The first week after awakening felt like an eternity suspended in glass.
Soo-Ah existed in fragments — recovering consciousness in a world that had reshaped itself in her absence. Her muscles had atrophied. Her voice was no longer her own. Her mind, though alert, trembled like a newborn colt with every step she took into this new reality.
But it wasn't her body that frightened her most.
It was him.
Kang Dae-Hyun.
He was always there. Silent. Watching. Waiting.
She would wake up from drugged dreams, bathed in sweat and disoriented, and find him sitting at the edge of the room, his long limbs folded with military precision, reading some document, or monitoring her vitals on his handheld, or simply… staring at her. Not the way a husband stares. Not the way he used to stare — that adoring, bumbling look that made her laugh back when they were barely twenty and full of dreams.
No.
This Dae-Hyun was unreadable.
Like marble come to life.
When he spoke, his voice was calm, clipped, terrifying in its lack of variation. When he touched her — to help her sit, or when he brought a spoon to her lips during her early days of paralysis — his fingers were gentle but precise, like a surgeon's. Not a flicker of warmth. Not a tremor of hesitation.
But his eyes… they never left her.
They were haunted, black oceans rimmed with insomnia, with loss, with… something she could no longer name.
And always, behind his coldness, was grief. Not loud. Not broken. But fossilized — solid, like bone calcified under the weight of time.
She tried, in small ways, to piece herself back together. Nurses came and went, physical therapists guided her aching limbs, the medical staff smiled softly but nervously. Even they were unnerved by Dae-Hyun, who remained in the room during every session, every meal, every test — never interfering, never leaving.
He was a shadow with a billionaire's face and a grieving father's heart.
"Don't you have work?" she asked one afternoon, her voice still fragile.
"I work from here," he replied without looking up from his device. "KGI's digital systems were redesigned to operate under remote protocol. I implemented it personally."
The way he said it made her shiver.
Not because of the convenience.
But because it sounded inhuman.
She tried again. "You haven't left this room."
"I don't need to."
"You don't sleep."
He blinked slowly, as if the concept were foreign to him.
"I sleep enough."
And that was it.
No emotion. No irritation. No softness.
Just logistics.
On the fifth day, she asked to see Min-Jun's things.
He didn't speak at first. Just stood up, left the room, and returned an hour later with a sealed memory crystal and a sanitized white box.
He placed them on her lap, knelt beside her, and said nothing. He didn't open the box. Didn't explain the crystal. He simply sat beside her and waited while she trembled and peeled open the box's sterile lid.
Inside were Min-Jun's shoes. His favorite rattle. A drawing he'd made — more scribbles than art, but his. A tuft of his hair, preserved like sacred relics. A pair of mittens Soo-Ah had hand-knitted during pregnancy.
She began to cry again.
He did not.
He simply wrapped an arm around her shoulders — still cold, still distant — and let her weep into his chest. His fingers stroked her hair in a mechanical motion, gentle but devoid of warmth, like a man following a ritual long since disconnected from emotion.
It hurt more than if he had broken down.
It hurt more because he didn't.
The nights were worst.
Soo-Ah would awaken from dreams of Min-Jun calling for her. From memories that had become knives.
And every time, Dae-Hyun was there — seated by her bed like a sentinel, hair disheveled but eyes sharp and vigilant. He never let anyone else take the night shift. He refused to sleep more than two hours at a time. When she had once pleaded with him to go rest, he had only responded:
"If I close my eyes too long, I'll see the accident again."
She never asked again.
But the hardest part was reconciling the man in front of her with the one in her memory.
She remembered his laughter — the way his stomach jiggled when he laughed too hard. The way he had chased Min-Jun around the house in pajamas covered with flying pigs. The way he used to snore softly, drooling into her hair.
That man no longer existed.
In his place stood something carved from grief, forged in ice.
He had lost more weight than she could fathom. His face, once soft and rounded, was now a chiseled sculpture. His shoulders were broad and defined, but not with vanity — with punishment. Every inch of him screamed discipline. Control. Pain.
She once asked why he worked out every day at 3 a.m.
His reply had been simple:"Pain reminds me I'm still alive."
Soo-Ah began to recover — slowly, steadily — but her soul could not keep pace with her body.
She could not reconcile this Dae-Hyun. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
And yet… she didn't push him away.
Because no matter how terrifyingly changed he was, he never left her.
When she screamed in the night, he held her.
When her hands trembled, he steadied them.
When she broke down at the mention of Min-Jun's name, he was the only one who didn't flinch — because he had already died with that name.
He had burned himself into something unrecognizable — not for power, not for legacy, not for healing.
But so he could stay by her side.
Even if she never fully came back to him.
Even if he had already lost her once, and feared he would lose her again.