I stared at him, my breath hitching in my throat. The room felt like it was shrinking, the walls closing in until there was nothing left but the sound of my own frantic heart and the weight of his hand on my knee.
"What do you mean... a long time?" I asked, my voice cracking.
Ki-hoon didn't look away. He didn't flinch at my swollen eyes or the messy way I was wiping my nose with the sleeve of the expensive blazer. He looked at me with a steady, quiet focus that made my skin tingle.
"My father's house," he said, the words falling like stones into a still pond. "Three years ago. You were in the garden, helping your father with the hedges because he'd pulled a muscle in his back. You didn't have those glasses then. You were laughing at something he said, and you looked... bright. Like you were the only thing in that gray estate that actually had a pulse."
