tried to protect him even in her last breath.
She hadn't disappeared into the dark.
She had screamed into it.
And now, he would answer that scream.
Ji-hoon wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, breath still ragged.
Ji-eun had given him a map of what happened that night.
His mother had left him a message.
And somewhere in the shadows of the past, Si-wan still smiled in public, still held concerts, still pretended.
But Ji-hoon wasn't pretending anymore.
He would uncover every secret.
He would expose every lie.
And he would make sure that when the final note of this story played—
It would be his.