3. Chapter Three
The address sits highlighted on my phone screen, I’ve read it enough times now that I don’t need to look again, but I do anyway out of anxious habit.
Across the street, the auto shop looks like every other one I passed on the drive down, corrugated metal roof, a couple of cars up on lifts inside the open bay, a faded sign that reads Daeho Motors in peeling red paint.
Nothing about it announces itself as significant.
Nothing about it tells me whether I’m about to waste another afternoon or not.
I slide my phone into my pocket and stand there a second longer than I need to, letting the traffic pass between us.
Busan smells different than Seoul. Saltier, warmer, the sun already bearing down even though it’s barely past ten in the morning.
I can taste that faint brine if I open my mouth, it clings to the whole city no matter how far you get from the water.
This is a long shot. My mother said she’d already made the drive down here herself, more than once, walking into body shops and garages all over the city with a photograph in her hand, asking after a boy who probably didn’t even look the same anymore.
Nothing ever came of it. But I had to try anyway.
I got this address from Sihyung four days ago, after a coffee that took some convincing on my part and a fair amount of guilt on his.
It’d been years since I called him. Years since I’d called any of them, if I’m honest, but Sihyung especially, because Sihyung was never someone I’d cut ties with on purpose.
We’d just drifted, the way people do when there’s history between them that neither one wants to poke at too hard.
So when I texted him out of nowhere asking if he had time to meet, I wasn’t surprised it took him a full day to respond.
What did surprise me was the reply when it came, quick and warm, an exclamation point after every sentence like he’d been waiting for this.
He showed up at the coffee shop fifteen minutes early.
I was already there, and I watched him come through the door searching the room until his eyes landed on me and his face lit up like a little kid.
He hugged me before I had the chance to stand up all the way, thumping me on the back twice like men do to show affection platonically, and said my name with awe.
“Seyeon-ah. Look at you. You look exactly the same, you bastard.”
“You don’t,” I said, because he didn’t, really.
He’d put on some weight in a good way, the type that comes from a settled life, and there were fine lines starting at the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there the last time I saw him.
He looked well. He looked like someone who slept easy at night.
We sat and he ordered for both of us without asking and then he started talking.
He always did talk more than me. He told me about his wife, who still made fun of him for crying during his own wedding vows.
He told me about his boys, six and nine, the older one obsessed with baseball and the younger one who wanted to be a diver like the divers in the news specials.
He told me about his seafood restaurant, half-owned with his cousin, right on the docks where you could smell the catch coming in fresh every morning.
He pulled out his phone to show me pictures, his sons squinting against the sun on a beach trip, his wife laughing at something off camera, and I looked at every one, feeling warmth and sadness in equal amounts for all I’d missed.
It was strange, hearing about a life so full while mine had stayed so quiet, teaching in Seoul, coming home to an empty apartment with just my dog for company most nights.
Not quite unhappy. Just quiet. Sterile might be the better word.
Still, there was something healing about watching him talk about his family with unguarded joy, proof that people from Haemok could build something new and good, that it wasn’t all just wreckage behind us.
I let him get all the way through his updates before I brought it up, because I hadn’t wanted to be the person who called out of nowhere just to ask a favor. I wanted at least an hour of just being glad to see him first.
But eventually there was a pause, a natural lull where the conversation could’ve gone anywhere, and I took it.
“Sihyung,” I said, turning my cup in my hands, not quite looking at him. “I have to ask you something. It might be a strange thing to ask after all this time.”
He got quiet, and when I looked up his expression had shifted, a careful look settling over his features, like he already knew where this was headed before I said the name.
“You wouldn’t happen to know where Ryowoon is, would you?”
He didn’t look surprised, honestly. If anything, he looked like he’d been expecting it, maybe even from the moment I first texted him asking to meet. But he didn’t look offended either, which was a relief I hadn’t expected to feel this strongly.
“I wish I did,” he said, and he sounded like he meant it. “I don’t. I’m sorry, Seyeon. Next to you, the only one who really stayed close to him was Haeil, and, well.”
He didn’t finish the sentence. The silence that followed sat between us thickly, me staring down at the table, tracing the rim of my cup with one finger, feeling that same old ache bloom in my sternum, the one that never really goes away no matter how many years pass.
Sihyung cleared his throat after a moment. “You don’t need me to tell you this, but he probably didn’t want to be found. Not by anyone.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m not asking for me.”
He studied me for a second, and then he nodded slowly, like he understood there was more to it than I was willing to say out loud. He didn’t push. Sihyung always was good about knowing when to let something sit unspoken.
“Is there anywhere,” I asked, “any place he mentioned, before he left? A shop he talked about, somewhere he thought about working? Anything like that?”
He thought about it for a long moment, brow furrowed, tapping his knuckle against the table.
“There were a couple garages up in Busan he used to deal with, back when he was still doing work in Haemok. Parts, mostly, or referrals when a job was too much for the shop he had. I don’t know if it means anything.
It’s been years. But if he ended up staying in that line of work, maybe someone there might’ve heard something. ”
He wrote the names down on a napkin because neither of us had paper, his handwriting cramped and slanted, and slid it across the table to me. I thanked him more times than was probably necessary, and he waved it off, told me to come find him again before another six years passed, made me promise.
Now I’m standing across the street from the second of those two names, the first one already a dead end this morning, an older man behind the counter shaking his head at Ryowoon’s name, never heard it in his life.
This one might go the same way. Probably will.
But I came all the way down here, so I step off the curb and start crossing anyway, salt on my tongue, my heart thumping slowly in my chest as the shop gets closer.
The garage swallows sound and spits it back out, the whine of a drill deep inside the building, a radio playing trot music through tinny speakers, someone laughing at something I can’t hear over the rest of it.
I stand just inside the roll-up door for a second, letting my eyes adjust to the dimmer light after the glare outside, and then I call out, pitching my voice to carry.
“Excuse me? Is anyone up front?”
Nobody answers right away. A car sits up on the lift closest to me, its underside exposed, a pair of legs in stained coveralls sticking out from beneath it.
Further back, two men lean over the open hood of a sedan, murmuring to each other, one of them gesturing at something with a wrench. Neither looks over.
I call out again louder, and a man finally straightens up from behind a stack of tires near the back wall, wiping his hands on an oil-stained rag. He’s younger than me by maybe five years, with a buzzed head and grease smudged along his jaw like war paint.
“Yeah?” he says, walking over, still working the rag between his fingers.
“Sorry to bother you,” I say stiffly, cringing at my city-polished dialect that slipped out by accident.
I’m not in Seoul, I remind myself, if I talk like that it makes me an outsider here.
“I’m trying to find someone. A man named Cha Ryowoon.
I was told he might’ve done business with this shop a while back. ”
The name doesn’t seem to mean anything to him. His brow furrows with polite confusion.
“Doesn’t ring a bell. You’d have to ask the boss, he’s been here longer than any of us.”
“Is he around?”
The man tilts his head toward the back of the shop and hollers a name swallowed by the noise of the drill still going.
A minute passes. I use it to look around, my eyes moving over every face in the shop like I’ve been doing all morning, scanning for something that might not even still exist in the shape I remember it.
The man beneath the lifted car. The two hunched over the sedan.
None of them are tall enough, none of them have that set to the shoulders I’d know even from behind, even after all this time.
I don’t know what I expect to find, honestly.
It’s not like I think he’s going to be standing right here in some random garage in Busan, wrench in hand, exactly the way he looked at twenty-three.
But some part of me keeps looking anyway, can’t stop myself, imagining all the ways ten years might have reshaped him.
Maybe he’s bulkier now, all that wiry, restless muscle getting heavier from years of manual work.
Maybe he cut his hair short like half the guys in here, shaved close at the sides.
Maybe there are new scars, ones I’ve never seen, over the ones I have.