Prologue
They say you can’t choose your parents. What they don’t tell you is that sometimes, if you’re desperate enough or foolish enough, you might try to unchoose them instead.
The night I decided to erase myself from existence, my father was at her house again.
Soojin, the divorced colleague. The woman who had somehow become more important than his wife, more important than his three children, more important than the mortgage he couldn’t pay because he’d been unemployed for two years.
“Hana, can you make dinner?” my younger sister Yuna called from her room, her voice small and tired. She was eighteen now, technically an adult, but exhaustion still made her sound like a child.
“I’m making pasta,” I called back, stirring the pot while checking my brother Minho’s assignments on the kitchen table. He was nineteen, but still drifting through life like nothing real could ever truly break him.
I was twenty two, and somehow still the one holding everything together.
I had stopped believing in anything like stability months ago, when I came home early and saw my father’s car parked outside a place it should never have been.
Mom was in her room. She was always in her room now, staring at nothing, the light gone from her eyes. The woman who once laughed easily, who sang while cooking, who dreamed of opening her own boutique, had slowly disappeared into silence.
I remembered the wedding album I had found while searching for her medicine. Young, radiant faces looking back at me. My mother glowing in red and gold, my father looking at her like she was his entire world.
The caption beneath it read: Jihye and Taehyun, September 1999. Forever begins today.
Twenty five years of forever had turned into this. A woman who had forgotten how to smile, two nearly grown children raising themselves, and a man who had chosen to leave behind everything he once promised to protect.
After dinner, after helping Yuna with her work, after listening to Minho complain about a future he refused to take seriously, I went to Mom’s room.
She was holding an old photograph. I recognized it immediately. My mother at eighteen, sitting in a college canteen, surrounded by friends, eyes bright with a life she still believed in.
“Who’s that?” I asked softly, pointing to my father beside her in the photo, the way he was looking at her even then.
She touched the photograph gently.
“Your father,” she said quietly. “He always looked at me like that. Like I was his whole world.”
Her voice broke slightly, but there was no bitterness in it. Only memory.
“He loved me first,” she whispered. “And I loved him for my whole life.”
That was all. No alternatives. No other stories. Just the beginning she had never stopped holding onto, even when everything else fell apart.
The migraine came without warning.
I had lived with them since childhood, but this one was different. It didn’t feel like pain inside my head anymore. It felt like the world itself was folding in on me.
I was driving home that night when it happened.
Rain covered the road in a thin sheet of glass. The headlights reflected back like broken stars. I remember the truck too late, the sudden weight of motion where there should have been none.
The crash was not slow. It was final.
Metal, glass, silence.
And then nothing.
When I opened my eyes, I was standing somewhere impossible.
A college campus filled with strangers in clothes that did not belong to my time. A banner stretched across a building ahead of me.
Welcome Class of 1997.
And then I saw her.
Young. Eighteen. Radiant.
My mother.
I looked down at my hands. They were steady now. Real. Alive in a time that should not have existed.
And I understood.
The accident had not ended me.
It had sent me back.
Two years before she met my father. Two years before their life together began.
I was twenty two years old.
And I had been given something impossible.
A chance to change everything that had come after.
Even if it meant rewriting my own existence.
