Winter had settled into the city the way it always did—quietly, insistently, turning everything a shade duller and colder than it remembered being. The sky had already darkened despite the early hour, the streetlights flickering on one by one as you made your way home from work, coat pulled tighter around you. Your breath fogged faintly in the air, disappearing as quickly as it formed. It should have been an ordinary evening. Tired feet, a familiar route, the kind of numb routine that made the days blur together.

But earlier that day, Suae’s voice lingered in your mind, casual but heavy all the same.

He’s back in Korea.

You hadn’t asked for details. You hadn’t needed to. The name alone had been enough to lodge itself beneath your ribs, a quiet pressure that stayed with you long after the conversation ended. You told yourself you were fine. That ten years was a long time. That people moved on, even if memories didn’t.

Still, your steps slowed as you passed the park.

It was subtle at first—the familiar iron railing, the frost-dusted path, the bare branches arching overhead like skeletal fingers. A place you hadn’t planned on looking at too closely. A place you and Eunhyeok had once spent too much time in, back when everything felt unfinished and suspended between what could have been and what never was.

Your gaze drifted there almost involuntarily.

And then you saw him.

He sat on the same bench near the path, posture straight even in stillness, long coat draped neatly over his frame. The dim glow of a nearby lamp caught in his dark hair, the sharp line of his features unmistakable even from a distance. He looked older than your memories and exactly the same all at once—calmer, heavier somehow, like time had settled into him rather than passed him by.

Eunhyeok...

For a moment, you wondered if your mind was playing a cruel trick on you. But then he lifted his head.

His eyes found you almost immediately.

There was no surprise on his face—only a brief pause, like his breath had caught somewhere between his chest and his throat. He rose from the bench slowly, as if afraid that moving too fast might shatter whatever fragile coincidence had put you both here at the same time.

You hadn’t meant to stop walking. Yet your feet did anyway, turning toward the path that led into the park. He did the same, steps measured, controlled, closing the distance between you with quiet inevitability.

The cold seemed sharper between you.

Up close, you could see it more clearly now—the faint tiredness beneath his eyes, the way his expression remained composed but not untouched. His gaze lingered on you, taking you in with the same unreadable focus he’d always had, as if memorizing you all over again.

“…I thought it might be you.”

His voice was lower than you remembered, steady but restrained, as though he were carefully regulating every word. He stopped a few steps away, hands slipping into his coat pockets, shoulders squared against the cold.

“I heard you still pass through here after work,” he added after a moment. “I didn’t expect… this timing.”

The silence stretched. Snow crunched faintly somewhere nearby as a couple passed at a distance, unaware of the gravity hanging between you. Eunhyeok’s eyes flicked briefly toward the ground, then back to your face, jaw tightening almost imperceptibly.

“You look the same,” he said quietly. “Just… more tired.”

It wasn’t a criticism. If anything, there was something painfully gentle in the observation.

He exhaled slowly, breath visible in the cold. “Suae told me she ran into you today.” A pause. “She didn’t say much else.”

The way he said her name carried weight—habit, familiarity, and something hollow beneath it. He didn’t explain further. The unspoken fact sat plainly between you: he was still with her. Still standing on ground that wasn’t yours.

And yet.

The way his eyes lingered betrayed him.

“You always walked home alone,” he said, softer now. “I used to worry about that.”

A small, almost imperceptible huff of breath left him, not quite a laugh. “Funny. I still do.”