Chapter 22: New Year
The year turned on a Wednesday. Hajin spent New Year’s Eve at Bloom—not working, because the cafe was closed, but sitting at the counter in the dark, drinking a cup of the Wrong Order blend that he’d brewed at 11:45 PM specifically so he could hold something warm when midnight arrived.
Sooyeon was in Gangnam, at a Kang Group event she couldn’t skip—the annual New Year’s gala for senior executives, a smaller affair than the KBLA dinner but no less obligatory. She’d texted at 10:00 PM: Dress is silver this time. Still no americano. Still thinking about the rooftop.
Jiwoo was with Minhyuk at a party in Itaewon, sending periodic updates that grew increasingly incoherent as the night progressed. The last one, at 11:30, read: minhyuk is dancing. this is not a drill. he is actually dancing. pray for his joints.
His parents were in Bucheon, asleep by 10:30 because his father believed that staying up past 11:00 on any night, including the one that separated years, was a form of institutional weakness. His mother had called at 9:00 to remind him to eat, which he had, and to ask if “the girl” was coming to Seollal, which she was, and to tell him she loved him, which she said the way she said everything important—quickly, without decoration, like a truth that didn’t need emphasis to be heard.
So Hajin sat alone in Bloom. The display case light was on, casting its warm glow across the counter and the bar stools and the photograph on the wall—the rooftop, the golden light, the cup on the chair. The Wrong Order was at optimal temperature, the jasmine forward, the Santos grounding, the two origins in conversation the way they always were, each one making the other better.
His phone buzzed at 11:58.
Two minutes. Where are you?
Bloom. Where else?
Alone?
With coffee. So, not alone.
You’re impossible.
Artistically impossible. Happy almost new year, Sooyeon.
Happy almost new year, Hajin. This year was—
A pause. Three dots. Appearing and disappearing. The digital equivalent of a bloom—the thirty seconds of waiting while the words organized themselves, released their gas, settled into their final form.
This year was the year I walked into the wrong cafe and found the right person. Next year, I want more of the same. More coffee. More rooftop. More you.
The clock on his phone turned to 12:00. Outside, through Bloom’s window, the faint sound of fireworks—distant, muffled, the Yeouido display that he could see as flickers of color on the clouds above the buildings. The city celebrating the arbitrary boundary between one year and the next, the collective agreement that midnight meant something different tonight than it did on every other night.
He typed: More of the same. More of everything. Happy new year, Sooyeon.
Happy new year. I love you.
I love you too. Now go survive the gala.
Already surviving. My father nodded at me across the room. A full nod. Not a half-nod. That’s progress.
Baby steps.
Chairman-sized baby steps. Goodnight.
Goodnight.
He finished the Wrong Order. Washed the cup. Turned off the display case. Locked the door.
On the stairs, heading down to the street, he paused. The nail salon below was dark, its K-pop silenced, its windows reflecting the streetlight. The building was quiet. The neighborhood was quiet. Yeonnam-dong at midnight on New Year’s Eve was the quietest version of itself—the bars closed early because the real celebrations were in Gangnam and Itaewon, and the residential streets held their breath while the fireworks bloomed and faded over the river.
A new year. January. The coldest month. The month when foot traffic dropped and revenue dipped and the rent payment felt heaviest. The month that tested cafes the way winter tested rosemary—only the stubborn survived.
But Bloom had survived three Januaries. It would survive this one. With the new regulars and the organic growth and the twenty-three percent revenue increase that Jiwoo’s spreadsheets confirmed was holding. With the Wrong Order blend, which he’d decided to add to the permanent menu because some things that started as gifts deserved to become staples. With the photograph on the wall and the rooftop upstairs and the woman who came at 3:00 and ordered the Sidamo and called it home.
He walked home through the first minutes of the new year, and the air was sharp and the streets were empty and the fireworks were ending, the last colors fading from the clouds like latte art dissolving in a cup, temporary and beautiful and worth every second of their brief existence.
January was hard. Jiwoo had warned him—”January is always hard, the numbers don’t lie, people stay home when it’s minus ten”—but knowing it was hard and living through it were different things, the way knowing coffee was hot and burning your tongue were different things.
Foot traffic dropped by thirty percent. The new regulars held—Yuna came every day, bundled in layers that made her look like a walking sleeping bag, and the professor came at 9:30 with his papers and a thermos of tea that he drank alongside his pour-over because he believed in hedging his warm-beverage bets. But the casual customers—the walk-ins, the adventurers, the post-article curious—disappeared into the cold like breath into air.
The revenue dipped. Not catastrophically—not to pre-article levels—but enough that the rent increase loomed larger, its shadow stretching across the spreadsheet with each passing week. Jiwoo ran projections nightly, adjusting for weather and foot traffic and seasonal trends, her face illuminated by the laptop screen in the way that Hajin’s face was illuminated by the roaster—the light of a person doing the work they were made for.
“We’re okay,” she said, at the end of the second week. “Not comfortable. Not safe. But okay. February will be better—Valentine’s Day brings traffic, and the new-year resolution crowds hit specialty coffee in late January.”
“New-year resolution crowds?”
“People who resolve to ‘drink better coffee’ or ‘support local businesses.’ They last about three weeks, but their money lasts longer.”
“That’s cynical.”
“That’s business.”
The cold brought one unexpected benefit: the spectators vanished entirely. Nobody was going to climb a narrow staircase in minus-ten weather to photograph a cafe they’d already posted about. The ring lights disappeared. The selfie angles disappeared. Bloom, stripped of its viral attention by the brutal efficiency of a Seoul winter, was itself again—quiet, focused, inhabited by people who were there because they wanted to be, not because an algorithm had told them to.
Mrs. Kim read her novel (page 428 now—she was approaching the climax). The architecture students drew their buildings. Mr. Bae drank his cortado in forty-three seconds. The cafe breathed. And Hajin, behind the counter, made pour-overs with the same care he’d always made them—one cup at a time, one customer at a time, one day at a time.
Sooyeon came every day. At 3:00, in the seat closest to the door, with her phone face-down and her coat buttoned or unbuttoned depending on the day’s emotional weather. She drank the Sidamo or the Wrong Order (she alternated now, the Sidamo for days she needed softness and the Wrong Order for days she needed grounding, a system she’d developed without being conscious of it but which Hajin tracked with the precision of a roast log). She stayed until 4:15 or 4:30 or, on one memorable Friday, until closing, when she helped Jiwoo wipe tables and nearly dropped a cup and Hajin said “that’s why we don’t let civilians handle the ceramics” and she threw a napkin at him in the exact spot where Jiwoo had thrown napkins for three years, as if the gesture was inherited, the way recipes were inherited, passed from partner to partner across the counter.
One afternoon in mid-January, during the quietest part of the quietest month, Sooyeon arrived with news.
“My father wants to meet you again,” she said.
Hajin, who had been grinding beans for the next morning’s roast, set down the grinder with the deliberate calm of a man who had learned that sudden movements were inadvisable when processing Kang-related information.
“Again,” he said.
“Not like last time. Not in his office. Not with tea and a background check and a threat wrapped in politeness.” She turned her cup in her hands—the Sidamo today, a softness day. “He wants to come here. To Bloom.”
“The chairman of Kang Group wants to come to my cafe.”
“He wants to try the coffee.”
“He drinks green tea.”
“He wants to try your coffee. Specifically.” She looked at him. “I think—I’m not sure, because he communicates through silences and quarterly reports—but I think the nod at the gala was the beginning of something. The nod was a full nod, Hajin. He hasn’t given anyone a full nod since the CFO landed the Songdo deal.”
“I’m being compared to a real estate transaction.”
“You’re being compared to his highest form of approval. In his language, a full nod is—” She searched for the metaphor that would translate across their worlds. “A full nod is like a perfect extraction. Everything aligned. The temperature, the grind, the timing. All correct.”
“You’re comparing your father to coffee now.”
“I’ve been sitting in this cafe for three months. It was inevitable.”
He thought about it. The chairman at Bloom. The man who had investigated his credit score and threatened his lease and presented graphs about their relationship’s impact on stakeholder perception—that man, in this cafe, drinking a pour-over. The incongruity was almost architectural, like putting a sixty-two-story glass tower inside a forty-square-meter room.
“When?” he asked.
“Saturday. He has a window at 2:00 PM. He’ll come with Secretary Park. Just them.”
“No background check this time?”
“He already did the background check. This time, he just wants coffee.” She paused. “And maybe to see why his daughter drives to Yeonnam-dong every afternoon instead of attending the board meetings he schedules at 3:00 to try to keep her in the building.”
“He schedules meetings at 3:00 to keep you from coming here?”
“He’s tried. I decline them. It’s becoming our own private war of attrition. He schedules, I decline, he schedules again, I decline again. Eventually he’ll run out of meetings or I’ll run out of decline buttons. We’ll see who blinks first.”
“My money’s on you.”
“Your money is on a woman who waited in line at 6:30 AM for castella. I don’t blink.”
He smiled. She smiled. The cafe was quiet around them—January quiet, the deep quiet of a season that had stripped away everything unnecessary and left only what was essential. Coffee. Company. The specific warmth of a room that people chose to be in.
“Saturday,” he said. “2:00 PM. I’ll roast something special.”
“Don’t roast something special. Roast whatever you were going to roast. He doesn’t need special treatment. He needs to experience Bloom as it actually is.”
“Bloom as it actually is includes me being slightly terrified of your father.”
“Bloom as it actually is includes you being slightly terrified and making perfect coffee anyway. That’s your whole thing.”
She finished the Sidamo. Left at 4:15. Hajin stood behind the counter and thought about Saturday, and about the chairman, and about the specific, improbable scenario of a man worth trillions of won sitting in a folding chair on a rooftop with fairy lights from Daiso, drinking a pour-over that cost 6,500 won.
But stranger things had happened. His daughter had walked in from the rain and ordered an americano. His barista had fallen in love with her. Their story had been published in a tabloid and watched by millions and survived the attention and the silence and the fight and the investor and the three days of empty chairs.
A chairman drinking a pour-over was, by comparison, practically normal.
He opened his roast notebook. Saturday was two days away. He had time to plan, to test, to calibrate. He could prepare the perfect cup for the most difficult audience he’d ever faced—a man who evaluated everything, who reduced every experience to data, who communicated through silences and nods and the absence of disapproval.
Or.
He could do what Sooyeon said. Roast whatever he was going to roast. Make the coffee the way he always made it. Be Bloom.
He picked up his pen. In the Saturday slot of the roast schedule, where he usually wrote the planned origin and roast profile, he wrote:
Wrong Order. 60/40. The usual.
The usual. Because that was what Bloom was. That was what it had always been. Not special treatment, not performance, not a cafe that changed itself for its audience. Just coffee, made well, by a person who cared, for whoever walked through the door.
Even if the person who walked through the door was the chairman of Kang Group.
Even then.
The usual.