25. Smaller Every Time
SMALLER EVERY TIME
SANG-HOON — SEOUL
My apartment in Seoul felt too quiet.
It was the same studio I’d rented as an intern when I began at Starhouse. The hangers in the closet that came with the apartment, which I’d never changed, were wrong: plastic, all the same size, the cheap kind that leave shoulder marks on anything structured.
When I returned, I’d emptied my professional wardrobe case and put everything away. I kept reaching for it when I needed something and finding it empty.
My phone sat on the counter, face-down, notifications silenced. I knew what was on it. Messages from Sun-hee-noona asking how I was doing, updates from the tour I was no longer part of, probably texts from Jin that I was too much of a coward to read.
I’d made my choice. Clean break, professional distance, exactly what I’d thought would keep him safe. So why did it feel like I’d cut off my own arm?
Someone knocked. I considered not answering, but the knock came again, in a persistent, familiar rhythm.
My sister.
I opened the door to find Mi-ran standing there with a bag of takeout and an expression that said she wasn’t leaving until we talked.
My little sister had never really embraced the little part.
She carried herself with the kind of polished confidence that made strangers assume she belonged somewhere important.
Her dark hair fell in a sleek sheet past her shoulders, her makeup understated but flawless, her cream blouse and tailored trousers looking as though she’d stepped out of a magazine editorial rather than off the Seoul subway.
Not that I was unbiased. When we were teenagers, I’d practiced hairstyles on her and her friends, turning our parents’ living room into an unofficial salon while they shrieked over curling irons and lip gloss. Mi-ran liked to joke that I’d launched her beauty obsession.
Looking at her now, immaculate as ever while I stood in wrinkled sweats and day-old stubble, I couldn’t disagree.
“You look like shit,” she said, pushing past me into the apartment.
“Thanks. Love you too.”
“When’s the last time you ate?” She walked into my tiny kitchen and started unpacking containers—jjajangmyeon, tangsuyuk, all my favorites from the restaurant near our parents’ place.
“I eat.”
“Ramen doesn’t count.” She pointed at the chair. “Sit.”
I sat, because arguing with Mi-ran was pointless. She’d inherited our mother’s stubbornness along with her nose and her tendency to cry at commercials.
She handed me chopsticks and a bowl. “Now talk. What happened?”
“I told you when I texted you from Amsterdam. I left the tour. Personal reasons.”
“Bullshit.” She took a bite of tangsuyuk, chewed thoughtfully. “You’ve been obsessed with that job since you started at Starhouse. You worked yourself half to death to get promoted to senior stylist. And then you just... quit? In the middle of the biggest tour of your career?”
“It was complicated.”
An elevated train thundered past, rattling the window in its frame. “Complicated how?” She leaned forward. “Does this have anything to do with Jin?”
My silence was answer enough.
“I knew it.” She set down her chopsticks. “Oppa, I’ve seen the way you talk about him. Every time you come home, it’s ‘Jin said this’ and ‘Jin did that’ and ‘you should have seen Jin’s performance.’ You’re in love with him.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters. Don’t be ridiculous.” Her voice rose. “Did you tell him?”
“Yes. In Cannes. After the fireworks incident.” The words felt like swallowing glass. “We were together. For a week. And then I left because someone was trying to kill him. If I wasn’t there, I couldn’t make things worse.”
Mi-ran stared at me for a long moment. Then she reached across the table and smacked the back of my head.
“Ow! What was that for?”
“For being an idiot.”
“Someone was trying to kill him.” I reached around and rubbed the back of my head.
“And someone is still trying to kill him,” she shot back. “Leaving didn’t change that.”
My heart raced and my hands shook. “I couldn’t stand there every night wondering whether I was about to watch him get hurt and be powerless to stop it.”
“So you chose to leave him to face that without you?”
Tears began welling up at the corners of my eyes.
She took my hand. “Oppa, did Jin ask you to leave?”
“No.”
“Then you made the decision for both of you.” She squeezed. “When Eomma was sick,” she said more quietly, “do you remember what she wanted from us?”
Our mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer when I was nineteen, Mi-ran seventeen. Two years of treatment, surgery, radiation, the slow crawl back to health.
“She said she needed us to be strong.”
“No.” Mi-ran shook her head. “She said she needed us to be there. Not to be strong, not to be brave, not to pretend everything was fine. Just to be there. To sit with her during chemo even when she was throwing up. To hold her hand even when she was scared. To cry with her when it got too hard.”
Mi-ran leaned forward. “That’s what love is, Oppa. Showing up even when you’re terrified.”
My throat tightened. “What if I go back and he still gets hurt?”
“Then at least he won’t face it alone.”
Silence grew between us. Finally I said, “I’m getting messages from Sun-hee-noona, the tour manager.”
“And?”
“He’s falling apart.”
“Of course he is. You’re not just his stylist. You’re his person.
The one who kept him grounded, who reminded him he wasn’t just Jin the idol but Joon-hi the human being.
” She squeezed my hand. “He needs you. Not because you can protect him from every threat, but because loving you makes him stronger. Makes him more himself.”
“You’re not wrong.”
She didn’t even hesitate. “Then why are you still here?”
I remembered Jin in that Cannes hotel room, asking me to stay. Thought about his face in London when I’d been distant. “I don’t know if he’ll take me back.”
“Then you find out.”
“Mi-ran—”
“No, Oppa. You don’t get to decide for him twice.”
She pressed my phone into my hand.
“If he tells you to stay away, at least you’ll know. But hiding here because you’re scared?”
Her voice softened. “That’s not love.”
Then she left.
In the silence that followed, I sat at the table, unfinished dishes in front of me, staring at the list on my phone. Forty-seven unread messages from Jin since the first one I’d answered that I couldn’t come back.
I’d been avoiding them, afraid of what they might say. Afraid he’d tell me to stay away. Afraid he’d decided I’d hurt him too badly to forgive.
I opened the thread. The first unread message had come not long after I landed in Seoul.
I don’t understand why you left, but I hope you’re safe.
The most recent: I’m still angry that you left. But I’d take you back in a heartbeat if you came back.
Please come back.
I read that one three times before I could breathe properly. I put the phone down on the table and sat with it for a while.
I’d been telling myself that I’d left to protect him, that distance was a form of care.
But my fear was actually about Jin’s safety and my own inability to watch someone I loved get hurt.
That had made sense in Amsterdam. It had made sense on the plane to Seoul.
It had made sense every time I’d stared at the ceiling of this apartment at two in the morning, reconstructing the logic of the decision.
Reading forty-seven messages from a man who’d kept reaching for me even while I was gone, it didn’t make sense anymore.
He hadn’t asked me to leave. He hadn’t agreed that I should leave. He’d said goodbye and started sending me messages to come back, because that was what Jin did. He reached for people even when they’d given him every reason not to.
A boy in the Starhouse Academy with him had tried to sabotage him by stealing his stage instructions, but he’d already memorized them.
When the boy’s contract wasn’t renewed, Jin had sat with him while he cried and reassured him that he’d be picked up somewhere else.
When he was, Jin sent him a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
A makeup artist had been fired because she sent him out on stage with half his face unfinished, and he still helped her get another job. I knew that whatever I asked him for, he’d deliver.
Aidan had put security protocols around Jin within forty-eight hours of Cannes. Jason had doubled the team. The threat hadn’t gone up when I was there; it had gone down. I’d been working backward from the conclusion I wanted — I have to go — and building the justification after.
I hadn’t left to protect him. I’d left because watching him be in danger was unbearable, and I hadn’t been able to admit that the unbearable thing was my problem to carry, not his.
I pulled up Sun-hee-noona’s number. She answered on the first ring.
“About damn time.”
“I want to come back,” I said. “If the tour will have me.”
“The tour never wanted you gone in the first place.”
Relief hit so hard I had to sit down. “But listen carefully,” she said, her voice sharpening. “If you come back, you do not get to disappear on him again.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
The question landed harder than Mi-ran’s slap. I looked at Jin’s messages on the screen. “I didn’t,” I admitted. “Not until now.”
Silence hummed between us for a moment. “The next show is in New York,” she said. “Can you get there?”
“I’ll find a way.”
“Good. And Sang-hoon?”
“Yes?”
“When you see him, don’t lead with excuses.”
The line went dead. I sat there for another minute, staring at the thread.
Then my phone buzzed. Jin: Did you get my texts?
My fingers hovered over the keyboard.
I could explain everything now. Tell him I’d been terrified. Tell him leaving had felt like the only way to protect him.
But he deserved better than a confession typed into a text box. So I wrote: I got them. All of them. I’m on my way.
The response came almost instantly. To New York?
I swallowed. To you.
I booked the first nonstop to New York. Fourteen hours in the air, and thanks to the International Date Line I’d arrive Saturday evening. With luck I’d land around the same time the group did from England, and I’d have time before the technical rehearsal to show Jin how much I cared.
I started to pack, throwing clothes into the same suitcase I’d unpacked when I arrived in Seoul.
Then my phone rang from Haneul’s number.
I wasn’t surprised. He had always been the leader of the group, even though Jin was the center.
“Sun-hee-noona told me you’re coming back.
” His voice was careful. “Is that true?”
“Yes. If Jin will have me.”
“He will. He’s miserable without you.” A pause. “But Sang-hoon-ah, are you coming back for him, or are you running away from being alone?”
“I’m coming back because I was wrong. Because leaving didn’t make him safer, it just made us both unhappy. Because love means showing up even when you’re terrified.”
“Good answer.” I heard the smile in Haneul’s voice. “We need you back. Not just Jin—all of us. You’re part of this team, and it hasn’t been the same without you.”
“I don’t deserve—”
“Stop. You made a mistake. You’re fixing it. That’s what matters.” He cleared his throat. “The security situation is still serious. Aidan and Liam think the real attempt will come in New York or Seoul. You need to be prepared for that.”
“I am. Or I will be.” I zipped my suitcase. “How is he really? Jin?”
“Performing on muscle memory. Hitting the marks but not present. He looks for you in the wings between every song, and when you’re not there...” Haneul trailed off. “Just get here. That’s all he needs.”
The apartment looked the same as it had when I moved in. Same plastic hangers. Same window with the elevated train outside. Same life that had been waiting here while I was somewhere else, which was all it had ever been. A place I came back to between tours, smaller every time.
I turned off the light and left.