0 Found You
PREVIOUSLY ON Find Me from Far Away:
IN Bay Area, CA - 11-Year-Old Jang Sela [Seol Ah]
Two slow chords trembled across the night. The sound pulled at something under her ribs.
The clouds thinned into a meadow under a rack of stars. Moonlight lacquered the grass and the ocean beyond it, and an old oak cast a black silhouette. Beneath its branches sat a piano. A boy’s shoulders moved with the music.
Sela moved without deciding to, each step measured, breath steady as in sparring. The music made her throat ache. She couldn’t look away.
The playing stopped. The boy looked up. For a breath, they simply regarded one another.
“I’m surprised to see anyone,” the boy said. “It’s usually just me.”
“How long have you been here?” Sela asked. Her mind snagged on several things at once.
He shrugged.
“Long enough.” Then he offered a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “You’re not dead. This is a dream, but it’s still a place.”
Sela let the words settle and found, oddly, that they did not make her feel safer. Sela bit her lower lip.
“How do you know if we are dreaming? What if I’m just imagining you talking to me… and I’m already dead?” she asked.
“I mean, why would anyone want to kill a young child like you?”
They both stopped and looked at each other. He smiled gently.
“Then I guess you’re alive.”
“How?!” Sela asked.
He returned to the bench, and the keys answered like a memory. Before he began, he tapped the piano’s wooden rim twice, an almost nervous, unconscious tic, then his left hand brushed the lower register in a pattern that made Sela’s throat tighten. The melody fit the hollow inside her chest.
A single tear tracked down her cheek. She moved to sit beside the bench and kept her hands in her lap, listening as if the sound might assemble the pieces of whatever she’d lost.
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She closed her eyes. Tang’s hands returned in memory: the weight of his touch, the shape of his guidance. She pressed a chord, and the first note rang through the empty room.
The melody echoed against the walls, each note landing as if it had always belonged to her.
A small, unguarded smile broke across her face. The song was real. The memory was real.
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IN South Korea - 16-Year-Old Jang Seol Ah and 19-Year-Old Kim Jin-ho
Young four-year-old Jin-ho smiled at his parents.
Hands on the piano keys.
A melody—so soft and ascendingly warming.
A memory that kept him together for years. The only happy memory that he could remember of his parents was.
The piano sounds echoed in his room, soft and familiar… a melody that somehow felt shared between him and her, from a memory neither of them fully understood yet. She turned to the window, and her heart fluttered, recognizing the melody of the piano.
“Greensleeves…” she whispered.
She rested her head by the window, listening to the piano as it continued on repeat. She smiled and fell asleep by the window. Seol Ah drifted into a dream…
The floor seemed to melt beneath her, tilting gently, and the quiet stretched wide like an open sky. The next thing she knew, her feet were on clouds, soft and endless, a white road that swallowed sound. She opened her eyes happily.
“Tang…” she called softly. She then ran through the clouds, hurrying to the other end and hoping to see what she longed for, Tang.
The piano melody vibrated in the air as she grew closer to the edge of the mountain.
“Tang!” she yelled, panting and flaring from running.
Tang… stopped and turned.
“Sela?” he responded, shocked.
“It’s been a while since I saw you,” she said with a smile. She then leaped into his arms as he stood. “I’m in Korea now… changed my name to Seol Ah.”
He chuckled and nodded, hugging her tightly.
“I see… do you miss me?” he asked.
“Yes… a lot!” she answered, withholding her cry. She pulled away and looked up, directly at his face. Yet, she couldn’t recognize it. Not the eyes but… the lips. “Jin Oppa?”
She gasped.
Jin-ho woke up and stared at the ceiling. He sat up and looked around.
“Korea… Seol Ah?” Jin-ho covered his mouth—
Seol Ah screamed.
Jin-ho jolted and turned to the window.
“Is she okay?” he asked. Then he quickly put on his jacket and headed to her front door, overhearing the conversation.
“Omma… I’m fine. I just had… a dream,” Seol Ah laughed awkwardly.
Jin-ho smiled. I finally found you from far away. Now, you’re close to me. My Seol Ah.
Meanwhile—
“Who gave you the information about Jang Seol Ah?” Jo Song questioned.
Seok Han chuckled faintly before he spat at Jo Song’s face.
“A little girl named Young Si Yeon…” Seok Han laughed, coughing and taunting. “Are you going to kill a little girl?”
Jo Song wiped the mucus out of his face with the handkerchief. Then he stared at Seok Han. They stared at each other. Jo Song pointed a wired staple gun at Seok Han’s thigh, pressing the trigger—
THWACK.
“Argh! Fucking bitch!!!”
“Look, I’m running out of staples… soon you won’t even be able to scream when you say hello to your favorite boss, Nu Chang—”
“Fuck you and Lee Chu Young! My Sajang-nim will fucking kill you two!”
Jo Song laughed and moved the gun up, pressing the cold metal to Seok Han’s cheek.
“My Sajang-nim says a scratch on her will make you regret that you even dared to touch her… so be happy that you’re still breathing before you get to see him,” Jo Song teased.
Seok Han barely had time to flinch—
CHK-THWACK.
“AHH!!!”
His scream slammed into the walls of the small room and died there.
————————————————————————————————————
“You need to make your decision. Do you want to find Lee Chu Young, or are you going to let me get him by using her?” Bin Sin asked, then he grabbed his coat. Before he opened the door—
“Touch a single strand of her hair… and you will regret that you even have me as your nephew,” Jin-ho threatened.
Bin Sin clenched his jaw as he turned around to look at Jin-ho.
“You’re like your father… stupid in the name of love… that’s how he lost his life,” Bin Sin cremated. Then he stepped out of the hospital room.
Inside Jin-ho’s room, away from everyone and everything, Jin-ho pressed his fingers against the piano keys, hitting them at random. He leaned his head back and groaned. “Where are you, Lee Chu Young? Get the fuck out of your hiding spot, so that I can have a brawl with you.”
