Yue Lan continued, her voice edged with restraint."But I still don't understand. Why go so far as to keep me in the dark—as you did? I'm sorry for asking this, Hye Won… I see now you two are in a relationship. But why her? Why now? After everything we've been through—everything you told me about....between us. Why choose her…over me?"
She paused, eyes fixed on Han Chen."You could've used the same methods ~ those messages, the mysterious appearances. We could've rebuilt something. Forgive me for the assumption, but… is she your unfinished lover from a past life, before you were forced to bind to me?"
"Is that jealousy I hear?" Hye Won's smile was all edges, a blade wrapped in silk. Yue Lan's usual composure flickered. A faint flush crept up her neck, but her eyes—sharp, unyielding—never left Han Chen.
"I will tell you," Han Chen said, rising smoothly from the table. "But let's step outside. Our dining is over." They soon followed.
The doors slid open with a whisper, and the night exhaled—salt, solitude, the ocean's murmur. Moonlit, the sea a rippling expanse of liquid obsidian. Distant city lights flickered like drowned stars. Han Chen and Yue Lan moved to the deck's edge, their silence taut. Behind them, Hye Won sprawled across a lounger, her glass of añejo tequila hanging limp between her fingers moving with yachts swaying.
Moments passed. Ice long melted. Her gaze drifted skyward, tracing constellations with the hollow focus of someone lost in thought—or liquor.
Yue Lan's nails tapped once, twice against her champagne flute eager to hear more. "Han Chen." Her voice was low at first. "No summaries. No riddles. Tell me what happened—and why you're different now."
Han Chen looked at her for a long moment, the night wind brushing through his hair. Then he nodded. "I can't explain it in words," he said softly. "But I can show you. My memories."
A shift in perception of their consciousness. Hye Won, tipsy but quiet, had been swept along too. None of them moved , seamlessly leaving their physical bodies behind ~ still seated, still breathing, but empty. Their consciousness reached the ethereal minds-cape of Han Chen.
***
The stars, the sea, the night—all of it faded. They were dropped into a room thick with grief.
young Han Chen knelt on the floor, staring at a phone that had just delivered the worst news of his life. His parents were gone. The air was too quiet. The weight of it crushed him in silence.
Then came the funeral. Family members arrived with masks of sympathy. Smiles too soft, voices too polished. Even the ones responsible for orchestrating the deaths showed up, offering fake tears and empty words.
Hye Won felt something twist in her stomach.
The memory changed again.
A hospital room. Fluorescent lights. Sterile air.
Yue Lan gasped.
The version of her lying on the bed was barely recognizable—burned, scarred, missing a leg. A husk of a person. Breathing, but not alive in any real sense.
Then came the wedding. Barely twenty, Han Chen stood at her side, slipping a ring on a hand that didn't move. The eyes meeting him. The witnesses near clapped and congratulated, as if a joke. The real contract was signed later, quietly. No legality needed.
"I only knew you through photographs," his voice echoed. "They said you were brilliant. I never got to meet that version."
The memories didn't slow down. They only hit harder.
Han Chen washing dishes in a cramped restaurant. Delivering packages at night. Three jobs. Sleepless weeks. All to cover hospital bills that no one else would pay. The only early support came from Yue Lan's mother and a distant cousin of his own ~ both of whom faded away over time.
And still, he stayed.
"You were a name to me," his voice murmured through the memory. "And then you became the only thing I had left."
Doctors stopped offering hope. Her family stopped visiting. Nurses talked like she was already dead. But Han Chen showed up every day.
He read to her. Fed her. Cleaned her. Talked to her even when she gave no response. And over time, she became the reason he kept going. Not love in the romantic sense—something deeper, something enduring. She was his outlet for grievances he face, he would speak, and she would listen.
Yue Lan stood frozen, watching herself in that bed. The thing she feared most: losing control. She was powerless. Dependent. No decisions. Barely some voices. Just... waiting.
She didn't remember that time, but she could feel it now—how angry she would have been. Ashamed. Betrayed by her body. By life. And still, Han Chen stayed. Time jumped.
Years had passed. She was still in that bed, but now her chest no longer rose. No breath. No pulse. Han Chen stood by her side, thinner now, hair graying at the edges.
"I wanted to tell you that I didn't know you," he said quietly. "That none of this was fair. But I… I'm tired, Lan'er. Maybe it's better this way. Maybe now you're free."
Then, the rain.
A funeral under a leaden sky. The grave was fresh, the crowd long gone. Han Chen stood in the mud alone, soaked to the bone. He looked far older than he was—like life had drained him year by year.
His hand rested on her name carved into stone.
"For years," he whispered, "I spoke to your silence. Now I don't even have that."
That silence, once a strange kind of comfort, had become unbearable. It echoed louder than any scream. Then time shifted again.
Han Chen, older now, sat in a small, dim apartment. Alone. Watching the news. Things were more clear in the final years of life. Through her mother's letters and things happening all over he pieced together some truths.
The people who had ruined both their lives were thriving. Celebrated. Powerful. Untouchable. The people he sworn to show how successful he can be are now celebrities...No one remembered what had been taken from him.
No one cared. And one night, in that quiet, forgotten space, he simply faded. No cries. No letter. No one noticed right away.
The rage. The exhaustion. The loyalty. The heartbreak. The suffocating grief of someone who was never given a chance to grieve properly, who spent every waking moment keeping another person alive while losing himself.
Both girls had never known any of this. Now they couldn't unsee it.
The stars returned. The deck. The night wind. The hum of the sea. But the silence that followed wasn't peace. It was grief. Wounded and raw. Han Chen stood still, eyes on the horizon.
Hye Won moved first. Her steps were unsure, but her arms were certain as they wrapped around him tightly. She clutched him like someone terrified he might vanish again. Her voice trembled into his chest.
"Why didn't you show me sooner?"
He said nothing. Just let her hold him.
Yue Lan moved too, instinctively ~ but froze halfway. Her hand reached out, then paused. Two things stopped her. One: the quiet pressure from Han Chen's spirit, pushing back. Two: the sight of Hye Won already in the space that used to belong to her.
Yue Lan stopped, frozen, not from his words, but from the restraint behind them.
Her eyes met his, and something in her expression shifted—not pity, not gratitude. Something deeper.
She turned, instead, and pulled Hye Won into her arms.
It surprised them both. Hye Won blinked, confused, half still holding on to Han Chen. But Yue Lan didn't let go. She held her tightly, as if the warmth of another human being could anchor her, too. And when she finally spoke, her voice was barely a whisper.
"I'm sorry," she said. "For everything you went through."
Han Chen looked away. "Don't be," he muttered. "That was my life. You had yours. Save the pity for yourself..."
Hye Won stood between them now ~ caught in something she couldn't fully grasp but couldn't look away from either. She knew Han Chen was hers now, in this lifetime. But seeing what he had endured for someone else… knowing she hadn't been there at all...
It hurt. It pulled something tight in her chest. And still, it deepened her love for him in ways she didn't expect.
And then—Yue Lan. She was here now too. And the look in her eyes wasn't distant, wasn't bitter. It wasn't a challenge. It was soft. Like something had broken open in her. Like she didn't just feel grief for Han Chen ~ but saw Hye Won as part of something she hadn't realized she needed. Not a rival. A thread in something larger. Maybe something just beginning.
"Let's go back, I have something more to tell you" Han Chen interrupted, what seemed to be an emotional moment. Han Chen's detached voice from the ambience sounded again as he walk back to the dining area now cleaned.
"So tell me," he said, tilting his head slightly toward Yue Lan. "In that life… who was I to you?"
Yue Lan's fingers tightened around her glass. "My husband," she answered, voice steady despite the tremor beneath. "One who lived for me."
Han Chen's smile was however doesn't reflected the same emotion. "In name. That reality made me live for you. Years spent talking to a body that couldn't answer, a ghost wearing your face. Was there ever love? Intimacy? No. Just duty. Just obligation."
Yue Lan felt a little lost hearing those...but she didn't look away. "You chose to stay with me, back then....instead of living your life."
"I did." He exhaled slowly. "But staying wasn't love. It was inertia. It was guilt. It was fear of letting go of the last thing tying me to that world."
A beat passed. The only sound was the wind and distant city noises.
"Then why help me now?" she asked. Her voice cracked—just a little. "Why show me any of this? Why not just disappear?"
He exhaled, slow. "Let me answer your earlier question. If I don't feel bound to you, why help you? Sympathy? Partly. But not all."
Hye Won, who had been watching with wide, glassy eyes, let out a sharp, humorless laugh. "Wow. That was a turn-off."
Han Chen didn't look at her. His gaze remained fixed on Yue Lan, unblinking.
"My strength requires severing regrets," he said. "And you—you were my greatest one. For a long time, I believed my rebirth was meant to pursue you, to correct what was lost."
A pause. "But when I saw you again, I felt nothing. No flood of love, no torrent of memories. Just... distance. The version of you I married was gone long before you were born, and what remained felt like a stranger. I felt lost and was confused...And then—"
His voice softened, just slightly, eyes slid toward Hye Won.
"…then I heard her cry."
Hye Won's breath hitched. She looked away.
"That moment," Han Chen said, "was the first time in this life I felt something I didn't expect. It wasn't fate. It wasn't duty. It was real. She was hurting, so was I, hearing her. And I remembered what it was to ache for someone else.....
She was unknown after school days in past life. Now I met her early in this life. A person whose fate I changed in chaos. Unintended. She is a girl who followed me for years even after rejecting her many times. I saw her budding love from the very start, but I didn't mind much...but until that day."
As Hye Won reminisced her school days few years before, he still continued. "And I realized something. I wasn't grieving the loss of you, Yue Lan. I was grieving the inaction. The silence. The helplessness. I wasn't in love with you. I was in love with the idea that I could've done more. That I owed you more."
He paused. The dim light drew sharp edges across his face as the yacht swayed slightly. "That's why I am helping you now. Not out of grief. Not to reignite something. But to see if my debt to you—my karmic chain—could finally be broken."
Yue Lan's breath hitched. "So you're saying you've let me go completely? That I'm free to live my life, love someone else?"
Han Chen's expression didn't change answering her. "If that's what you want."
A beat of silence. Then Yue Lan's voice, barely a whisper: "Forgive me, after what I've seen...after feeling your memories as my own...how could I ever look at another man the same way?"
Han Chen's lips curled, but it wasn't a smile. A conversation took a sudden turn from there. "Ah. There it is."
Hye Won stiffened. "There what is?"