Prologue: The Boy Who Remembered
Prague — Three Years Ago
The train pulled out of the station at 3:14 p.m.
Choi Jihun pressed his forehead against the cold glass and watched a Czech alley disappear behind him.
He was twenty-two years old. He had her name. He had her face. He had the Czech opening of a jazz song that had played through dinner the night before, looping in his head like a debt.
He had nothing else.
She had memorized his number wrong twice. Then she had stood on a Czech sidewalk and told him, in a voice she clearly hated, that she could not remember her own phone number — that the autofill on her phone had eaten it two years ago, that her email was logged in everywhere and her parents were unreachable for the day.
He had told her, It’s okay. Take my number. When you get back to Korea, message me.
He had told himself, on the platform, that of course she would.
He had been twenty-two. He had not yet learned that ink runs in the rain.
✦ ✦ ✦
He spent six months trying to find her.
Hostel records. The Korean Embassy. Open chat rooms. Instagram searches that returned fourteen thousand results. Korea had thirty-five thousand Seos. He gave up in February — or told himself he had. The search just moved to the back of his head, where it lived alongside the smell of trdelník and the opening notes of Pride and Prejudice.
Then his life fell apart.
His father’s diagnosis in his junior year. The withdrawal of his family’s support. An ex-girlfriend who, when he asked for space, decided he was cold and made sure the rest of K University’s department agreed. Rumors he was too tired to fight. A semester he stopped attending. A leave of absence. A long, bad spring of part-time work, hospital bills, and a transfer application scraped together one good professor at a time.
He got into the senior class at her school by a margin of one acceptance letter.
He had not known, when he submitted the application, that her school was her school.
He found out three weeks before he was supposed to start.
He had stood in his Seoul apartment with the housing-confirmation email in one tab and the senior class roster in another, and he had — for the first time since the night his father had been hospitalized — felt the floor go out from under him.
Seo Jiyun. Senior. English Literature. Returning student.
She was there.
She had been there the whole time.
✦ ✦ ✦
The version of him that had gotten on a Czech train at twenty-two would have run, full-tilt, into the auditorium on the first day of orientation. He would have said her name.
The version of him that walked into the auditorium at twenty-five was a different man. A more careful one.
He stood at the side of the stage with thirty seconds left before his introduction, and he made his calculation.
She was happy. She had to be happy. She had two friends laughing on either side of her in the third row. She had a senior named Min Hajun smiling at her from two rows back. She had a life that did not include the wreckage he had become.
She had earned three good years without him.
Be a stranger, he told himself, as the emcee called his name. Be polite. Be invisible. Get through the year. Don’t drag her into anything.
It was the best decision he was capable of making in thirty seconds.
It would, three weeks and one accidental double-lease later, turn out to be one of the worst decisions he had ever made.
But Choi Jihun, in that moment, did not yet know that.
He took a breath. He smoothed his expression. He walked out into the lights.
“Hello,” he said into the microphone. “I’m Choi Jihun.”
The auditorium erupted.
In the third row, a girl in a navy hoodie sat up so fast she dropped her pen.
He did not look at her.
He looked at a point ten meters above her head, bowed once, and finished his introduction in the calm, neutral voice of a man who had spent three years learning how to look at the woman he loved as if he had never met her.
He walked off the stage.
He made it to the wings before his hands started shaking.
He was about to do, for what would not be the last time that semester, the one wrong thing he had specifically promised himself he would not do.
He was going to lie to the only girl he had ever loved.
Forgive me, he thought, in the general direction of a Czech alley three years ago.
He started walking.
✦ ✦ ✦
Seoul — The Same Hour
In the third row of the same auditorium, Seo Jiyun sat up, dropped her pen, and stared at the man on the stage with her heart in her ears.
She did not know about Vienna. She did not know about his father. She did not know about K University.
She knew only that her wish from Charles Bridge had — three years late, three years exactly on time — finally come true.
She did not yet know what it would cost her.
She did not yet know what it would cost him.
She knew only that the boy from Prague was on her stage.
The rest, the universe was about to teach them.
