The water was so cold it burned.
So-young gasped as she drowns in the Han River, chill biting through her coat —the same tan wool one her father gave her on her twentieth birthday, now stained with soju and cold. Her numb fingers slipped once—twice—before finally passing the little girl towards the broken ice where bystanders were standing.
Just a little further—
The child's mittened hand caught the edge. Safely.
Relief flooded So-young's chest, sharp and sweet as the first bite of a warm bungeo-ppang on a winter day.
Then the current wrapped around her ankles like vengeful hands and dragged her under.
Darkness pressed in, but her mind was painfully clear.
"I'm really going to die like this".
Not in her tiny bakery with its cracked tile floors and the oven that only worked if you kicked it just right. Not surrounded by the smell of caramelizing sugar and yeast, the way it had been when her mother was alive—
"Measure with your heart, So-young-ah," Mom would say, guiding her small hands over a bowl of dough. "Like this—"
The memory hit harder than the freezing water.
She didn't cry when the bank took the bakery keys last week. didn't scream when the Han family lawyers made her sign away her inheritance. But now, suspended between river ice and muddy depths, So-young finally let the tears come.
Her last thought wasn't of the unpaid loans or the eviction notice.
It was of her father's flour-dusted hands lifting her onto the stainless steel counter at Han Bakes, letting her shape her first loaf at six years old. "Look at you—my little chef!" His laugh had been warm as proofed dough.
The foreclosure notice flashed behind her eyelids instead:
HAN BAKES
Property Seized by Creditors
Ji-eun's voice filled in her memory, thick with soju last night: "You were always too soft for this business, So-young-ah." Her best friend since culinary school—the only one left who remembered her mother's recipes—holding her hair back as she vomited in some dingy bar bathroom. "Crying again? Tch. You and your—"
The current twisted her sideways.
Something warm brushed her cheek.
A glow, gold as the crust on perfect milk bread, pulsed in the depths. Not sunlight—something older. The scent of cinnamon and fermented beans filled the water, impossibly, the way it had in her mother's kitchen.
Voices hummed a lullaby:
"Sleep, my baby, under the moon's light—"
Mom's song. The one she'd sung every night before—
Before the accident.
Before the family said orphans don't run bakeries.
Before she spent ten years trying to prove them wrong.
"WAKE UP, STUBBORN CHILD."
The command vibrated through her ribs.
—She jolted upright, gasping.
Sunlight. Real sunlight, not the phantom glow of drowning. The smell of caramelized sugar and steamed milk, not river filth.
And her mother's voice—her mother's voice—horribly off-key, singing along to the radio in the kitchen.
No. No, no, no—
She stared at her hands. Tiny. Smooth. No burn scar from the temperamental oven at her failed bakery. No calluses from kneading dough for fourteen hours a day. Just... child's hands.
A framed photo on the nightstand: her five-year-old self sandwiched between her parents at Lotte World, her father's smile bright with life. Not the hollow-cheeked ghost he'd become after Mom's accident.
The sob tore from her throat before she could stop it.
Beyond the bedroom door, her father's voice rumbled. "So-young-ah! If you don't get up, I'm eating all the red bean buns!"
The world tilted.
She ran—bare feet slapping against wooden floors she hadn't felt in twenty years—and crashed into the kitchen.
There they were.
Flour dusting Dad's apron. Mom's hair in its messy bun, a smudge of red bean paste on her cheek. The steam from freshly baked buns curling toward the ceiling.
Alive.
"Mom!," she choked out, clinging to Mom's waist, breathing in the scent of vanilla and yeast that no memory had ever captured right. "I missed you so much."
Dad laughed, warm and whole. "did you have a bad dream, sweetheart?"
She buried her face deeper. Let the dough-warmth of them clears away the river's cold.
Somewhere, faint as the first rise of bread, the kitchen hummed back.