Chapter 1: The Ultramarine Lie
The fluorescent lights of the Min Design Group office didn’t just illuminate; they judged. They hummed with a sterile, buzzing repetitiveness that seemed to vibrate inside Lee Da-in’s skull, a constant reminder of the three years she’d spent wavering at the exact same repeat of unremarkable.
She kept her head down, her digital stylus clicking rhythmically against the glass tablet. On her screen, she was meticulously adjusting the gradient of a laundry detergent bottle. It was a “Sea Breeze” scent, but to Da-in, it just looked like a flat, soulless blue, the color of a swimming pool in a closed hotel.
“So, Da-in-ssi,” a voice chirped, followed by the squeak of a rolling chair. It was Yoon-hee, the office social butterfly, leaning over the partition with a look of feigned concern. “Thirty years old today. The big milestone. Tell us, is there a hidden cake waiting for you? Or perhaps a bouquet being delivered to your house since you won’t let us celebrate with you?”
Da-in didn’t look up. “I’m just going home, Yoon-hee. My mother sent some seaweed soup. That’s enough.”
“Seaweed soup by yourself on your thirtieth?” A male colleague from across the aisle chuckled, not unkindly, but the pity in it stung worse than an insult. “Da-in, you’ve been at this firm for three years. We’ve never even seen you get a ‘Goodnight’ text. Are you a monk?”
“She’s just focused,” Yoon-hee defended, though her eyes were scanning Da-in’s desk for any sign of a secret life. “But seriously, Da-in. Not even a first love? Everyone has at least a tragic high school story to cry over.”
Da-in’s hand hovered over the tablet. A first love. The phrase felt like a language she hadn’t learned. While her peers had spent their twenties navigating messy breakups and heart-fluttering confessions, she had been buried in sketchbooks and, later, corporate brand guidelines. She was thirty, and her heart was a pristine, unpainted canvas. It wasn’t that she didn’t want love; it was that she was terrified of how much she wanted it, and how little she knew how to find it.
“Again?”
The voice was cold and cut through the office chatter like a blade. Min Tae-oh stood at the end of the row, his charcoal suit without a single wrinkle, arms crossed. He stepped closer, leaning in to look at her screen.
“The shading on the bottle neck is too precise, Lee Da-in. It’s mathematically perfect, which makes it look repulsive. It lacks... life.” He looked from the screen to her tired eyes. “Perhaps you’re too focused on rushing home to your seaweed soup to put any soul into your work. Art requires a pulse. Do you have one?”
The office went deathly quiet. The pity was gone, replaced by the awkward tension of a public shaming. Da-in felt a hot, prickling sensation climb up her neck. It was the weight of every Friday night spent alone, every single box checked on a form, and Tae-oh’s constant, icy reminder that she was hollow.
“I’m not rushing home to eat soup alone,” she said. Her voice was quiet, but it carried.
Tae-oh arched a perfectly groomed eyebrow. “Oh?”
Da-in stood up, her chair scraping harshly against the floor. The lie formed in her mind before she could stop it, a collage of every romance novel she’d ever read and every painting she’d ever admired.
“I have someone,” she blurted out. “He’s... he’s in Italy. A painter I met during my semester in Florence.”
The silence deepened. Yoon-hee’s jaw dropped.
“His name is Yoo Hwan,” Da-in continued, her heart battering away like a trapped animal. Once she started, she couldn’t stop; she needed the lie to be beautiful enough to shield her. “We had to part because I couldn’t find work there, but we’ve stayed in touch all these years. He’s the reason I don’t date. Why would I look at anyone else when I’ve already seen perfection? He has eyes the color of Deep Ultramarine-like the ocean at midnight, and he told me he’d come for me when the time was right.”
She looked Tae-oh directly in the eyes. “He’s coming back for me soon. Maybe that’s why my work lacks ‘soul’ to you, Director. Because my soul isn’t in this office. It’s with him.”
Tae-oh stared at her for a long beat, his expression unreadable. Finally, a small, dangerous smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“Ultramarine eyes? How... vivid. He sounds less like a man and more like a museum piece.” He straightened his jacket. “I look forward to meeting this ‘masterpiece’ when he arrives. Don’t keep us waiting too long, Lee Da-in.”
Two hours later, Da-in sat in a dim corner of a pojangmacha, three empty green bottles of soju standing like soldiers on the plastic table.
“What did I do?” she whispered, her forehead hitting the table with a dull thud. “Yoo Hwan? Italy? I don’t even like pasta that much.”
The alcohol made the world tilt. But beneath the drunken panic, something else was stirring. The lie hadn’t just been a shield; it had been a blueprint. For the first time in years, she didn’t see a laundry detergent bottle when she closed her eyes. She sawhim. The curve of a jawline she hadn’t touched. The specific, heavy blue of an eye she hadn’t looked into.
Her fingers fumbling as she counted out the crumpled bills to pay her bill. The heat of the alcohol was a dull roar in her ears as she stepped out into the night air.
The walk home was a sensory blur. The city lights didn’t look like electricity anymore; they looked like watery streaks of gold and blue on a damp canvas. Every person she passed, couples holding hands, businessmen shouting into phones, felt like they were part of a world she didn’t belong to. She was a ghost in her own life, a sketch that had never been inked.
“I’ll show him,” she muttered, stumbling toward her rooftop apartment.
She fumbled with her keypad.Beep-beep-beep.She didn’t turn on the lights. She didn’t need them. She dragged her old, wooden easel into the center of the room, the moonlight through the window hitting the blank paper like a spotlight.
She didn’t use her digital tablet tonight. She reached for the heavy, cold ceramic palette and a tube of pigment she hadn’t touched since university: Ultramarine. She began to paint.
She didn’t paint a man; she painted a feeling. She painted the way a heart feels when it’s being shamed. She painted the warmth of a hand she had never held. Her movements were frantic, the water splashing over the edges of the paper, the deep blue bleeding into the cream-colored fibers.
“Stay,” she whispered to the pigment as it pooled on the paper. “Just for a second. Stay.”
