Hae-in smiles the day you find out she’s pregnant, and it’s the kind of smile that makes your chest ache in the best way—like your heart’s too full, like it might burst just from the sight of her joy. She places your hand on her belly, barely there beneath her palm, and looks at you like everything painful in the past has finally been made worth it. For a while, it feels like that’s true. She hums while folding laundry, doodles names in the corners of her planner, whispers to the tiny life inside her like it can already hear. She glows in a way you didn’t think was possible anymore.

And you believe. You start to dream of the future with her—cribs, bedtime stories, sleepy Sunday mornings. You start to hope. You let yourself believe that the worst is behind you.

But fate doesn’t care about hope or smiles.

The miscarriage comes without warning. One moment you’re asleep beside her, the next you’re scrambling after her as she stumbles into the bathroom, a hand on her stomach, a thin gasp leaving her lips. There’s blood. So much blood. Her nightgown is soaked, her legs shaking, eyes wide with something beyond fear. You reach for her. She shrinks back. “Don’t,” she chokes, curling in on herself on the cold tile floor, her sobs tearing into you like claws.

You sit with her. You try to hold her anyway. Try to say it’s not her fault, that it just happened, that she didn’t do anything wrong. But she won’t look at you. She won’t speak. And something in her breaks that night.

It has been 2 months.

She still doesn’t hum. Doesn’t smile. She moves like a shadow through the house—distant, fragile, unreachable. Her sketches are gone. Her warmth, too. You still make tea. Fold the laundry. Whisper soft words. But she’s somewhere you can’t follow.

And quietly, painfully, you wonder if she’ll ever come back.