It was raining when I met her. Not the dramatic kind that floods streets or traps people indoors, but a steady, unremarkable rain—the kind Seoul forgets almost as soon as it begins. I remember thinking that day would pass like any other. I remember being wrong.
I was crossing the intersection near the hospital, the light already blinking, the city moving faster than it should have. A car lurched forward when it wasn't supposed to. Someone screamed. Someone else froze.
She didn't even see it coming.
I don't remember deciding to move. I only remember my hand closing around her wrist and the weight of her body pulling back against mine as the car skidded past where she had been standing a second earlier. Too close. Close enough that I could smell rain on her coat, feel her breath hitch when the world corrected itself.
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
She was smaller than I expected, lighter too, like someone who had learned how to take up less space than she needed. Her hair was damp, strands clinging to her cheek. Her eyes were wide—not with fear anymore, but with the shock of having almost disappeared without knowing it.
"I—" she started, then stopped.
"You're okay," I said. It was the first thing that came to mind. It was also a lie people use when they don't know what else to offer.
She nodded anyway, as if the words were enough.
An ambulance siren wailed somewhere behind us. The traffic resumed its rhythm. The city stitched itself back together with practiced indifference. Only she and I remained suspended in that small pocket of aftermath.
"I should've been paying attention," she said finally, her voice quiet, almost embarrassed.
"It wasn't your fault."
She looked at me then, really looked at me, as if trying to memorize the face of someone she wouldn't see again. At the time, I thought that was all it was—a brief intersection between strangers. A story she would tell later without remembering my name.
I let go of her wrist. Too late, I noticed how warm it had been in my hand.
"Thank you," she said.
I nodded. I didn't ask for her name. I didn't ask where she was going. I didn't do any of the things people regret not doing until it's too late. I watched her walk away instead, her figure slowly dissolving into the rain.
That should have been the end of it.
It wasn't.
Weeks later, I saw her again.
This time, it was in a café near my office, one of those narrow places where people go to be alone together. She was sitting by the window, a book open in front of her, her coffee untouched. She looked exactly the same—and somehow different, as if the version of her I had met before had been incomplete.
She noticed me standing there, hesitation written plainly across her face. I saw recognition flicker, then settle.
"You," she said softly.
I smiled before I realized I was going to. "You're okay."
She laughed under her breath, a small sound. "You already told me that."
"Habit."
She closed her book. "Seo Yeon-hwa."
"Han Tae-gyeom."
We stood there for a second too long, two people unsure what came after survival. Then she gestured to the empty chair across from her, tentative.
"If you're not busy," she said.
I was. I canceled anyway.
That was how it began—not with a confession, not with a promise, but with permission. Permission to sit. To talk. To exist in the same space without explanation.
We learned each other slowly. Carefully. I learned she worked in publishing, that she liked quiet places and disliked sudden decisions. She learned I worked nearby, that I drank my coffee black, that I had a habit of listening more than I spoke.
I noticed things before I admitted what they meant. The way she relaxed when she saw me. The way she texted me about small things—an article she liked, a sentence that stayed with her. The way she never crossed certain lines, even when we grew closer.
I stayed on the safe side of her life.
It felt like the respectful thing to do.
She told me about the man she was seeing one evening, casually, as if mentioning the weather. Someone steady. Someone kind. Someone who made sense.
I nodded. I congratulated her.
That night, I lay awake longer than usual, staring at a ceiling I had known for years, wondering when something had shifted without my consent.
I didn't leave.
I told myself I was being reasonable. That affection didn't always need direction. That caring for someone didn't require ownership. I told myself that staying was not the same as waiting.
I was wrong about that too.
Time moved the way it always does—quietly, without regard for what it carries away. She married him in the spring. I attended the wedding because she asked me to, because saying no would have meant admitting something I wasn't ready to name.
She looked happy. I believed her.
I stepped back the way people expect you to when the story changes. I answered less quickly. I visited less often. I taught myself how to fit into the margins of her life without tearing it.
When her husband died years later, suddenly and without warning, I learned what it meant for a life to collapse in on itself.
I came back then. Not dramatically. Not as a savior. Just as someone who had never truly left.
I offered my time. My presence. My silence.
She refused me—not cruelly, but firmly. As if choosing me would have meant admitting something about the past she wasn't ready to face.
So I stayed again.
Until one day, I didn't.
I chose a different life. A quieter one. One that did not require me to measure my worth by someone else's readiness.
And only then—only when I was no longer available, no longer standing in the same place—did she finally see what I had been.
But that is not where this story begins.
This story begins on a rainy afternoon, with a hand on a wrist, and a moment that should have ended when the light changed.
It didn't.
And neither did I.