The Things We Never Learned: Four Steps Away,1

The hallway on the fifth floor of Hannam Villa smelled like floor cleaner and someone's leftover delivery, the kind of stale garlic that seeped under doors and never fully left. The elevator chimed at 1:07 AM and all seven of them spilled out at once, still dressed in the coordinated blacks and silvers from the Chilsung CF shoot, makeup half removed, Taeyul's foundation line visible along his jaw where the wipe had missed.

Dongmin had Joon in a loose headlock, dragging him sideways through the elevator doors while Haesoo walked backward in front of them, phone out, filming.

"Say it," Dongmin said, grinning so wide his eyes nearly disappeared. "Say it or I'm posting the behind cam of you forgetting the choreography."

"I didn't forget it. I improvised."

"You walked into Eunwoo."

"Eunwoo was in the wrong spot."

Eunwoo, three steps behind them with his bag slung over one shoulder, didn't even look up from his phone. "I was on my mark."

"See?" Dongmin squeezed tighter. Joon swatted at his ribs without real force, half laughing despite himself, that reluctant crack in the composure he always pretended was effortless.

Haesoo cackled and the sound bounced off every surface in the corridor, sharp and bright and far too loud for one in the morning. Jisung winced beside Minjae, pulling one earbud out like the noise had physically hurt him.

"Guys." Minjae's voice came from behind them, steady and already tired in that specific way it got when he knew no one was going to listen. "It's one AM. People live here."

"We live here," Haesoo said, still filming.

"Other people live here."

"They should be honored." Joon finally twisted free of Dongmin's arm and straightened his jacket, flicking his hair back with two fingers. "Their property value just went up."

Dongmin snorted. He shoved Joon's shoulder, and Joon shoved him back harder, sending him stumbling sideways just as the second elevator opened behind them with a soft ding that none of them heard.

She came out quiet. Backpack on, pink hoodie with the sleeves pulled over her hands, grey sweats, and green Crocs that made almost no sound on the tile. She was mid-step into the hallway when Dongmin's stumble caught her full in the shoulder and slammed her sideways into the wall.

Her backpack hit first. Then her arm. The dull thud of her body against plaster was louder than it should have been.

For one half-second, everything stopped.

Then she shoved him. Both hands flat against his chest, hard enough that he actually stepped back, and the look on her face could have set the hallway on fire.

"Hey, watch it!"

Her voice was sharp and clear, accented in a way that didn't belong to this building or this district or maybe this country. She was shorter than him by a full head, her dark hair falling in thick black curls around her face, loose and wild from what looked like a long night. Big brown eyes, enormous, glaring up at him with so much open fury that he could see every fleck of gold near her pupils. Her cheeks were flushed pink, lips pressed together, jaw set. She looked like a doll someone had filled with gasoline and lit.

Dongmin's mouth opened. Nothing came out.

Minjae stepped forward immediately, one hand up, the diplomacy already switching on behind his eyes. "I'm sorry. That was our fault. Are you okay?"

She didn't look at Minjae. She was still glaring at Dongmin, chest rising and falling fast.

"You guys are always loud," she said, and the word always landed like she had been saving it for weeks. "Every single time. One in the morning, two in the morning, slamming doors, yelling in the hallway. You need to calm down."

Haesoo lowered his phone slowly. Joon raised one eyebrow. Taeyul tilted his head with the faintest flicker of a smirk, the kind he used when something unexpected was happening and he wanted to watch it play out.

"We didn't mean to—" Minjae started.

"You pushed me into a wall." She pointed at Dongmin without breaking eye contact. "You literally just body-checked me into a wall."

"I—" Dongmin found his voice, finally. "That was — I got pushed, I didn't—"

"Then maybe stop roughhousing in a hallway where people live at one in the morning."

She held his gaze for one more second, a look that burned with the kind of frustration that only comes from lost sleep and repeated offense, then broke it cleanly. She turned her back on all seven of them, crossed the three steps to the door directly across from theirs, and punched her code into the keypad without hesitation. Four fast beeps, the lock clicked, and she was inside. The door shut behind her. The deadbolt engaged from the other side with a mechanical finality that sounded like a sentence ending.

No pause. No backward glance. Just gone.

Silence.

The hallway felt twice as large without her in it.

Joon was the first to speak. "So that happened."

Haesoo slowly pocketed his phone. "Did she say always?"

"She said always," Jisung confirmed quietly from behind Minjae's shoulder.

"How long has she lived there?" Eunwoo looked at the closed door with genuine concern. "Have we been bothering her this whole time?"

Taeyul leaned against the wall, arms folded. "I've never seen her before. And I would have noticed."

"You would have noticed because she's pretty or because she lives four meters from our front door?" Joon said flatly.

"Both."

Minjae exhaled through his nose, the slow deliberate breath he used when he was recalibrating from crisis-mode back to normal. "We should apologize properly. Tomorrow. When it's not one in the morning and we haven't just shoved her into a wall."

Dongmin was still standing in the same spot, still facing her door. He hadn't moved since she pushed him. His chest felt warm where her hands had been, a strange dull print of pressure that didn't match the size of her.

She pushed me back.

Joon nudged him with his elbow. "You alive?"

"She's so small," Dongmin said, almost to himself. "How did she push that hard?"

"Anger," Jisung said simply. He was already walking toward their apartment door, pulling his other earbud out. "Anger and sleep deprivation. We probably deserve it."

Minjae punched in their code and held the door open, head-counting them in the way he always did, automatic and paternal. Haesoo ducked in first, already typing something on his phone. Taeyul followed, then Eunwoo, then Joon pulling Jisung by the sleeve.

Dongmin lingered one beat longer than the rest, his eyes still on the door across the hall. Plain white. Same as theirs. No welcome mat, no decoration, nothing that said anything about whoever lived behind it except that she had been there long enough to know their noise by pattern.

He turned and followed Minjae inside, the lock engaging behind him in a click that echoed against hers.

Three hours of sleep felt like someone had filled Dongmin's skull with wet sand. He was face down on the couch, one arm hanging off the edge, fingers grazing the floor, when Minjae's voice cut through the dark like a surgical instrument.

"Up. Everyone up. Call time in thirty minutes."

Groaning came from multiple directions. Haesoo was already moving somewhere in the kitchen, the faint blue light of his phone illuminating his face in the dark. Eunwoo sat up from the other couch with the slow mechanical obedience of someone whose body had learned to override his brain years ago. Taeyul's door opened and he emerged already dressed, hair pushed back under a cap, because of course he was.

Dongmin pressed his face deeper into the cushion. "Too early."

Minjae pulled the blanket off him in one clean motion. "Too bad. You wanted to be an idol. Get up."

"I was young. I didn't know what I was agreeing to."

"You were fifteen. Get up."

"Fifteen-year-old Dongmin was an idiot."

"Current Dongmin is going to be a dead idiot if Jin has to wait. He texted ten minutes ago. Van's downstairs in twenty."

That got him vertical. Jin waiting meant Jin's particular silence when they climbed into the van late, that flat expressionless stare that somehow communicated more disappointment than a full lecture. Dongmin had been on the receiving end of it exactly twice and both times he had wished the man would just yell instead.

He dragged himself to his room and changed on autopilot. Black hoodie, black cargo pants, the ones with too many pockets that he kept saying he'd replace but never did because the waistband was broken in perfectly. He shoved his feet into his sneakers without untying them, grabbed his phone off the charger, and stumbled back into the hallway where the others were already converging near the front door.

Joon was leaning against the wall with his eyes still half closed, hood up, looking like he might commit a crime if anyone spoke to him. Jisung had his earbuds in and a notebook tucked under his arm, already somewhere else in his head. Haesoo was whispering something to Eunwoo that made Eunwoo snort quietly.

Minjae opened the front door and they poured into the corridor with the coordination of people too tired to be graceful. Sneakers scuffed tile. Someone's bag hit the wall. Joon coughed. Haesoo said something about coffee and Dongmin responded too loud, his voice still calibrated to the apartment.

"I will literally sell my kidney for an iced americano right now."

"Which kidney," Joon muttered.

"Whichever one is worth more, I don't care, I'll find out later."

"Quiet down," Minjae said, already three steps ahead, his voice tight with the specific exhaustion of a man who had given this instruction six thousand times. "It's four in the morning. We just had this conversation."

"That was a different conversation. That was a one AM conversation. This is a four AM con—"

The door across the hall opened.

Every single one of them stopped.

She stood in the doorway in an oversized white t-shirt that hung to her thighs and shorts that were barely visible beneath the hem. Her hair was pulled into a messy knot on top of her head, stray curls escaping everywhere, and her eyes were swollen and red-rimmed in the way that only comes from being woken up repeatedly by people you already hate. She was holding a plastic bucket with both hands.

Dongmin registered the bucket. He did not register the danger.

"Oh," he said. "Hey, listen, about earlier, we're really sor—"

She threw the water.

It hit him full in the chest and face, a clean arc of cold that soaked through his hoodie and splattered across the tile floor and caught the edge of Joon's sneakers. Dongmin gasped, the sound strangled and sharp, his arms flying out to his sides as the shock of it locked every muscle in his body.

"Shut up," she said.

She stepped back inside and closed the door. The keypad beeped once as she engaged the lock.

The hallway dripped.

Dongmin stood there with water running down his chin, his hoodie plastered to his chest, his mouth open, his arms still out like he was waiting for someone to explain the laws of physics to him. A single drop fell from the tip of his nose and hit the floor with a sound that was somehow louder than anything else.

Nobody moved for a full three seconds.

Then Haesoo broke.

He doubled over laughing so hard that no sound came out for the first few seconds, just his whole body folding in half, one hand slapping his own thigh. When the sound finally arrived it was high and wheezing and completely uncontrollable.

"She — she got you — she—"

"I'm wet," Dongmin said, still not moving. "I'm literally wet right now."

"You're soaked," Taeyul said, and his composure lasted exactly one more second before the smirk cracked into a full grin. He pressed his knuckles against his mouth but it didn't help. "She had that ready. She filled that before she even opened the door. She heard us and went to the sink."

"Premeditated," Joon said. He looked down at his splashed sneakers, then back up at Dongmin. Something that might have been admiration crossed his face. "I respect it."

"You respect it? She threw water on me!"

"On your face, specifically. Good aim for someone half asleep."

Eunwoo was biting the inside of his cheek, visibly trying not to laugh out of some loyalty to Dongmin's dignity. It wasn't working. "Are you okay?"

"No, Eunwoo. I am not okay. A stranger just threw water on me in my own hallway."

"Technically it's her hallway too," Jisung said. He hadn't moved from his spot. His expression hadn't changed. He said it the way he said everything, quiet and precise and absolutely unhelpful. "And technically you did shove her into a wall three hours ago."

"I didn't shove her! Joon shoved me into her!"

"Don't put this on me." Joon wiped his sneaker against the back of his calf. "I pushed you. You hit her. She soaked you. Cause and effect. Beautiful, really."

Minjae had his hand over his eyes. He stood very still for a long moment, breathing slowly through his nose, and when he finally lowered his hand his face had the tight, measured quality of a man selecting his words from a very limited and rapidly shrinking list.

"We are going to go downstairs," he said, each word careful and deliberate. "We are going to get in the van. We are not going to be loud. And when we get back tonight, we are going to bring that girl an apology because we have now assaulted her and woken her up twice in the same night."

"She assaulted me back!" Dongmin gestured at his soaking chest. "With water! In October!"

"You outweigh her by thirty kilos." Minjae turned toward the elevator and pressed the button. "We deserve worse. Move."

The elevator arrived. They filed in. Dongmin squelched with every step, leaving wet footprints on the tile that traced his path like evidence. Haesoo was still wheezing, leaning on Eunwoo's shoulder, tears in his eyes. Taeyul had his phone out, angling it toward Dongmin with the slow deliberate aim of someone composing a shot.

"Don't you dare," Dongmin said.

"This is historical documentation."

"Taeyul."

"Future generations need to know."

The elevator doors closed. Dongmin caught his reflection in the polished steel, hair matted flat against his forehead, hoodie dark and heavy with water, cargo pants sticking to his thighs. He looked like someone who had lost a fight with a garden hose. He looked ridiculous.

She had the bucket ready.

That meant she heard them coming. Heard the door, heard the voices, and instead of pulling the blanket over her head or banging on the wall, she got up, walked to her kitchen, filled a bucket, carried it to her front door, and waited.

Dongmin peeled his hoodie away from his stomach. The cold was settling in now, sharp against his skin, and he should have been annoyed. He was annoyed. He was soaking wet in an elevator at four in the morning and Haesoo was still laughing and Taeyul had definitely already taken the photo.

But somewhere underneath the cold and the embarrassment and the lingering shock of water hitting his face, in a place he didn't look at directly, something else sat quiet and unnamed. She had been angry enough to fill a bucket. She had been brave enough to throw it at a man who towered over her. She had not hesitated.

Who does that?

The elevator reached the lobby. The doors opened. Dongmin stepped out into the cold, still dripping, and followed the others toward the van where Jin was already waiting with the engine running and an expression that said he had decided not to ask.

The makeup chair was too tall and the lights were too bright and Dongmin was on his third handful of honey butter chips before the stylist had even finished his base.

She was a small woman in her forties with steady hands and the particular patience of someone who had been doing idol makeup for long enough to have opinions about every face she'd ever touched. She tilted his chin up with two fingers and started blending along his jawline, and Dongmin immediately reached back into the bag balanced on his thigh.

"Can you stop moving."

It wasn't a question. It was a statement delivered with the flat resignation of someone who already knew the answer.

"No," Dongmin said, a chip halfway to his mouth. He ate it. Crumbs landed on the black cape draped over his chest.

She sighed. The sigh carried years in it. She kept working.

"You're going to get crumbs in your pores," she said, dabbing concealer under his left eye while he chewed.

"My pores are strong. They've been through worse."

"Your pores are twenty-two years old. They haven't been through anything."

"Emotional damage counts."

She tilted his head to the side with a firmness that said she was done negotiating with his jaw and needed it to stay where she put it. Dongmin held still for exactly four seconds, then reached for another chip.

"Kang Dongmin."

"Last one. I swear. Last one."

It was not the last one.

In the mirror across from him he could see Joon two chairs down, hood still up, eyes closed, letting his stylist work in the kind of absolute silence that made people think he was either meditating or planning something. Haesoo was in the chair beside Joon, scrolling through his phone, occasionally tilting his face when directed without looking up. Eunwoo was already done, standing near the rack of outfits with a coordi noona, holding a jacket up against his chest while she frowned and swapped it for a different one.

Taeyul walked past behind Dongmin's chair, already in full makeup, already looking like a magazine cover even though the shoot hadn't started. He glanced at the chip bag in Dongmin's lap and then at the stylist's face.

"How many has he had."

"I stopped counting," she said.

"You're a saint."

"I'm underpaid."

Taeyul patted her shoulder once in solidarity and kept walking. Dongmin watched him go in the mirror, then looked at the stylist.

"He didn't even offer me water. He just walked past. No compassion."

"He has great skin," she said, ignoring him entirely. "Holds product well. Doesn't eat while I'm working."

"I'm a growing boy."

"You're a hundred and seventy-nine centimeters. You're done growing."

Minjae appeared behind the chair, already dressed in a fitted dark blazer and slacks, looking like someone's composed older brother at a funeral for casual clothing. He looked at the chip bag. He looked at the stylist. He looked at Dongmin.

"Are you giving her a hard time."

"She's giving me a hard time. She insulted my height."

"I stated your height," the stylist said. "Factually."

Minjae gave Dongmin the look. The one that sat right between amusement and exhaustion, the one that said he loved him but would not defend him. "Finish the chips or put them away. We're shooting in fifteen."

Dongmin shoved three more chips into his mouth at once, crumbs falling like confetti, and the stylist closed her eyes for a single long moment, brush suspended in the air above his cheekbone, summoning something from deep inside herself that was either patience or the will not to commit a crime on company property.

She opened her eyes. She kept blending.

Jisung settled into the chair on Dongmin's other side, quiet as always, and his stylist started without a word. Jisung sat perfectly still, hands folded, eyes forward. The stylist worked fast and unbothered. The contrast was violence.

"Why can't you be like him," Dongmin's stylist said, not looking up.

"Jisung doesn't experience joy," Dongmin said. "That's why he sits still. There's nothing happening inside."

Jisung's eyes slid sideways in the mirror. He said nothing. One corner of his mouth moved a single millimeter upward and then flattened. It was the most devastating response possible.

Dongmin pointed at him with a chip. "See? Nothing. Empty. A void."

"He's writing a song about you right now," Joon said from two chairs down, eyes still closed. "And it's going to be devastating and you're going to cry when you hear it."

"I will not cry."

"You cried at a dog food commercial last week."

"The dog was old, Joon. The dog was old and it still brought the ball back. That's loyalty. That's cinema."

The stylist turned his face forward with both hands, firm, final, and held it there. "Five more minutes. No talking. No chips. No moving."

Dongmin opened his mouth.

"No."

He closed it. He sat still. He lasted almost ninety seconds before his hand drifted back toward the bag, and she caught his wrist without looking, her brush never leaving his eyelid, her grip stronger than it had any right to be.

Why do small people keep manhandling me today.

The thought arrived before he could stop it, and with it came the flash of her face in the hallway, those furious brown eyes and the pink flush across her cheeks and the bucket she'd had ready like a weapon. He blinked. The stylist told him to stop blinking.

He stared at the lights above him and chewed the last chip he'd managed to sneak, the crunch obscenely loud in the quiet of the makeup station, and somewhere behind him Minjae exhaled through his nose in a way that carried the weight of three years of leadership and every single one of Dongmin's choices.

The apartment smelled like fried chicken and soju and the particular exhaustion that comes from fourteen hours of holding poses under studio lights. Three boxes of golden crispy sat open on the living room table, half-demolished, surrounded by crumpled napkins and sauce packets and a growing graveyard of empty cans. Haesoo was on the floor with his back against the couch, legs stretched under the table, working through a drumstick with the methodical focus of someone who had earned every bite. Joon sat cross-legged beside him, dipping a piece into garlic sauce with his fingers because he'd decided chopsticks were unnecessary tonight. Taeyul was on the couch behind them, eating with actual utensils like a civilized person, phone balanced on his knee, scrolling through the photos from today's shoot.

Eunwoo was doing dishes in the kitchen because nobody asked him to and nobody ever had to. Minjae was at the counter with a schedule printout, marking tomorrow's call times with a pen while eating a wing one-handed. Jisung had taken his food to his room twenty minutes ago and hadn't been heard from since, which meant he was either writing or asleep, and either way nobody was going to knock.

Dongmin finished his fourth piece of chicken, wiped his hands on his sweatpants, and stood up. "I'm taking the trash out before it starts smelling."

"It already smells," Joon said.

"Then I'm a hero."

"You're getting sauce on your pants."

Dongmin looked down. There was a smear of soy garlic across his left thigh. He considered it for a moment and then decided he didn't care. He gathered the empty boxes, stacked the cans inside, and carried the whole pile to the front door, shouldering it open with the kind of graceless momentum that sent it swinging wider than necessary and banging lightly against the wall.

The sound echoed down the hallway.

He stepped out and she was right there.

Three steps from her own door, backpack on one shoulder, a convenience store bag dangling from her wrist, still in the same green Crocs from last night. Different hoodie, this one oversized and grey, the sleeves covering her fingers. Her hair was down, those thick black curls falling around her face and past her shoulders, and she looked tired in a way that went deeper than one bad night. The kind of tired that had been accumulating.

She saw him. Her expression flattened into something between recognition and contempt, and she stopped walking.

Dongmin froze with an armful of chicken boxes.

"If you guys keep waking me up," she said, and her voice was calmer than last night but harder for it, the anger refined into something more deliberate, "I am going to complain to management about it. I mean it."

"We just got home. We haven't even—"

"The door." She pointed at the apartment door still resting against the hallway wall behind him. "You just slammed the door. It's eleven at night."

"That wasn't a slam, that was a — it swung, it—"

"Every single night." She shifted the convenience store bag to her other hand. "Some of us actually go to school and don't fool around all day."

That landed different.

Dongmin lowered the stack of boxes slightly, a crease forming between his eyebrows. "I work all day."

She looked at him. Looked at the chicken grease on his sweatpants, the stacked takeout boxes in his arms, the smear of sauce he hadn't bothered to wipe. Something flickered behind those big brown eyes that might have been amusement if it weren't wrapped in so much irritation.

"Working at a convenience store?"

The air left his lungs in a way that was almost physical. Dongmin stared at her. He could hear Haesoo laughing at something inside the apartment behind him, the faint tinny sound of someone's phone playing a video, life continuing as if the hallway weren't currently the site of his ego being dismantled piece by piece by a girl in Crocs.

"I'm Kang Dongmin," he said. He said it the way he would say it on a variety show, with the automatic delivery of someone who'd introduced himself on camera a thousand times. "From Sol7."

She blinked.

Nothing.

No recognition. No widening of the eyes. No sudden shift from annoyance to starstruck. Just a girl standing in a hallway holding a convenience store bag, looking at him the way someone looks at a stranger who has just said something completely meaningless.

"I have no idea what that is," she said. "And I could care less. Just shut up already."

She turned, walked to her door, punched in her code, and went inside. The lock clicked. The hallway settled back into silence.

Dongmin stood there holding three empty chicken boxes and five crushed cans and the shattered remains of an introduction that had never once failed him. Not once. Not at fan signs where thousands screamed his name. Not on variety shows where MCs lit up the second Sol7 walked on set. Not in airports where strangers wept at the sight of him. Kang Dongmin from Sol7. Rookie of the Year. Best Boy Group. Song of the Year. His face was on a billboard in Gangnam, six stories tall, selling a sports drink he didn't even like. His face was on buses. He had millions of followers and couldn't walk through Myeongdong without a mask and a hat and even then someone would catch his walk and start filming.

And she said convenience store.

Behind him, Joon's voice came from inside the apartment, flat and unbothered.

"Did you just try to name-drop yourself at the neighbor?"

Dongmin turned slowly. Joon was standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame, arms folded, one eyebrow raised in the specific configuration that meant he had heard everything and was going to be merciless about it.

"I didn't name-drop. I introduced myself."

"You said 'I'm Kang Dongmin from Sol7' like you expected confetti."

"I expected recognition, Joon. Basic recognition. We were on every music show last year. We won Song of the Year. Our faces are on the side of a building in Gangnam. Six stories, Joon."

"She doesn't care about the building."

"We're on beverage ads! She probably walked past my face on the way home tonight! She probably bought her little snacks standing two feet from a cardboard cutout of me!"

"And yet." Joon let that hang. Let it breathe. Let it do its damage. "She looked at the real thing and thought cashier."

Haesoo appeared behind Joon's shoulder, still holding a drumstick. "Wait. She doesn't know Sol7?"

"Not even a little," Dongmin said, walking back inside with the trash.

"Sol7. Us. The group that sold out the Olympic Gymnastics Arena."

"Yes, Haesoo."

"The group with a Daesang."

"Yes."

"She asked if you work at a convenience store?"

"She did."

Haesoo's face went through four expressions in two seconds. Shock, confusion, disbelief, and then pure unadulterated delight. He grabbed Joon's arm.

"She looked at Kang Dongmin. Main dancer. Sold-out arena tour. Three music show wins. Brand ambassador for two major campaigns. And she thought—"

"Don't say it."

"Convenience store."

Haesoo was gone. Bent double in the doorway, laughing with his whole body, the drumstick still clutched in his hand like he'd forgotten it existed. The sound of it bounced through the apartment, high and wheezing and completely uncontrollable.

Taeyul appeared from the living room, phone in hand, drawn by the commotion like a shark sensing blood. "What happened."

"The neighbor doesn't know who we are," Joon said, and the way he said it carried the quiet reverence of a man witnessing something sacred. "She told Dongmin to shut up. Again. And she thinks he works retail."

"She doesn't know Sol7," Taeyul repeated slowly, processing it. "We're one of the most followed groups in the country. We trended number one worldwide four times this year."

"She does not care," Dongmin said.

Taeyul considered this for a long moment. Then something shifted in his face, a crack in the polish, genuine bewilderment mixed with something that looked dangerously close to fascination. "Where is she from?"

"I don't know! She yelled at me and left! Both times! That's all she does! She yells at me and she leaves!"

Dongmin dropped the boxes by the shoe rack and stood there, hands on his hips, looking at the ceiling. Eunwoo came out of the kitchen drying his hands on a towel, read the room in about three seconds, and put his hand on Dongmin's shoulder.

"You okay?"

"She said she could care less, Eunwoo. Those were her words. 'I could care less.' About Sol7. About the Daesang. About the arena tour. About all of it."

"That's rough."

"She thinks I fool around all day."

"We did work fourteen hours today," Eunwoo offered gently.

"She doesn't know that! She thinks I'm some loud unemployed guy who eats chicken and slams doors!"

From down the hall, Minjae's voice arrived without the man himself, still at the counter, still marking schedules, unbothered and absolute. "To be fair, from her perspective, that's exactly what you look like."

"We have a Daesang, Minjae."

"She doesn't know that."

"We sold out the arena."

"She wasn't there."

"Our faces are literally on—"

"Dongmin." Minjae's voice was patient and final and carried the particular weight of a man who had heard enough. "She is a person who lives next door and doesn't follow K-pop. They exist. Go throw the trash out. Quietly."

Dongmin grabbed the boxes and walked back into the hallway. He passed her door. He looked at it. Plain white. Silent. On the other side of that door was a person who lived in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Seoul, directly across the hall from one of the biggest groups in the country, and felt nothing about it. Not curiosity, not excitement, not even mild interest. Just annoyance.

Convenience store.

He shoved the trash into the bin at the end of the corridor with more force than necessary and walked back, his footsteps deliberately soft on the tile, and when he closed the apartment door behind him he held the handle and eased it shut with a care that bordered on reverence, the latch catching without a sound.

Inside, Haesoo was still laughing.