The candy was wrapped in cellophane, tucked inside the pocket of a woman Woojin had never seen before, and it was destroying him.
He was two months old. The woman was one of Sooa’s colleagues from the department store—a sales associate from the Lancome counter named Jihye, who had come to visit the baby with a gift bag full of samples and a pocket full of hard candies that she distributed to everyone she met like a retired grandmother at a bus stop. Woojin could not see the candy. He could not smell the candy. He had no rational basis for knowing that it existed.
But his body knew.
Something in his infant brain—some ancient, sugar-hungry circuit that had been dormant for the first six weeks of his life and had apparently chosen today, this hour, this exact moment, to activate—sent a signal so overwhelming that his entire nervous system rearranged itself around a single imperative: I need that.
No, his hundred-year-old consciousness replied. You do not need candy. You are two months old. You do not have teeth. You cannot chew. You cannot even reliably close your hand around a rattle. The candy is not for you. The candy is physically impossible for you. Ignore the candy.
His eyes locked onto Jihye’s pocket. His body began to squirm. A sound emerged from his throat—not a cry, not a fuss, but a low, continuous whine that he had no memory of authorizing.
“Oh, he is fussy,” Jihye said, leaning closer. The pocket came with her.
Do not lean closer. You are making this worse. The proximity is making this actively, measurably worse.
“Maybe he is hungry?” Jihye reached into her pocket—Woojin’s entire body tensed—and pulled out her phone. Not the candy. The phone. The disappointment was so acute that Woojin felt his face contort into an expression that, in an adult, would have been classified as betrayal.
“He just ate,” Sooa said, watching her son with the slightly narrowed eyes of a woman who was collecting data. “He is fine. He does this sometimes.”
“Does what?”
“Fixates on something. Stares at it. Gets upset when he cannot have it.”
“All babies do that.”
“Not like this. Last week he stared at Dongshik’s ramyeon for twenty minutes. He is two months old and has never eaten solid food, but he watched that bowl like it owed him money.”
It smelled extraordinary. Your husband may be a questionable Shakespearean scholar, but his ramyeon technique—the way he cracks the egg at exactly the right moment, so the white sets but the yolk remains liquid—suggests a man who understands timing at a fundamental level.
Also, I am not fixating on the candy. I am experiencing a neurochemical response to anticipated sugar intake that is entirely the fault of this infant brain and its pathetically underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, which has no capacity for impulse control and will not develop one for approximately another four years.
This is not me. This is biology.
The candy, however, does smell very good.
Jihye shifted in her seat. The cellophane crinkled. The sound was so precisely, exquisitely torturous that Woojin did something he had never done before: he reached for it.
Not successfully. His arm extended approximately fifteen centimeters in the wrong direction, fingers grasping at air with the coordination of a drunk man trying to catch a fly. But the intention was unmistakable. His body had moved in the direction of the candy with a purposefulness that startled everyone in the room, including himself.
“Did he just—” Jihye looked at Sooa.
Sooa looked at Woojin.
Woojin, whose arm was still extended toward the approximate location of where the candy had been three seconds ago before Jihye moved, looked at the ceiling and attempted to project an expression of innocent, random infant flailing.
That was not intentional. That was the Moro reflex. That was random motor activity. I am two months old and I definitely did not just reach for a candy in a stranger’s pocket because my infant brain hijacked my motor cortex with a sugar craving that belongs in a medical textbook.
“He reached for my pocket,” Jihye said, sounding delighted.
“He is two months old,” Sooa said. “Babies do not reach for things at two months.”
“He definitely reached. I saw it.”
“It was probably a reflex.”
But Sooa’s eyes, Woojin noticed, did not agree with her mouth. Sooa’s eyes were doing that thing they did—that careful, quiet assessment, the former-actress reading a scene that did not match the script she expected.
You are cataloguing this, Woojin thought. Adding it to whatever file you are building in your head. The file labeled “Things About My Son That Do Not Make Sense.”
That file is getting thick, Park Sooa. And I have no way to stop you from reading it.
The sugar incident, as Woojin mentally catalogued it, marked the beginning of what he came to think of as the Siege.
The Siege was his infant body’s systematic campaign to dismantle every defense his adult consciousness had built over a hundred years. It attacked on multiple fronts, simultaneously, with the relentless efficiency of an army that did not know it was fighting a war.
Front One: Sugar. Everything sweet triggered a response so powerful that it bordered on the philosophical. When Sooa ate fruit—any fruit, but especially the clementines she peeled during evening dramas—Woojin found himself leaning toward the smell with an intensity that made his neck muscles ache. When Dongshik came home with hotteok from the street vendor near the market, the scent of brown sugar and cinnamon hit Woojin’s olfactory system like a drug, and he vibrated—literally vibrated, his entire body humming with need—until the smell dissipated.
I once turned down a three-course dessert at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Lyon because I was preparing for a role that required visible hunger. I fasted for thirty-six hours without discomfort. I have discipline. I have self-control. I have—
Sooa ate a grape.
—absolutely no ability to resist the smell of fruit when this body decides it wants sugar. None. Zero. I am a prisoner of a two-month-old’s metabolism and it is the most humiliating experience of my hundred-year existence, and I say this as a man who once forgot his lines on live television during the Baeksang Awards.
Front Two: Affection. This was the more dangerous front, because it was the one he had no strategy for.
When Sooa picked him up, his body responded with a rush of warmth that had nothing to do with temperature regulation and everything to do with the cocktail of bonding hormones his brain released every time skin touched skin. When Dongshik held him against his chest—which was often, because Dongshik was a man who expressed love through proximity the way other men expressed it through words or gifts—Woojin felt something loosen behind his ribs, a tension he did not know he was carrying until it was gone.
And when they held him together—both of them, Sooa’s hand on his back and Dongshik’s arm around them both, the three of them in the sagging couch on a Sunday afternoon with the TV off and the apartment quiet—Woojin experienced something that his hundred-year vocabulary could not adequately name.
It was not happiness. He had been happy before—the sharp, transient happiness of a successful opening night, the satisfied happiness of a performance that met his own exacting standards.
It was not comfort. He had been comfortable before—the material comfort of a penthouse apartment, the professional comfort of a career that never wanted for opportunity.
It was something underneath both of those. Something foundational. Like discovering that the building you lived in had a basement you never knew about, and in that basement was a room, and in that room was everything you had ever needed and never thought to look for.
Belonging, some part of him whispered. The word is belonging.
But I have never belonged anywhere. I was The Thousand Faces. I belonged to every character and none of them belonged to me. That was the deal. That was always the deal.
And now two people I have known for eight weeks are renegotiating the terms, and they do not even know they are doing it.
Front Three: The crying.
Not his crying—theirs.
Sooa cried once, in the kitchen, at 2 AM, when she thought everyone was asleep. Woojin heard her through the thin walls—not sobbing, not wailing, but the quiet, controlled crying of a woman who was very good at being strong and very tired of the effort. He lay in his crib and listened, and his body did something he had not expected.
He cried too.
Not because he was hungry or wet or uncomfortable. Not because his hormones demanded it. He cried because his mother was crying in the kitchen at 2 AM, and he could not go to her, and he could not ask what was wrong, and he could not offer any of the things that a son should be able to offer his mother—a hand, a word, a cup of tea, the simple presence of another person who cares.
In my previous life, I won the Cannes Best Actor for a scene in which I cried for four minutes and twelve seconds without blinking. The director called it “the most technically perfect display of grief in cinema history.” The critics agreed. Twelve million people watched that scene and believed they were seeing a man in pain.
They were watching a performance. A brilliant, flawless, utterly empty performance.
This—lying in a crib, tears running into my ears because I am horizontal, crying for a woman I cannot help—this is real. This is what grief actually feels like when you cannot do anything about it.
And it is so much worse than the performance.
Dongshik found Sooa in the kitchen ten minutes later. Woojin heard the murmur of voices, the rustle of an embrace, Sooa’s muffled protest of “I am fine, go back to bed” that convinced no one. Then Dongshik’s voice, low and steady: “You do not have to be fine. You just had a baby and you went back to work after six weeks and you have not slept properly in two months. You are allowed to not be fine.”
“The formula is so expensive, Dongshik-ah.”
“I know.”
“And the rent went up.”
“I know.”
“And your group—the theater group—Minhyuk said the landlord wants the rehearsal space back by June.”
A pause. Longer than the others.
“I know.”
“What are we going to do?”
Another pause. Woojin held his breath—a thing he could do now, for approximately three seconds, one of his growing catalogue of physical achievements.
“We are going to be fine,” Dongshik said. “We have each other, and we have Woojin, and I will figure out the rest. I always figure out the rest.”
He does not know how to figure out the rest, Woojin thought, listening to the conviction in his father’s voice and the absence of a plan underneath it. He is saying the words because they are the right words, the words a husband says to his wife at 2 AM in a kitchen that smells like dish soap and worry. He is performing. Not lying—performing. The way good people perform, because the alternative is admitting that the situation is worse than either of them can bear.
I know this performance. I have given it a thousand times. It is the performance of confidence without substance, hope without evidence, the specific lie that keeps families from falling apart.
It is the most important lie there is.
And Dongshik—this ridiculous, Shakespeare-quoting, meat-thermometer-using man—delivers it with a sincerity that I could never match. Because he believes it. Against all evidence, against all reason, against the mathematics of a theater actor’s salary and a cosmetics saleswoman’s commission and a baby who eats formula that costs more per gram than saffron, he believes it.
That is not acting. That is faith.
I have never had faith in anything except my own ability to pretend.
The kitchen went quiet. Footsteps returned to the bedroom. The apartment settled back into its nighttime sounds—Dongshik’s snoring, the refrigerator’s hum, the occasional creak of the building adjusting to the cold.
Woojin lay in his crib and stared at the darkness and thought about money.
Money, in the Shin household, was a presence felt more through absence than abundance.
Woojin understood this not because anyone discussed finances in front of him—he was an infant; adults did not discuss bank balances with infants—but because he was a trained observer with a hundred years of experience reading the subtext of human behavior, and the subtext of the Shin household was written in a font size large enough for even his 20/400 vision to read.
The signs were everywhere. The formula that Sooa bought was the store brand, not the imported one she had clearly wanted—he had seen her pick up the premium canister, check the price, and put it back with a motion so practiced it had become automatic. Dongshik’s shoes, visible from Woojin’s position in the baby carrier when they went for walks, had soles worn thin enough that the outline of his toes was visible from above. The heating in the apartment was set two degrees below comfortable, a fact that Woojin knew because his mother always dressed him in one more layer than the weather required and his father wore the same cardigan indoors from October to April.
In my previous life, I earned my first hundred million won at twenty-six. By forty, I was one of the highest-paid actors in Korean cinema. By sixty, I stopped counting.
I spent money on tailored suits and vintage wine and an apartment with a view of the Han River. I spent money on a housekeeper and a personal assistant and a driver who knew to keep the car at exactly 22 degrees because I was a man of specific preferences and unlimited budget.
And none of it—not one won of it—bought me what Shin Dongshik has in this 15-pyeong apartment with the leaking faucet and the store-brand formula.
Which is either very poetic or very stupid, and I have not yet decided which.
The financial pressure expressed itself most clearly in Dongshik’s relationship with his theater group.
The group—Woojin gathered from overheard conversations—was called “Barefoot Company.” It consisted of seven actors, a director-slash-playwright named Minhyuk who apparently subsisted entirely on instant coffee and artistic vision, and a shared rehearsal space in a building near Hongdae that the landlord had been threatening to reclaim for a chicken restaurant since 1999.
Dongshik attended rehearsals on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and all day Saturdays. These were the only hours during which Woojin did not hear his father’s voice somewhere in the apartment, and the silence was—he would not admit this, not even in the privacy of his own thoughts—noticeable.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Sooa would set Woojin in his bouncer—a contraption of fabric and springs that he found architecturally questionable but physically tolerable—in the living room, and she would sit at the kitchen table with a calculator and a stack of papers.
Bills.
She sorted them with the mechanical efficiency of someone who had performed this task many times: electricity (higher than expected; the aging heater was eating power), water (reasonable), phone (a luxury she was clearly considering eliminating), rent (the largest, always placed at the bottom of the stack, face-down, like a thing too terrible to look at directly).
Woojin watched her from his bouncer, fifteen feet away, close enough to see the blur of her movements but not the numbers on the paper. He did not need to see the numbers. He could read the math in the line of her shoulders, in the way her pen moved—fast when the sums were manageable, slow when they were not.
You are carrying this alone, he thought. Dongshik contributes, but you manage. You are the one who knows which bills can wait a week and which cannot. You are the one who switched from the good formula to the store brand and told him it was because the baby “preferred” it. You are the one who stays two hours late at the department store on commission days because every extra 10,000 won means another week of formula.
And you do this while also being the person who notices that your two-month-old son watches television with critical attention and reaches for candy he should not know exists.
You are, Park Sooa, the most competent person I have met in either of my lives, and you are not getting a fraction of the recognition you deserve.
On one particular Tuesday, the calculator session ended differently. Instead of filing the bills and putting the kettle on—her usual signal that the math was done and survivable—Sooa sat still. The apartment was quiet. Woojin, in his bouncer, was quiet. The only sound was the refrigerator, humming its single, faithful note.
Then Sooa turned to look at him.
Not the casual glance of a mother checking on her infant. A direct, sustained look—the kind of look that actors called “the hold,” the moment in a scene when all pretense drops and one character truly sees another for the first time.
“You are watching me,” she said.
It was not a question.
I am always watching you. I am a trained observer trapped in a body that cannot do anything except observe. But that is not what you mean, is it?
“You have been watching me do the bills for forty-five minutes. You have not cried, you have not fussed, you have not fallen asleep. You have been watching.”
I have. Because your arithmetic is more compelling than most of the dramas on that television.
“Babies do not do that, Woojin-ah.”
I am aware.
She stood up. Crossed the room. Knelt in front of the bouncer so that her face was level with his—close enough that his vision, improving weekly but still far from adequate, could make out the individual features of her expression.
It was not worry, exactly. It was not fear. It was something he had seen before, in the faces of directors who had watched him do something on camera that they could not explain—a mixture of fascination and caution, the look of someone standing at the edge of something vast and deciding whether to step forward or back.
“I do not know what you are,” she said quietly. “But you are not what the books say a two-month-old should be.”
You are right. I am not.
“And I am not going to tell your father, because he will say I am reading too much into it, and maybe I am. But I am going to pay attention. I am going to watch you the way you watch everything else.”
You are the first person in a hundred years to see me. Not my performance. Not my character. Me.
And you do not even know what you are seeing.
“So.” She reached out and touched his cheek—one finger, gentle as a moth landing. “Whatever you are, little one, we are going to figure it out together. Okay?”
His body responded before his mind could intervene. His hand—tiny, uncoordinated, still operating on a software version approximately six updates behind what he needed—rose and found her finger.
He held it.
Not the reflexive grasp of a newborn. Not the random clutching of an infant’s motor exploration. He held her finger the way you hold something you are afraid to lose—deliberately, with all five fingers, with a strength that surprised both of them.
Sooa’s breath caught.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”
And for a long moment, in the quiet apartment with the calculator and the bills and the humming refrigerator, a mother and her son held on to each other, and neither of them let go.
That night, Woojin lay awake while the apartment slept.
This was becoming more common—the stretches of nighttime wakefulness, when his body’s sleep demands briefly aligned with his mind’s need for solitude. These were the hours he valued most, the closest thing to privacy available to a person who was literally carried everywhere and could not close a door.
He thought about money.
Not his parents’ money—though that occupied a significant portion of his concern. He thought about money in the abstract, in the way it shaped lives, the way it constrained choices, the way it turned talented people into people who measured their worth in increments of 10,000 won.
Dongshik should not have to choose between art and rent. Sooa should not have to stretch formula by adding an extra ounce of water, which she thinks I have not noticed but which I have absolutely noticed because the taste is different and my infant palate, curse it, is more sensitive than my adult one ever was.
In my previous life, I had more money than purpose. In this life, these people have more purpose than money. And I—the one person in this apartment who knows what compound interest is, who understands market dynamics, who once turned down a Samsung endorsement because the offer was “only” eight hundred million won—I cannot help.
I cannot even hold my own bottle.
But I will remember this. I will remember the sound of Sooa’s calculator at the kitchen table. I will remember the worn soles of Dongshik’s shoes. I will remember the store-brand formula and the two-degree deficit in the heating and the way my mother put the rent bill face-down because looking at the number hurt.
And when I am old enough to do something about it—when this body finally grows into something capable of more than eating and sleeping and crying—I will make sure these people never have to do math at 2 AM again.
This is not a promise born of gratitude. It is not the noblesse oblige of a man who once had wealth and wants to reclaim it.
It is simpler than that.
They held me when I could not hold myself. The least I can do is hold them back.
Outside, a March wind rattled the windows of the fourth-floor walkup. The building creaked and settled. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked once and fell silent.
In the bedroom, Dongshik mumbled something in his sleep—a fragment of a line, a piece of dialogue from whatever play he was rehearsing, delivered with the same earnest conviction asleep as awake. Sooa shifted beside him, her hand finding his the way it always did, an unconscious choreography perfected over years of sharing a bed too small for two people.
They do not know who I am, Woojin thought, feeling the familiar weight of infant sleep beginning to press against the edges of his consciousness. They do not know that the creature in the crib next to their bed has a hundred years of memories and a lifetime of regrets and an opinion about their formula temperature.
But they love me anyway. Blindly, completely, in the way that only parents can love—without evidence, without reason, without any guarantee that the investment will pay off.
In acting, we call this “emotional availability.” The willingness to be open to a scene without knowing where it will go.
I spent a hundred years learning to fake it.
They do it without trying.
His eyes closed. The wind outside found a gap in the window frame and whistled a single, thin note—F-sharp, he thought automatically, though his certainty about such things was growing softer, the edges of his precision wearing smooth against the relentless erosion of this new life.
I am two months old. I cannot walk, I cannot talk, I cannot eat solid food. I have no money, no independence, no plan.
But I have a father who sings folk songs at dawn and a mother who does math in the dark and an apartment that smells like pepper paste and laundry detergent.
In my previous life, I had everything and held nothing.
In this one, I have nothing and am held by everything.
He slept. And in his sleep, for the first time, he dreamed not of spotlights or stages or the face of a son who would never be born, but of clementines—bright, fragrant, impossibly sweet—peeled by hands he was only beginning to trust.