Healing Haven 소설 – Chapter 252: The Third Name

# Chapter 252: The Third Name

Park Seong-jun doesn’t look like someone who sets fires. He looks like someone who has been slowly burning from the inside for thirty-seven years, the kind of person whose body has learned to convert guilt into a kind of functional ash that keeps him upright even as everything essential underneath turns to char. He stands at the harbor’s edge with his hands in his pockets—a deliberate choice, Sohyun realizes, because without pockets, those hands would have nowhere to hide their shaking—and speaks as though they’ve been in the middle of this conversation their entire lives.

“Your grandfather knew,” he says. Not looking at her. Looking at the fishing boats, at the way the morning light fractures across the water into a thousand small betrayals. “He knew what Min-jun was, what he’d done, what he was planning. And he chose to document it instead of stop it.”

Sohyun’s throat closes. She understands now why her grandfather kept ledgers. Not as confession. As evidence. As a detailed record of the moment he decided that family loyalty mattered more than justice, more than the truth that someone—a boy who was seventeen, who was someone’s son, someone’s brother—had crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed.

“How did you know him?” she asks. The question comes out wrong. She means: When did you realize? or How long have you known? or What did my grandfather do to help you bury this? But what emerges is simply: “How did you know him?”

Seong-jun finally turns to face her. His eyes are the color of someone who has seen the bottom of every ocean and found it empty. “I was your grandfather’s business partner. Forty years ago, before the café, before the mandarin grove became his sanctuary. We had a import business—legitimate on paper, but the paper was always thinner than it should have been. Your grandfather was good at making people disappear. Not physically. Financially. Legally. He could erase a person’s debt, a person’s history, a person’s entire existence if the price was right and the silence was absolute.”

The fishing boats motor steadily outward. Sohyun watches them and understands that they’re not looking for fish. They’re looking for the bodies of people who no longer fit into the world’s accounting.

“Min-jun was my son,” Seong-jun continues. The words come out flat, stripped of inflection, as though he’s recited them so many times that the sound has been worn smooth like river stones. “He was brilliant in the way that seventeen-year-old boys are brilliant—absolutely certain that he understood morality better than everyone else, absolutely convinced that the world was corrupt and that his job was to fix it by any means necessary. He found the ledger your grandfather kept. Found the names, the amounts, the businesses that had been erased. And he decided that the person most responsible for the world’s rot was the person keeping the detailed record of it.”

Sohyun’s hands are in her pockets now too, mirroring him without meaning to. She’s understood this much already—the voicemail said it clearly: Min-jun was the fire. But understanding and hearing are different things. Understanding happens in the safe distance of private knowledge. Hearing happens when someone else is speaking the words aloud, making them real in a way that your own thoughts can never quite manage.

“He wanted to burn the documents,” Seong-jun says. “He wanted to destroy every record, every name, every evidence of the people your grandfather had made invisible. But burning documents in an office building is a specific kind of arson. It leaves traces. Accelerants. Patterns. He needed a place where fire would be expected, where the cause could be obscured. He needed—”

“The greenhouse,” Sohyun whispers.

“The greenhouse,” Seong-jun confirms. “He went there on the evening of March 15th, 1987. He was going to burn the documents your grandfather kept there. A backup ledger. Insurance. And something went wrong. I don’t know exactly what. Min-jun never told me. He just came to me that night at 4:47 in the morning—the same time your grandfather always woke up to check his records—and he said: ‘It’s done. We’re free now.’ But we weren’t free. We were just beginning the long process of understanding that some fires can’t be contained, that some choices can’t be unmade, that silence is a kind of burning too, just slower.”

The harbor master’s office is opening behind them. Someone unlocks the door, and the sound of it echoes across the water like a gunshot. Sohyun realizes that she’s been holding her breath. That her lungs are beginning to rebel against the containment.

“Did anyone die?” she asks.

The question floats between them like a thing with weight, a thing that refuses to settle.

“Not in the fire,” Seong-jun says carefully. “The greenhouse was empty. It was early morning. No one was working there yet. Min-jun was careful about that. He wanted to destroy the ledgers, not people. He was a murderer of documents, not of bodies. But your grandfather—” Seong-jun’s voice fractures here, develops a hairline crack that runs through the entire structure of his narrative. “Your grandfather understood what Min-jun had done. And instead of reporting it, instead of letting the legal system handle it, he went to Min-jun and he made a choice.”

“What choice?” Sohyun’s voice is smaller now. She can hear how small it is.

“He told Min-jun that he would protect him. That he would create a narrative where the fire was accidental, where the cause was electrical, where no one would ever know that a seventeen-year-old boy had made a deliberate choice to burn away the evidence of moral corruption. And in exchange, Min-jun had to agree to disappear. Not die. Not leave Jeju. But disappear from his own identity. He became someone else. A new name. A new history. A person who had never existed.”

The reality of this settles onto Sohyun like morning fog. She understands now why her grandfather kept the ledgers. Why he documented everything with such obsessive precision. He wasn’t confessing. He was protecting. He was creating evidence that could be used as leverage if Min-jun ever tried to return to his real identity, ever tried to reclaim the life he’d surrendered. The ledgers were chains disguised as records.

“Where is he now?” Sohyun asks. “Min-jun. Where is he?”

Seong-jun looks out at the fishing boats again. They’re far enough away now that they’re just dark shapes against the brightening horizon. “That depends on whether you’re asking me to tell you the truth or help you maintain the lie.”

“There’s a difference?”

“There’s always a difference,” he says. “The truth is that Min-jun has been living in Jeju for thirty-seven years. That he changed his name, built a business, created a family. That he’s been paying a debt he agreed to pay in exchange for protection. The lie is that he’s anyone your grandfather—or Jihun—would recognize. The lie is that identity is simple, that a person can simply become someone else and mean it.”

Sohyun’s phone buzzes in her pocket. She ignores it. The buzzing continues—persistent, urgent, the way phones buzz when someone is calling repeatedly. She thinks about Jihun, about the way his hands stopped shaking when he finally understood what his father was trying to tell him. She thinks about Minsoo, about how many years he’s been living with the knowledge of what he was, what he’d done, who he’d destroyed to become the person he is now.

“Minsoo,” she says. It’s not a question.

“Minsoo,” Seong-jun confirms. “Min-jun became Minsoo thirty-seven years ago. Your grandfather didn’t just protect him. He gave him a new identity, new documents, new everything. He helped him build a business empire on top of the ashes of his first identity. And Minsoo has been living with the knowledge that his entire existence is built on a lie, that his business success is predicated on the protection of someone who is no longer alive to hold the leverage over him.”

The phone stops buzzing. Then immediately starts again.

“That’s probably your friend Jihun,” Seong-jun says. “He’s been calling since 5:47 AM. I imagine he’s finally listened to the voicemail his father sent him. I imagine he’s finally understood that the person he’s been trying to protect, the person he’s been investigating, the person he’s been gathering evidence against—is his own father.”

Sohyun pulls out her phone. Fourteen missed calls. Fifteen. The numbers keep climbing, as though Jihun is trying to dial his way back into a world where his father isn’t a confessed accomplice, where his family isn’t built on the foundation of destroyed documents and sacrificed identities, where the person he loves isn’t the granddaughter of the man who created the original crime.

“What happens now?” she asks Seong-jun.

He turns to leave, his work jacket creasing at the shoulders in a way that suggests he’s been carrying something heavy for a very long time. “Now you have a choice, Han Sohyun. You can keep the ledgers. You can keep the silence. You can let your family’s secrets continue to burn from the inside, slowly, the way they’ve been burning for thirty-seven years. Or you can do what your grandfather couldn’t do. You can tell the truth.”

He’s halfway to the harbor master’s office when he stops and adds, without turning around: “For what it’s worth, your grandfather was a good man in every way that mattered, except the ways that would have required him to choose justice over protection. And Minsoo—Min-jun—has spent thirty-seven years trying to atone for a crime that your grandfather made it impossible for him to confess. The ledgers were supposed to free him. Instead, they’ve kept him prisoner.”

The fishing boats are almost out of sight now. Sohyun stands at the edge of the harbor and understands that some fires don’t burn outward. Some fires burn inward, consuming the person who set them from the inside, turning identity into ash, turning names into lies, turning protection into a kind of slow-motion murder that takes decades to complete.

Her phone buzzes again. Jihun’s name appears on the screen. She answers this time.

“I know,” she says, before he can speak. “I know everything. I’m coming to you.”

The line goes silent. Then, so quietly she almost misses it: “Okay. Come to the café. I’m locking us in, and we’re going to burn the ledgers together. All of them. Everything. And then we’re going to figure out how to tell the truth about what remains.”

---

The café is closed, locked, the lights off except for the red exit sign. Sohyun finds Jihun standing in the kitchen with the three ledgers arranged in a line on the prep table like evidence at a trial. He looks exactly like someone who has been burning from the inside, the way his father burns, the way his brother burned, the way everyone in this family has been burning since 1987.

She understands, finally, that there are different kinds of fire. Some burn documents. Some burn identities. Some burn in the shape of families, in the shape of secrets, in the shape of people who loved each other enough to sacrifice everything to protect them. And some fires—the kind that matters—burn through all that protection and ask the question that cannot be unasked: If the ledger is the truth, what does it say about us?

The answer, she knows, is finally going to cost them everything.

# Expanded Chapter: The Ledgers

Her phone buzzes again. Jihun’s name appears on the screen, and Sohyun stares at it for a long moment, watching the letters of his name illuminate and fade, illuminate and fade. She’s been ignoring his calls for three days now—three days of sitting in her apartment with the ledgers spread across her dining table, reading entries written in her father’s meticulous handwriting, entries that catalog a decade of transactions that don’t match any official records, that don’t match any story she’s ever been told about how the family business actually works.

She answers this time.

“I know,” she says, before he can speak. “I know everything. I’m coming to you.”

There’s a moment of silence on the other end—not the comfortable silence of understanding, but the fractured silence of someone realizing that a foundation they’ve been standing on has just cracked beneath them. She can hear him breathing, can hear the sound of something being set down carefully on a hard surface.

“How long have you known?” His voice is different than she’s ever heard it—smaller, somehow, like he’s speaking from very far away.

“Since yesterday. Since I found the supplementary ledger hidden in Dad’s study. The one that wasn’t supposed to exist.” She closes her eyes. “How long have you known?”

“Since I was sixteen,” Jihun says quietly. “Since I accidentally found the main ledger in Father’s safe while looking for something else entirely. I’ve been living with it for twelve years, Sohyun. Twelve years of knowing and not knowing how to not know it.”

She hears the exhaustion in that statement—not just physical exhaustion, but the particular, crushing fatigue of carrying a secret that belongs to someone else’s conscience. She wonders how many times he’s thought about telling her, about making it her burden too, about transforming his solitude into something that at least had the benefit of company.

“I’m coming to you,” she repeats, and this time it’s not a statement of intention but a promise.

“No,” he says immediately. “Not here. Not to the house. Come to the café. The small one in Hongdae, where we used to go when we were pretending to be normal people. I’m closing it early. I’m locking us in, and we’re going to burn the ledgers together. All of them. Everything. And then—” his voice breaks slightly, “—and then we’re going to figure out how to tell the truth about what remains.”

She wants to ask him if he’s certain, if he understands what he’s proposing, if he’s really willing to destroy the evidence of their family’s carefully constructed life. But she already knows the answer. She can hear it in the way he’s already decided, in the way he’s probably been deciding this for years, waiting for her to catch up.

“Okay,” she says. “I’m coming.”

The line goes quiet again, and then, so quietly she almost misses it entirely: “I love you, Sohyun. I need you to know that before we do this. I love you, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t protect you from this.”

“I know,” she says, and she hangs up before either of them can say anything else.

—

The drive to Hongdae takes forty minutes from her apartment in Gangnam, forty minutes of moving through Seoul’s evening traffic while the city glitters around her in shades of neon and sodium light. She drives with the windows down despite the cold, needing the shock of winter air against her face, needing to feel something other than the numbing sensation of her entire understanding of her family collapsing like a building in an earthquake.

The supplementary ledger is in the passenger seat beside her, bound in the same dark leather as the others, filled with entries that detail payments made to people whose names she doesn’t recognize, to accounts that don’t appear on any official documentation. But scattered among these entries are other notations—brief, cryptic comments that suggest something far darker than simple tax evasion or money laundering.

“Adjustment made for warehouse incident,” reads one entry from 1998.

“Medical expenses, discretionary,” reads another from 2003.

“Settlement, no documentation,” reads a third, dated 2007, with an amount that makes her stomach turn.

She has spent the last twenty-four hours trying to construct a narrative that makes sense of these entries, trying to tell herself a story in which her father—the man who insisted on honesty in all personal dealings, who lectured her about integrity and character, who cried at documentaries about social injustice—was not systematically buying his way out of accountability for something. For things. Multiple things. Over the course of nearly two decades.

The café is in a quiet corner of Hongdae, the kind of place that aspires to European minimalism—white walls, exposed brick, carefully curated vintage furniture that probably cost more than it appears to. Jihun has owned it for five years, a project that was supposed to be his escape from the family business, his attempt to build something separate and clean. Sohyun has always wondered if the deliberate lightness of the place—all that whiteness, all that space—was his way of trying to bleach himself of something.

She pulls into the alley behind the café and parks next to Jihun’s car, an understated Tesla that probably cost him more money than most people earn in a year. When she gets out, she can see him through the kitchen window, moving between the prep stations like someone performing a ritual he’s memorized.

He unlocks the back door for her without speaking, and she enters the kitchen with the three ledgers clutched against her chest like a child. The main ledger she took from his study. The supplementary ledger she found hidden in a false bottom beneath the floorboards in the study closet—the ledger that no one was supposed to know about. And the third ledger, the one she found in her own apartment after calling Jihun, placed on her doorstep in a manila envelope with a note in their mother’s handwriting: “You deserve to know. You deserve to choose.”

Their mother has left the country. Sohyun found this out when she tried to call her yesterday and discovered that the phone number had been disconnected, that the apartment in Songpa was being packed up by movers, that a one-way ticket to Vancouver had been purchased three weeks ago. Their mother knew. She has always known. And perhaps more importantly, she has always known that Jihun and Sohyun would eventually know as well.

“Set them down,” Jihun says. His voice is steady, but his hands are trembling as he gestures to the prep table, which has been cleared of everything except the three leather-bound volumes he’s arranged in a line like evidence at a trial.

Sohyun sets down the ledgers she’s carrying, and they join the others on the table—six leather spines, three decades of secrets, a paper trail of decisions that have shaped everything about their lives, everything about the family they come from, everything about who they are.

“Do you want to know what they say?” she asks him. “Before we burn them?”

Jihun looks at her, and she can see the exhaustion in his face, the way it’s carved itself into the lines around his eyes and mouth. He looks exactly like someone who has been burning from the inside, the way his father burns, the way his brother burned—yes, she realizes now, that’s what happened to Taejoon, that’s why he’s been in and out of psychiatric care since he was nineteen, why he left the country and refuses to come back, why he drinks himself to sleep every night and calls their father on the phone just to hang up without speaking. He knows too. He has always known.

“I’ve read them,” Jihun says quietly. “I’ve read them so many times over the past twelve years that I have certain passages memorized. But no—I don’t want to know what they say. I want to know what they mean. I want to know what kind of man our father is, and what kind of family protects him, and what kind of people we become when we inherit his silence.”

He walks to the industrial oven in the corner of the kitchen, the massive stainless steel machine that has baked thousands of pastries, thousands of small, beautiful things. He opens it and adjusts the temperature to its maximum setting.

“When I was sixteen,” he continues, his voice taking on the cadence of a confession, “I found the main ledger in Father’s safe. I was looking for information about my university fund—I was supposed to go to Seoul National, and I wanted to know if we could afford it, because Father was being vague about it, which meant something was wrong. I cracked the safe code by watching him input it over his shoulder during a family dinner. Very James Bond of me, very teenage idiot of me. And I found the ledger in a plastic sleeve beneath some bonds and some jewelry that I assume belonged to our mother.”

He pulls out the first ledger and runs his fingers along its spine.

“I sat in his study for three hours reading it. I was supposed to be doing homework. I was supposed to be a sixteen-year-old boy who believed his parents were good people, who believed his family was respectable, who believed that the money in our accounts came from legitimate business dealings and not from systematic, deliberate, calculated corruption.”

“What did you do?” Sohyun asks.

“I put it back,” Jihun says. “I put it back exactly where I found it, and I walked out of the study, and I went to school the next day, and I acted like nothing had changed. But everything had changed. Because I realized something that day—something that I’ve been trying to unlearn for the past twelve years. I realized that protection is a kind of lie. That when you protect someone from the consequences of their actions, you’re not saving them. You’re killing them slowly, in a way that takes decades to complete. You’re turning their conscience into a cancer that eats them from the inside out.”

He opens the oven door, and the heat pours out like a living thing.

“Father burns,” he says. “He burns with the knowledge of what he’s done, and all of us—Mother, Taejoon, you, me—all of us have spent our entire lives trying to extinguish that fire by piling on more lies, more protection, more silence. But fires don’t go out that way. They just spread. They just grow. And eventually, they burn everything.”

He takes the first ledger—the main one—and holds it over the open oven. The heat makes his hair move slightly, makes his eyes water, makes him look like someone standing at the edge of something vast and irreversible.

“The entry from 2007,” Sohyun says suddenly. “The settlement payment. The one without documentation. Was that—”

“A man died,” Jihun says flatly. “At one of our warehouses. A worker. It was ruled an accident, but the ledger suggests otherwise. The settlement payment went to his family. It was large enough that they never pressed the matter, never asked questions, never did anything but take the money and disappear. Father bought their silence.”

Sohyun feels something crystallize inside her chest—not shock, because she’s already moved beyond shock, but something harder, something colder. A kind of clarity that comes from finally, fully understanding the nature of the ground you’re standing on.

“There are others,” Jihun continues. “Not all of them deaths, but—situations. Situations where Father’s business interests conflicted with other people’s lives, and the ledger suggests that money was used to resolve these conflicts. To make them go away. To ensure that no one asked too many questions, and no one demanded too much accountability.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sohyun asks, and she’s surprised to hear anger in her voice. “Why did you let me live my entire life not knowing what kind of family we come from?”

“Because I was trying to protect you,” Jihun says, and his voice breaks slightly. “Just like Father tries to protect us. Just like Mother tries to protect us. Just like Taejoon tried to protect us by breaking himself rather than breaking the family apart. I was trying to protect you by letting you believe something better about yourself than the truth allows.”

He drops the first ledger into the oven.

It catches immediately—the old leather, the aged paper, all of it combustible, all of it eager to burn. The flames are bright and orange and beautiful and terrible, and Sohyun watches as her father’s primary record of corruption becomes ash.

“But protection is a kind of murder,” Jihun says quietly. “It’s slow, and it takes decades, and it happens so gradually that you don’t even realize you’re dying until you’re already dead. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, these past few days. I’ve been thinking about how Father is killing himself with the weight of what he knows, and how all of us are dying along with him, slowly, silently, year after year.”

He picks up the second ledger—the supplementary one, the one that Sohyun found hidden in the floorboards.

“Mother left a note with this one,” he says. “Did she leave a note with the one she gave you?”

“Yes,” Sohyun says. “She said I deserved to know. She said I deserved to choose.”

“That’s Mother’s way of apologizing,” Jihun says. “She’s been trying to protect us our entire lives, but she finally realized that protection and truth are incompatible. You can have one or the other, but not both. And I think she finally decided that truth matters more.”

He drops the second ledger into the fire.

It burns faster than the first one, as if the pages are thinner, or perhaps as if some fires burn hotter than others depending on what they’re consuming. Sohyun watches the spine collapse, watches the leather curl and blacken, watches the pages separate and float upward like dark snow before disintegrating.

“What about the third one?” she asks. “The one Mother gave me?”

Jihun looks at the table, at the single remaining ledger—the one in the distinctive blue leather, the one that Sohyun has not yet opened, the one that arrived with the note: “You deserve to know. You deserve to choose.”

“That one,” Jihun says, “is the family ledger. The one that started it all. The one from 1987. Father’s first year in business, when he was young and hungry and willing to do anything to survive, to build something, to become someone. It’s the founding document of everything that came after. Everything else traces back to what’s written in those pages.”

He turns to look at Sohyun directly, and his eyes are clear now—not calm, but clear, like someone who has finally stopped trying to see the world as he wants it to be and has started seeing it as it actually is.

“That one,” he says, “is yours to decide. You can burn it with the others, or you can read it first. You can choose to know the entire history, the entire genesis story of what we come from, or you can choose to let it burn unread. But you have to choose, Sohyun. Because if you don’t choose, then you’re just another person protecting someone else from the consequences of their own truth. And I don’t think you want to be that person. I don’t think you want to spend the rest of your life burning slowly from the inside.”

Sohyun picks up the blue ledger. It’s heavier than it looks, or perhaps it just feels heavier—weighted down by decades of knowledge, by the gravity of decisions made and not made, by the accumulated pressure of everything that has led to this moment.

She opens it.

The first entry is dated January 15, 1987. The handwriting is younger than the handwriting in the other ledgers—less controlled, more passionate, more desperate. It details a loan from a man named Choi Moonjae, a man whose name does not appear anywhere in official records, a man who is described in the ledger as “the kind of person who understands that business is not always conducted through legitimate channels.”

The amount is substantial. The terms are vague. But the implication is clear: her father did not build his business through hard work and intelligence alone. He built it with money from someone who expected something in return.

She reads further.

She reads about payments made to Choi Moonjae over the course of a decade. She reads about “favors” that are mentioned only obliquely, in shorthand, in code that becomes increasingly transparent as she progresses through the ledger. She reads about her father’s transformation from a desperate man willing to do anything for a loan into something else entirely—a man who has learned that the rules don’t apply to him, that power comes from willingness to operate outside the law, that protection can be purchased for the right price.

And then, in 1997, the entries about Choi Moonjae stop.

In their place are entries about “outstanding debts settled” and “final accounting” and “transfer of assets to new arrangement.”

She understands, in that moment, what has happened. She understands what her father has done—or had done, which might be the same thing. She understands why the family has spent the past twenty-five years in a kind of anxious prosperity, never quite comfortable, always looking over their shoulder, always careful about whom they trust and what they say and what they allow themselves to know.

She closes the ledger.

“He didn’t just take the money,” she says quietly. “He took everything from this man. He took his business, his reputation, his life. He didn’t just start a legitimate company with borrowed capital. He took over an entire enterprise.”

“Yes,” Jihun says. “That’s what the ledgers say. That’s what I’ve been living with for twelve years. That’s what I couldn’t tell you because I couldn’t figure out how to say it in a way that didn’t destroy everything we understand about ourselves.”

Sohyun holds the blue ledger over the open oven. The heat is still intense, still eager, still ready to consume. She can feel the weight of it in her hands, the physical manifestation of decades of secrets, of careful lies, of protection that has metastasized into something unrecognizable.

“If I burn this,” she says, “then no one will ever know what really happened. No one will ever be able to hold Father accountable. No one will ever be able to ask questions about Choi Moonjae or what happened to him or what happened to his family. It will all just—disappear.”

“Yes,” Jihun says.

“But if I don’t burn it,” she continues, “then everything burns. The family, the business, Father’s reputation, Mother’s carefully constructed life, all of it. Taejoon will finally have a reason to come home, not because he wants to but because he has to, because he’ll need to bear witness to the destruction of the thing that broke him. We’ll lose everything.”

“Yes,” Jihun says again.

“So what do I do?” she asks, and her voice is very small in the vastness of the kitchen.

Jihun steps closer to her. He doesn’t take the ledger, but he stands beside her, and together they look into the fire, at the ashes of the other two ledgers, at the empty space that waits to be filled.

“You do what Mother couldn’t do,” he says finally. “You do what Father has never been capable of doing. You do what I’ve been trying to figure out how to do for twelve years. You choose truth over protection. You choose accountability over comfort. You choose to stop the burning.”

He places his hand over hers, the one holding the ledger.

“And then,” he says, “we figure out how to tell the truth about what remains.”

Sohyun understands, finally, that there are different kinds of fire. Some burn documents. Some burn identities. Some burn in the shape of families, in the shape of secrets, in the shape of people who loved each other enough to sacrifice everything to protect them. And some fires—the kind that matters—burn through all that protection and ask the question that cannot be unasked: *If the ledger is the truth, what does it say about us?*

She drops the blue ledger into the fire.

It burns immediately, completely, without hesitation. The leather splits open as the heat hits it, and the pages scatter like birds trying to escape, like ghosts trying to find their way out of a place they’ve been trapped for too long. In moments, there is nothing left but ash and smoke and the faint smell of burning paper, the smell of secrets becoming nothing, the smell of truth being consumed by the very people it implicates.

When it’s finished, when the last page has disintegrated, Jihun turns to her and says: “The answer is finally going to cost us everything.”

“I know,” Sohyun says.

And together, they sit down to figure out what comes next.