Chapter 109: Soomin’s Question
The pandemic taught Soomin to count.
Not the ordinary counting that six-year-olds learned — the one-two-three of apples and blocks and the fingers on her hands. The pandemic taught her a different kind of counting: the counting of days. How many days since she’d been to school in person. How many days since she’d played with Seojin at the playground. How many days since she’d seen Uncle Minho or Uncle Lei or Auntie Jimin in the flesh instead of through a screen that made their faces flat and their voices slightly wrong.
She kept a calendar in her room — a large paper calendar that Jihye had bought at a stationery shop before the lockdowns closed them, and on which Soomin made a mark every day with a different colored marker. The marks were not X’s or check marks. They were fireflies. One firefly per day, drawn with the specific care of a child who had decided that the record of time passing should be beautiful rather than merely accurate.
By August 2020, the calendar had 147 fireflies. A constellation of light on a piece of paper, each one representing a day that a six-year-old had spent in a world that was smaller than it should have been.
“Appa,” Soomin said one Saturday morning. She was at the kitchen table, drawing firefly number 148 with a green marker while Junwoo ate cereal with the focused gravity of a four-year-old who treated breakfast as a competitive event. “Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask me anything.”
“Is it true that you always know what’s going to happen?”
Daniel’s hand stopped halfway to his coffee cup. The kitchen was quiet — the specific morning quiet of a pandemic household, where the world outside the windows was muffled and the world inside was everything.
“What do you mean?”
“Seojin’s mom told Seojin’s dad that Nexus was ‘ahead of the pandemic.’ She said it at their house during a video playdate. Seojin heard. She told me.” Soomin looked up from her firefly. “She said your company knew the virus was coming before other people knew. And Seojin’s dad said ‘Cho Daniel always knows things before other people.'”
The comment was innocent. A child repeating an adult’s offhand observation. But the words — always knows things before other people — landed in Daniel’s chest like a stone dropped into a well he’d spent twelve years trying to fill.
“I don’t always know what’s going to happen,” Daniel said. The lie tasted like metal. “Nobody does.”
“But you knew about the virus.”
“Our company had a monitoring system. It flagged the virus early. It wasn’t a prediction — it was preparation.”
Soomin considered this. She had inherited Jihye’s analytical mind and Daniel’s stubbornness, a combination that produced a six-year-old who didn’t accept explanations that didn’t satisfy her internal logic.
“But you know other things too,” she said. “Like when you told Halmeoni to go to the doctor before she was sick. And when you told Uncle Minho about Singapore before Singapore was ready. And when you bought the house with the garden before the garden was even planted.” She set down her marker. “You always know the right time for things. Umma says it’s because you’re smart. But smart people are wrong sometimes. You’re never wrong.”
The observation was devastating in its precision. Soomin, who was six, who drew fireflies on a calendar, who believed in invisible lasers and diplomat insects, had done what Emily Park’s 147-page report and Soojin’s temporal pattern analysis had done — identified the anomaly. Not through statistics or mathematics but through the pure, unfiltered observation of a child who watched her father every day and noticed that he moved through the world differently from other people.
Jihye appeared in the kitchen doorway. She’d been listening — Daniel could tell from the way she stood, one hand on the frame, the posture of a wife who was ready to intervene but was choosing, for now, to observe.
“Soomin-ah,” Daniel said. He knelt beside her, bringing his eyes to her level — the physical language of a parent who was about to say something important and wanted the child to know that the words were delivered as an equal, not from above. “I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to listen carefully.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not always right. I’ve been wrong about many things. I was wrong about the Malaysian investment — that cost the company a lot of money. I was wrong about the Vietnamese menu — our AI made a mistake that hurt people’s feelings. I’ve been wrong about how much time to spend at work and how little time to spend at home.”
“But the big things—”
“The big things, I’ve been lucky. Very lucky. And I’ve worked very hard to make smart decisions. But luck and hard work look the same from the outside. You can’t tell the difference just by watching.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “The most important thing I can tell you is that nobody knows the future. Not your appa. Not anyone. The future is a blank page, and we all write it together, one day at a time.”
Soomin looked at him. The look of a six-year-old who was processing information — not rejecting it, not accepting it, but holding it up to the light and examining it the way she examined everything: with intense, focused, uncompromising attention.
“Then why does Uncle Lei look at you like he knows something nobody else knows?”
The question hit like a wave. Not because it was wrong — because it was so right that it took the breath out of Daniel’s chest. Soomin had seen what Wang Lei saw. Not the data, not the pattern, not the mathematical proof — the look. The look that passed between two men who shared an impossible experience. The look that said I know what you are because I am the same thing.
“Uncle Lei and I are very close friends,” Daniel said. “Close friends sometimes understand each other without words.”
“Like you and Umma?”
“Like me and Umma.”
Soomin nodded. The nod was provisional — the nod of a child who had accepted an answer for now but had filed the question away for later, the way she filed everything, in the vast, organized, surprisingly methodical archive of a six-year-old mind.
“Okay,” she said. “But Appa?”
“Yes?”
“If you could know the future — if you could look at tomorrow and see what was going to happen — would you want to?”
The question was simple. The answer was not.
Would he want to? If someone offered him the future again — the complete, detailed map of what was coming — would he take it?
In 2008, the answer would have been yes. Without hesitation. The knowledge had been everything — the foundation of his company, his family, his entire second life. Without it, he would have been an unremarkable teenager in Incheon with no money, no connections, and no particular reason to believe he could change the world.
But now? After twelve years of carrying the weight? After the isolation and the fear and the widening circle of truth and the constant, exhausting work of pretending to be something he wasn’t?
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”
Soomin’s eyes widened. “Really?”
“Really. Knowing the future sounds like a superpower. But it’s actually a trap. Because when you know what’s going to happen, you stop paying attention to what’s happening now. You stop being surprised. You stop discovering things. You stop being…” He searched for the word. “You stop being present.”
“Present like here?”
“Present like here. In this kitchen. With you and your brother and your mother and your firefly calendar. This moment — right now — is the only moment that’s real. The future is a story we haven’t written yet. And the best stories are the ones you don’t know the ending of.”
Soomin looked at her calendar. At the 148 fireflies, each one a day, each one a small light in the darkness of a year that had been harder than a six-year-old should have had to endure.
“I think the fireflies know that,” she said.
“Know what?”
“That the moment is the only thing that’s real. Fireflies only glow for a few seconds. They don’t know if they’ll glow again. But they glow anyway. Every night.” She picked up her marker. “That’s why I draw them. Because they’re brave.”
Daniel looked at his daughter. At the marker in her hand. At the calendar full of light.
And for a moment — a single, luminous, perfectly present moment — he understood something that all his future knowledge and all his strategic planning and all his sophisticated defenses had never taught him:
The bravest thing in the world was not knowing the future. The bravest thing was facing the darkness without knowing if the light would come, and glowing anyway.
Like a firefly.
Like his daughter.
That evening, after the children were asleep, Daniel and Jihye sat in the garden. The August air was thick — summer at its peak, the jade tree’s canopy full and dark, the cicadas singing the specific Korean summer song that sounded the same every year and would sound the same a hundred years from now.
“She asked,” Daniel said.
“I heard.”
“She’s six. And she’s already seeing the pattern.”
“She’s not seeing the pattern. She’s seeing you. The way you move through the world. The confidence that’s slightly too precise. The decisions that are slightly too well-timed.” Jihye leaned against him. “She’s not a data scientist or a mathematician. She’s your daughter. She knows you the way only a child knows a parent — completely, intuitively, without the filters that adults use to explain away the things that don’t make sense.”
“What do I do?”
“You keep being her father. You keep making mistakes — real ones, visible ones, the kind that show her you’re human. You keep reading her bedtime stories and building Lego towers and showing up for the ordinary moments that have nothing to do with future knowledge and everything to do with love.” She took his hand. “The pattern she sees is not the anomaly. The pattern she sees is a father who always seems to know the right thing to do. And the best response to that observation is not to hide the pattern — it’s to show her that knowing the right thing isn’t what matters. Choosing the right thing is what matters. And choosing requires uncertainty.”
“She’s going to ask again.”
“Of course she will. She’s your daughter. She never stops asking.” Jihye’s voice carried a smile. “And when she asks again — when she’s twelve, or sixteen, or twenty, and the question has sharpened from curiosity into something more — you’ll tell her. Everything. Because she’ll be ready, and because keeping a secret from someone who loves you is only justified as long as the secret protects them. And at some point, the secret stops protecting and starts separating.”
“How will I know when?”
“You’ll know because she’ll stop asking. Children who’ve given up on getting the truth stop asking for it. That’s the warning sign. As long as she’s asking, she’s trusting you to eventually answer.”
The cicadas sang. The jade tree stood. The garden held the summer the way a cup holds water — completely, temporarily, with the knowledge that the season would end and the cup would empty and both things were natural and neither was loss.
Daniel thought about the future he couldn’t see. The future that Soomin would grow into — a future where she would be twelve, sixteen, twenty. Where she would stop drawing fireflies and start asking questions that had no simple answers. Where she would discover that her father was either the most extraordinary man in the world or the most extraordinary liar, and that the truth was somehow both.
He didn’t know what that future looked like. He didn’t know how the conversation would go, or when, or what Soomin would say when she learned that the fireflies weren’t just art but metaphor — that her father, like them, had been given a brief, impossible light in the darkness and had spent his entire second life trying to make it mean something.
He didn’t know.
And the not-knowing was terrifying. And beautiful. And exactly right.
Because Soomin was brave. Brave enough to ask. Brave enough to glow without knowing if the light would come again.
And Daniel — who had known the future and lost it and found something better in its absence — was finally, after twelve years, brave enough to not know.
Just like everyone else.
Just like a firefly.