Discover Top Posts Tagged with #young2keu

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — 김주훈

a novel — seoul, late nights, a voice you'd know anywhere

for everyone who has fallen in love with a voice before a face

"It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, meant we were supposed to be together."

SYNOPSIS! Hazel runs a tiny anonymous late-night podcast for insomniacs, and she is very careful not to fall in love with any of her callers — until one keeps coming back. His voice is low and tired and tells her things he's never told anyone: about hotel rooms in cities that don't feel like his, about being surrounded by thousands of people and feeling profoundly, completely alone. She falls for him slowly, then all at once, long before she learns who he actually is. Kim Juhoon is one of the most famous idols in the country, and he has been waiting for her uploads the same way she waits for his voice notes, and neither of them has any idea what to do about that.

tags! slow burn, angst, fluff, idol au, strangers to lovers, found family, hurt/comfort don't worry fam i got your back, no kissing cuz i'm against writing allat for a young kid, podcast au, seoul, insomnia, happy ending because our realities are too sad already, tweaked personalities of members to fit the plot, juhoon and oc are not eighteen - they're older, and yes inspired by the classic romcom:- sleepless in seattle, definitely my best written work. w.c: approx 20k;

this is gonna be long but i promise its so worth it :)

PART Ⅰ: THE FREQUENCY OF LONELINESS

Chapter One: Hazel

The apartment was the kind of small that required a certain philosophy to inhabit comfortably.

Hazel Harper had developed hers over two years: she did not accumulate things that could not be carried in a single trip. She owned seven books at a time — no more, no fewer — rotating them out of a secondhand shop on the corner of Mangwon-dong where the owner, a woman in her seventies named Choi Soonim, had taken to setting aside anything that arrived with a faded English spine. She owned two mugs, one good coat, and a microphone that cost more than her monthly food budget, which told you almost everything about her priorities.

Her name was Hazel Harper and she was twenty three old and she could not sleep.

This was not a new condition. She had been an insomniac since childhood — since the particular night she was eleven years old and had lain awake listening to her parents' voices travel through the thin walls of their house in Portland, Oregon, all the way to the kitchen, where they discussed quietly and with great civility the dissolution of their marriage. There had been something about that night — the specific quality of their voices, low and careful and trying so hard to be kind — that had stayed with her like a frequency she could never quite tune out. She had been listening for something ever since. She was never sure what.

She had come to Seoul on a language scholarship. She stayed because Seoul at night felt like it understood her.

There was a particular hour — somewhere between 1 and 3 a.m. — when the city changed its face. The daytime crowds dissolved. The glow of convenience stores became something almost sacred, those little rectangles of fluorescence standing sentinel against the dark. The Han River bridges reflected their lights in the black water below, doubling themselves, becoming twice as beautiful and half as real. Drunk businessmen helped each other home like two-legged creatures that had forgotten how to be singular. Couples sat on the steps of closed restaurants and talked too softly to overhear. Delivery scooters moved through empty intersections like small ships.

Hazel loved all of it with a ferocity that surprised her. She loved that she could walk home from the convenience store at two in the morning and feel the city still breathing, still pulsing, still very much alive. She loved that Seoul did not require her to explain why she was awake. The city itself was always awake. It understood.

She had started the podcast eighteen months ago, almost by accident.

She had not intended for it to become anything. She had a decent microphone — bought with a summer's worth of tutoring money because she loved the weight and specificity of good audio equipment — and an account on a small hosting platform, and an inability to sleep, and one night in November she had simply pressed record and started talking. She talked about the rain. She talked about a noodle shop on her corner that closed at midnight and always left a light on in the kitchen, and how she had begun to find that light comforting in a way she could not entirely rationalize. She talked about loneliness not as a complaint but as a weather condition — something you dressed appropriately for rather than tried to prevent.

She posted it at 2 a.m. She titled the podcast Sleepless in Seoul and did not attach her name or face to it.

She had expected nothing. She had received, within a week, forty-seven messages from people who could not sleep.

The podcast grew slowly, the way honest things tend to grow — without strategy, without a plan, through the word-of-mouth of exhausted people who had found something in the dark that felt like company. By the time Hazel was a year in, she had a small but devoted listenership of perhaps eight hundred people. They sent voice notes. They sent confessions. They sent small and enormous things: breakup stories, immigration anxieties, the particular grief of missing dead grandmothers, the particular loneliness of loving someone who did not love you back, the specific relief of admitting out loud, in the dark, that you were not entirely fine.

She aired the ones with permission and kept all the others with the same care she imagined a priest might keep confessions — private, weightless, given somewhere safe.

The format was simple. Hazel spoke for ten minutes at the top of each episode — the city, the hour, whatever was in her head. Then she played a selection of listener voice notes, anonymized, their voices unaltered. Sometimes she responded gently. Sometimes she just let them breathe in the air between her observations.

She ran it on Tuesday and Friday nights.

She had never missed an episode.

She had also never told anyone she did it.

Not her best friend Mira, who was a graphic design student with opinions about everything and would have had opinions about this. Not her university friends, who would have been supportive in a way that required performance. Not even her mother back in Portland, who would have worried about her being awake at 2 a.m. talking to strangers. It was hers — entirely, completely, privately hers — and she had grown fiercely protective of that.

On the particular Tuesday night that begins this story, Hazel was sitting cross-legged on her narrow bed with the microphone on its small stand before her, a cup of barley tea on the windowsill going cold. The window was open a crack despite the October chill, because she liked the sound of distant traffic in her recordings — a specific quality of ambience, urban and alive and quietly insomniac.

She had been talking for eight minutes about the smell of autumn in Seoul — something she had missed entirely in the abstract of missing seasons, which turned out to have their own personality in this city, their own particular combination of ginkgo and rain and the ghost of summer's humidity still faintly present — when she queued up the first voice note.

It was from someone new.

She knew this because she had a small enough listener base to recognize the regulars: the woman in Busan who called herself Insomniac No. 4 and sent notes about her divorce, the student in Daejeon who reported on his nighttime conversations with his plants, the middle-aged man in Itaewon who spoke about his adult children with a tenderness that made Hazel's throat tighten reliably every single time.

This was a new voice.

It was a man's voice, low and careful, and there was a quality to it that she noticed immediately — not what he said, which was simple enough, but the way he said it. Like someone choosing his words very deliberately. Like someone who was used to speaking carefully and was choosing to stop.

"I found this podcast," he said, "and I'm not sure why I'm sending a note. I don't do things like this."

A pause.

"I've been awake for forty hours, more or less, and I'm in a hotel room in a city that isn't mine — which is most of them, these days. I can hear the city outside the window. I don't know if that's comforting or not. It's something. It's better than silence."

Another pause, longer.

"I heard you talking about the rain. I like rain."

That was all.

Hazel stared at the audio file for a moment before playing it on air. She pressed her thumb against her chin, the way she did when she was thinking. Then she smiled slightly — not broadly, but with the particular warmth she felt when someone arrived at the podcast for the first time and couldn't quite explain why.

She played it. She spoke afterward, not directly to him, but in his general direction, the way you might speak to a cat that had wandered in from the cold and was deciding whether to stay.

"Forty hours is a long time to be awake," she said. "I hope wherever you are, the rain finds you."

She did not think about it again for three days.

Chapter Two: Juhoon

The hotel room was in Singapore.

He remembered that much: the specific quality of the air conditioning, and the view from the window, which was glass-and-steel architecture rising out of tropical air. He had been in Singapore for four days and had seen none of it except through car windows and the back of a venue. He had performed to forty thousand people two nights ago and had come offstage and sat in his dressing room in silence for twenty minutes before anyone noticed he had not moved.

His name was Kim Juhoon, though the world knew him as JH, which was the name his management had given him when he was eighteen and Cortis debuted and he had been too young and too grateful and too terrified to have any opinion about it. He was twenty-six now, and the name still belonged to him, but it fit differently than it used to — like a coat he had been wearing long enough that he no longer noticed its weight, until suddenly he did.

Cortis was five members. They had debuted six years ago with a song that climbed to the top of the domestic charts in three days and the international charts in seven, and the trajectory had never really stopped. There were award shows and world tours and stadium concerts and brand deals and reality shows and fan meetings and interviews and photoshoots and schedules that arrived as printed documents and were treated as binding law. There were people who knew what time he woke up and what he ate and when he was tired, and none of them were the people he wanted to know these things.

He had sent the voice note on a Tuesday night in Singapore, having found the podcast entirely by chance — someone in a fan forum he occasionally browsed anonymously had linked it in a thread about things that helped with tour insomnia, and he had clicked through without much expectation and found himself listening to a woman's voice talk about rain in Seoul, and something about it had made him go very still.

Not because it was remarkable. It was quiet and sincere and not especially profound, and yet it made him feel, for the first time in what felt like months, like he was in a room with a person rather than a production.

He sent the note. He did not know why. He did not usually do impulsive things. His life had very little room for impulsive things.

He was asleep before the episode aired, but he found it the next morning on his phone, sitting in the back of a van on the way to a press event, earbuds in, while Martin read aloud from his phone the schedule for the following day with the tone of someone performing a dramatic monologue, and James leaned his head against the window with his eyes closed in the way of a person who had decided the morning was happening to someone else, and Juhoon pressed his thumb against the volume dial and listened to a voice say, quietly and without drama: I hope wherever you are, the rain finds you.

He had to look out the window because he was not sure what his face was doing.

He was the quiet one, in Cortis. This was known. It was, in fact, documented — fan wikis detailed the members' personalities with the clinical precision of naturalists cataloguing wildlife, and Juhoon's entry noted that he was thoughtful, reserved, rarely the first to speak in group settings, occasionally given to silences that other members had learned to interpret. He was not the one who told stories at variety show appearances. He was not the one who produced comedic chaos in reality show footage. He was the one who, in their most famous concert film, could be seen standing at the edge of the stage between songs, looking out at the audience with an expression that the internet had been trying to name for four years. Some called it melancholy. Some called it intensity. One particularly long and earnest forum post had called it the look of a man remembering something he hasn't experienced yet.

He had read that once, at three in the morning, and had felt uncomfortably seen by a stranger on the internet.

He had good people around him, which was not nothing. James, the oldest, carried himself with the steadiness of someone who had spent years learning how to survive pressure without making a performance of it — sharp in rehearsal, unexpectedly patient in private, the sort of person who noticed when someone was quiet and chose not to embarrass them for it. Martin, their leader, possessed a warmth that expanded to fill whatever room they were in; loud when the moment called for it, perceptive when it didn’t, with an instinct for people that made the others trust him almost automatically. Seonghyeon moved through the world with a quieter kind of intelligence, observant and dryly funny, the kind of person who seemed to be thinking three conversations ahead while still listening carefully to the one in front of him. And Keonho, the youngest, all restless energy and impossible charisma, had the unnerving habit of throwing himself entirely into whatever fascinated him that week — choreography at three in the morning, a melody half-finished on his phone, a sudden conviction that everyone else needed to hear it immediately.

Together they formed a strange, functional balance: Martin pulling people outward, James keeping them grounded, Seonghyeon watching everything, Keonho feeling everything at full volume. It should have been chaotic. Somehow, most days, it worked.

He loved them, genuinely and without reservation — four people he spent most of his time with. But even with them, there was a version of himself that Juhoon kept folded away — the version that woke up sometimes in hotels and genuinely could not remember what city he was in, or what day it was, or what he wanted, or when he had last wanted something for himself rather than for the work or the group or the schedule.

He did not know the words for this. He had tried, sometimes, with therapists his management arranged — two of them over three years, careful and professional and bound by something that made him feel like his honesty would be processed and filed. He had stopped going. He had not told his management he stopped going.

He was not unhappy. He wanted to be clear about this, even in the interior monologue of his own thoughts: he was not unhappy. He loved the music. He loved performing. He loved, genuinely and without reservation, the members, he spent most of his time with. His life had meaning and beauty and more material comfort than he had any right to expect from a childhood in a small apartment in Incheon, where his father had worked at a factory and his mother had cleaned offices and they had been careful — always careful — with small amounts of money.

He was not unhappy. He was simply not present. There was a version of him that moved through schedules and performed and gave interviews and attended meetings, and then there was the rest of him, which seemed to exist in a parallel frequency — awake at wrong hours, looking at cities through glass, reaching for a quality of aliveness that he could feel just at the edge of his awareness, like a song he couldn't quite hear.

He started listening to Sleepless in Seoul on a Sunday. By Thursday of that same week he had listened to every episode in the archive — forty-three of them, going back eighteen months — and was waiting for the next one with a specific anticipation that felt strange and clean, like something he hadn't felt in a long time.

He sent another note the following Tuesday.

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 44 — TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12 [LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]

"I listened to your old episodes. I don't know if that's a normal thing to do — probably not, since you said in one of them that you had been surprised anyone found them at all. I found them.

The one from February, where you talked about watching a couple argue on the subway at midnight — I listened to it three times. Not because it was sad. Because you made it sound like something worth paying attention to.

I'm back in my own city now. My own, if a city can be yours. I've been in seventeen cities in four months. Ours is starting to feel less like mine.

I don't know what to do with that."

Hazel played it at 2:14 a.m. and sat with it afterward the way she sometimes sat with the notes that arrived already broken open, that required no interpretation because they had interpreted themselves.

She spoke carefully.

"To the caller from Singapore," she said — she had remembered the time zone from the metadata — "welcome home. I think cities can be yours and not-yours at the same time, the way people can. We don't own the things we love. We just keep coming back to them and hoping they'll be in the same place when we do."

She paused. Then: "I'm glad you listened to the old ones."

She was not sure why that felt important to say.

Chapter Three: The Shape of Insomnia

October in Seoul moved like a slow exhale.

The humidity released its grip. The air sharpened. Leaves on the ginkgo trees along the streets of Mapo-gu turned simultaneously yellow and fell simultaneously, coating the pavement in something that looked, at night under the streetlamps, like scattered coins. The Han River grew quieter as the evening joggers grew more bundled, more determined-looking. The convenience stores installed their portable grills outside and the smell of sizzling street food joined the more permanent smells of the city — diesel and autumn leaves and the particular undertone of a city built and rebuilt and layered with decades of itself.

Hazel's apartment was on the fifth floor of a building that had no elevator and this seemed fine to her because she had read once that the Japanese had a concept for the value of inconvenience, and she had adopted it without fully investigating whether the source was accurate. The apartment had a single large window that looked out over the street, and in October, with the window cracked and the radiator muttering under the sill, the room had a warmth that she associated with rightness — a word she had stopped apologizing for using, since it seemed to describe things more precisely than its alternatives.

She had three lectures on Mondays and Wednesdays, two on Thursdays. She was studying linguistics with a focus on Korean language acquisition. She worked twelve hours a week at a café three blocks from campus that was owned by a Korean-Australian couple and played exclusively 1970s American soft rock, which created a specific cognitive dissonance she had come to love. She tutored a high school student in English on Saturday afternoons. She read. She walked. She produced, with devotion and care, a podcast that nobody knew she made.

Her best friend Mira Shin was the sort of person who occupied space with full commitment, which Hazel admired and found slightly exhausting. Mira was doing her MFA in graphic design and had opinions about everything from typeface kerning to the moral obligations of carbohydrates. She was one of those people whose love for you expressed itself as constant attention — she noticed things, pointed them out, made you feel seen in a way that was sometimes wonderful and occasionally felt like being held under an affectionate but somewhat relentless magnifying glass.

They met for brunch on the first Sunday of November at a place in Yeonnam-dong with good eggs and better coffee and the kind of lazy weekend crowd that felt like a reward for having made it through another week.

"You look like you didn't sleep," Mira said.

"I didn't."

"Again."

"Still. It's a continuous condition."

"Hazel."

"Mira."

This particular exchange had recurred approximately four hundred times across three years of friendship, and they both understood it to mean: I love you and I'm concerned and I know and I'm fine and are you sure and yes.

"I was up late," Hazel said, which was true and not the entirety of the truth.

"Doing what?"

"Reading. Listening to the city. Thinking."

"You think too much."

"You've mentioned that."

"It's like a full-time job you do for free," Mira said, wrapping both hands around her coffee. "All that rich interior life and no one to invoice."

Hazel laughed. "I'm practicing."

"For what?"

"For when someone turns up who deserves it."

Mira looked at her over the rim of her mug with an expression that Hazel recognized as the precursor to a Speech About Love. She had received many of these speeches. They were delivered with genuine affection and were not wrong, exactly, but they tended to locate Hazel's approach to romance as the primary obstacle, which she found reductive.

"You know what your problem is?" Mira began.

"I romanticize things," Hazel said.

"You romanticize things. You build entire emotional architecture around hypothetical people and then when actual people appear — with their actual human mediocrity and their specific flaws — they can't compete."

"That's not entirely true."

"The guy from your research seminar."

"He chewed with his mouth open."

"Hazel. That's a human flaw. That's not a disqualification."

"It's not the chewing, it's what the chewing suggested about his fundamental relationship to the world."

Mira put her mug down. "See, that. That. That right there is what I mean. You want to be in love like people are in love in films. You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie."

The phrase landed more accurately than Hazel appreciated. She picked up her coffee.

"That's a little harsh," she said.

"It's not harsh. It's said with complete love. You have this incredibly specific idea of what it's supposed to feel like — this thing that happens somewhere below the ribs and doesn't require explanation — and you're waiting for it in a world made of people who are just doing their best."

"I'm not waiting for anything impossible."

"You're waiting for the feeling, not the person. You've told me yourself that the feeling is the thing."

Hazel considered this.

"The feeling comes from the person," she said finally. "Or it should. I don't think I'm wrong to want it from the right one."

"I'm not saying you're wrong," Mira said. "I'm saying it might arrive in an unexpected package. Or with the mouth open."

"There are limits," Hazel said, "to unexpected packages."

Mira laughed. It was an argument they had been having in various forms for three years, and neither of them had conceded anything, which was perhaps the correct outcome.

What Hazel did not tell Mira — what she had not told anyone — was that she had begun to think about the anonymous caller.

Not in the way you think about someone you know. She knew nothing about him. She had no name, no face, no geography beyond the inferred Singapore and the single detail of a hotel room and a city that felt not-quite-his. She had his voice and his words and the particular quality of his silences, which were not awkward but considered — the silences of someone who was used to thinking before he spoke and had decided, for the duration of these notes, to let the thinking happen in front of her.

She thought about him the way you think about a song you have heard only once, that you cannot fully reconstruct but cannot stop reaching for.

He had sent four notes in four weeks.

They were not confessional in the way many listener notes were — raw and uncontrolled and arriving in the small hours smelling of tears or alcohol or both. His were more like letters. Formal at the edges and honest in the center. He asked questions sometimes that he did not expect answered, or that he answered himself, in the next breath. He mentioned — once, briefly — that he was a public person. He did not elaborate. The word he used was exhausted, and he used it the way someone uses a word for the first time after having suppressed it — with the relief of a thing finally said.

She had played three of his notes on air. She had kept one — too private, too unguarded, too much like finding an open letter — and had sent him a direct message through the podcast's anonymous portal instead:

I received your note. I didn't play it on air — it felt like it belonged to you more than the night. I hope you got some sleep.

He had responded four hours later, which meant it was very early morning wherever he was.

Thank you. I think that's the first time someone has handed something back to me instead of taking it.

She had read that and sat with it for a long time.

Chapter Four: Juhoon's Nights

November found Cortis in Seoul.

They were between legs of a tour — three weeks in which Juhoon was scheduled for individual promotional activities, two group variety show recordings, a photo shoot for a luxury watch brand, a fansign event, and a studio session for new material. This was a light schedule, relative to what had preceded and what would follow. His manager, Park Jiyoung, who had been with him for four years and communicated primarily in calendar invites and the occasional concerned glance, had told him he had evenings free this month.

Evenings free, for Juhoon, had begun to mean: earbuds in, lying on the floor of his apartment in Hannam-dong — he always preferred the floor to the bed when thinking, something about the flatness of it, the way it pressed back — listening to Sleepless in Seoul.

His apartment was a kind of performance in itself. It was beautiful and carefully designed and had been selected by a management company on the basis of several practical criteria, and it contained everything he needed and almost nothing he had chosen. There were plants, which were his — six of them, arranged by a window that faced north and therefore required exactly the kind of low-light species he had researched with a specificity that would have surprised anyone who had not seen him approach a problem he actually cared about. There was a bookshelf of novels. There was recording equipment that lived in the second bedroom, which had become the room where he actually existed, which told you something about him.

He did not think of himself as lonely. He thought of himself as alone, which was different — or should have been, and sometimes wasn't.

He lay on the floor on a Tuesday in November and listened to Episode 46.

Her voice was distinct. He had been thinking about this in the way that people who appreciate audio quality think about voices — technically, with genuine admiration — because there was something in it that functioned like a key in a lock. It was warm without being performed. It had a cadence that moved between thoughtfulness and humor with such ease that the humor felt like a natural weather condition rather than an attempt. She was, he had decided, someone who had spent considerable time listening to things, because she spoke like someone who understood that the silence around words was as important as the words themselves.

He knew nothing about her. He had tried, once, to find the podcast's origin and had arrived at a hosting platform with no personal information attached. He had not tried harder. There was something about the anonymity that felt necessary — a container for honesty that depended on its sealed quality. He had spent six years being known by the wrong parts of himself. The relief of being entirely unknown was so profound it had begun to feel like oxygen.

"Tonight," she said in Episode 46, "I want to talk about insomnia as a spiritual condition."

He smiled at the ceiling.

"I don't mean spiritual in the organized-religion sense, though I'll take it wherever it finds me. I mean it in the sense that 3 a.m. is perhaps the only hour when your brain stops negotiating with you. All the performance stops. All the version of yourself that you carry for other people — the competent one, the together one, the one who has answers — that person goes to sleep, usually, around midnight. And what's left is something more raw. More true, maybe. More afraid."

"Insomnia is a gift, in that sense. Not one you asked for. But it takes you somewhere most people don't go very often."

She paused, and he heard — very faintly — the sound of traffic through an open window, some distant city-breath.

"You are most yourself when you are most tired. Someone told me that once. I've been thinking about it for three years."

He sent her a voice note that same night, at 1 a.m., sitting in his second bedroom with the recording equipment off, just his phone.

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 47 — TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2 [LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]

"The episode about insomnia. I wanted to respond, which I don't usually want to do. I want to respond because you said something that I've been trying to say for about two years, and you said it much better than I could have.

The person who shows up at 3 a.m. — I've been thinking of that person as a failure. As evidence that something hasn't worked, hasn't held. I've been trying to get back to the other version — the one with answers, like you said — and not succeeding, and feeling the failure of that.

What if that's the wrong frame? That's the question I'm sitting with.

What if the 3 a.m. version is just the one who hasn't given up on being honest yet?"

Hazel listened to the note three times before airing it.

She aired it without comment at the end, which was unusual for her — she always responded, always let the notes land in a bed of conversation. But this one she let stand alone, and closed the episode with just the sound of her city in the background, and the quiet.

Her listener numbers were not large. But several people in the comments that week mentioned the final voice note specifically, with the vocabulary of people who had been surprised by something true.

One person wrote: who is that. I need to know who that is.

Hazel sat with that comment for a long time, in the dark, with the city breathing through her window, thinking: so do I, actually. So do I.

PART Ⅱ: PARALLEL FREQUENCIES

Chapter Five: Near Misses, or the Geometry of Almost

A map of Seoul in November would show, if you overlaid the movements of two people, a geometry of almost.

It would show Hazel walking from her apartment in Mangwon to the café on Wednesday mornings, earbuds in, hands in the pockets of her good coat, passing the ginkgo trees that had dropped their coins on the ground and were now bare-armed against the pale sky.

It would show Juhoon, on the same Wednesday, leaving the Cortis practice building three blocks north of that same street, head down, cap pulled low, moving to a van that waited at the corner.

It would show them at the same convenience store — the one on the corner with the handwritten sign in the window that said 참깨라면 입고 ("sesame ramen back in stock") in marker that had faded to the color of old blood — Juhoon at 11:45 p.m. on a Thursday, Hazel at 12:30 a.m. on the same Friday morning, after recording Episode 48.

It would show them at a coffee shop in Hongdae that they both frequented: Juhoon with a manager and a hat, Hazel with a linguistics paper and a highlighter, on different days in the same week in November, sitting in the same corner seat by the window because that seat had the best light and both of them knew it.

It would show parallel trajectories in a city of ten million people that kept bending toward each other without touching.

This was not fate, exactly. This was Seoul — layered and dense and full of coincidences that only became legible in retrospect, when you were trying to reconstruct the story of how two people's lives had arranged themselves into an inevitability. At the time, neither of them knew the other's face. They knew only: voice. Word. The specific quality of night silence on a podcast. The sound of a city breathing through two separate open windows.

Mira had a theory, which she shared over tteokbokki on a Friday evening in November.

"You are emotionally attached to a stranger," she said.

"I'm not attached," Hazel said. "I'm interested. There's a distinction."

"You brought him up in three separate conversations this week."

"I bring things up when they're interesting."

"You said he was perceptive. You described the quality of his silences." Mira pointed with her fork. "You described. The quality. Of a stranger's. Silences."

"He's a podcast listener who sends thoughtful notes."

"He's a man whose voice you have developed feelings about."

"I have appreciation. Not feelings."

"Those are the same thing and you know it." Mira leaned back. "You know what this is? This is just two neuroses knowing they are a perfect match. You are a person who falls in love through words and voices and cannot sleep, and he is apparently also a person who cannot sleep and speaks carefully and sends voice notes to anonymous podcasts at 1 a.m. You are two broken clocks that happen to ring at the same time."

"That's not romantic," Hazel said.

"I didn't say it was romantic. I said it made sense."

"They're the same thing."

Mira looked at her with the expression of someone watching a person walk directly into a glass door with great intentionality. "At least admit you're interested."

A pause. A piece of tteok, chewed. The sound of the restaurant around them, loud and warm and smelling of chili and sesame and the specific comfort of a Friday night.

"I'm interested," Hazel said.

"Progress," Mira said.

What she did not say — what she would not have known how to say, even to Mira, even to the air — was that the interest had begun to feel like more than curiosity. It was the kind of interest that colonized small moments: a Tuesday evening when she was editing audio and heard his voice again in playback and had to stop for a moment and just listen. A Thursday morning when she woke and found a new note in the podcast inbox and lay still before opening it, feeling something that lived adjacent to anticipation — that pleasurable dread of something you want very much and are afraid of in proportion to how much you want it.

She had begun to think of him as someone she knew. Which was insane. She knew nothing. No name. No face. No age, with certainty. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, based on voice and affect — a voice that had lived in it long enough to know its own register, that wasn't performing anything except occasionally, when it grew careful, a kind of self-consciousness.

She had begun to think of him as someone she was going to recognize when she met him.

This was, she acknowledged to herself in the 3 a.m. clarity she had described on air, possibly insane.

It was also possibly the most honest thing she had felt in two years.

Chapter Six: What Juhoon Was Not Saying

He had begun to wait for Tuesdays and Fridays in a way that reorganized his sense of the week.

This was not something he had planned or particularly welcomed. He was a person who had spent six years trying to limit his dependencies — not from coldness but from the particular knowledge that came from learning, repeatedly, that the things you leaned on in this industry had a habit of shifting or withdrawing or turning out to be contractual rather than real. He was not cynical about this. He had simply become careful.

And yet he was waiting for a podcast.

He had not told anyone. Not the other members, not his manager. It was not the sort of thing that required concealing — there was nothing shameful or dangerous about it — but telling someone would have made it legible, and he was not sure he wanted it legible. He wanted to keep it where it was: private, warm, entirely his.

In mid-November, Cortis recorded an episode of a variety show that required the members to answer questions about their current obsessions. The format was designed to produce revelations: rapid-fire, performed spontaneity, the warm chaos that made good television.

Martin had said: "I'm genuinely obsessed with this one tteokbokki place in Mapo. I went four times in one week. The owner recognized me on the third visit and said nothing, which I respected deeply."

James had said: "Old American road movies. The ones where nothing happens for forty-five minutes and then everything happens at once." He had delivered this with the slightly sideways smile of someone who understood exactly how that sounded and was comfortable with it.

Seonghyeon had said: "I've been learning to make bread. Not well. The bread is a problem. But I think there's a metaphor in the bread somewhere and I'm not ready to give up on it." This had produced thirty seconds of the other members laughing in a way that was entirely genuine, and which would be the clip most replayed from the episode.

Juhoon had said: "classical music" and "a plant care forum I found." Both true. Both safe.

He thought of the podcast and did not say it.

He sent a voice note that Tuesday:

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 49 — TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16 [LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]

"There's a specific version of loneliness that I think is particular to being surrounded. I want to talk about it but I'm not sure you can talk about it without it sounding like a complaint, and I don't want it to sound like a complaint, because I know how lucky I am. I say that not to preface a complaint but because it's actually true. I know how lucky I am.

But there's a version of loneliness that isn't about being alone. It's about — you're in the room and you're present and you perform presence very well, you've been doing it for a long time — but something in you is watching from the other side of the glass. You're watching yourself perform the being-there and you can't find your way back in.

I don't know if that's loneliness or something else. I don't know what to call it.

But I wanted to name it somewhere. Even if I couldn't name it properly."

Hazel sat with this one for a long time.

She played it toward the end of Episode 49, and when it ended she did not respond immediately. She let the city fill the silence. A distant motorbike. A few drops of rain against the window. The radiator's underbreath.

"That's not a complaint," she said finally. "That's a map. You just drew a map of something most people can't find words for."

She paused.

"I've felt it too. That being-on-the-other-side-of-the-glass thing. I think it's not loneliness exactly. I think it's the cost of performing yourself so reliably that you forget there's a self underneath the performance. And then 3 a.m. comes, or a stranger's podcast comes, and the performance falls away, and you remember you're still there."

Another pause, longer.

"You're still there," she said. "I just want to say that. Whatever you haven't been able to name — it's still there."

Juhoon listened to this on a Wednesday morning, in the van, on the way to a press junket, and did not trust what his face was doing for a full thirty seconds.

Keonho, seated beside him, glanced over.

"You good bro?" he said.

"Fine," Juhoon said. "Something in the podcast I'm listening to."

Keonho waited. He was good at waiting.

"It just — said something accurate," Juhoon said. "About something I hadn't managed to say myself."

Keonho nodded slowly, with the particular acknowledgment of someone who has known you long enough to understand that you do not need the response to be verbal.

"What podcast?" he said.

"Nothing you'd know," Juhoon said. "Small."

Keonho turned back to his own window. The van moved through Seoul in the grey morning light.

"Those are the good ones," he said.

That same evening, Cortis had a free night, which was rare enough that it functioned as an event.

They ended up at Keonho's apartment — the largest of the members' individual spaces, with a kitchen big enough for five people to occupy without anyone having to stand in the hallway — because Keonho had announced at 7 p.m. that he was making jjigae and anyone who arrived before eight would be fed and anyone who arrived after eight would have to explain themselves.

Everyone arrived before eight.

Martin arrived first, which was characteristic: he was constitutionally early and had spent six years pretending this was coincidence. He came in already wearing the particular expression of someone who wanted to be useful and was calibrating how to offer it, which was also characteristic, and set about chopping garlic with the focused pleasure of someone who had found a task at exactly the right moment.

James arrived second, with two bags of convenience store snacks arranged by what he described as "emotional logic" — the sweet things first, the salty things after, something fizzy at the end — and was immediately interrogated about the system by Seonghyeon, who arrived thirty seconds later having apparently been waiting outside the building for James so they could enter together, which neither of them acknowledged.

Juhoon arrived last and was greeted by the specific comfortable noise of four people who had been in each other's company for six years: overlapping conversations, someone's music from a phone, the sound of a spoon against a pot.

He sat on the floor by the low table — his preferred position, always the floor — and accepted a beer from Martin and felt something release in his chest the way it only released in rooms that did not require anything of him.

"You look like you're thinking," Seonghyeon said, dropping down beside him with the sudden gravity of a person who has decided the floor was the correct choice all along. He was eating something that crinkled.

"I'm not," Juhoon said.

"You have the face."

"What face."

"The one where you're working something out but you don't want to be asked about it." Seonghyeon considered this. "It's very identifiable. The fans have a name for it."

"The fans have a name for everything."

"They do," Seonghyeon agreed cheerfully. "It's a whole system. Very organized. Slightly frightening."

From the kitchen, Keonho said something that made Martin laugh loudly enough that James looked up from his phone with the expression of someone who had missed a joke and was deciding whether to ask. He did not ask. He put his phone away and came to sit at the table instead, and the five of them arranged themselves in the loose geometry of people who had long ago stopped being deliberate about where they sat in relation to each other, because the proximity had become its own language.

Juhoon ate. He listened. He let the room be a room.

Later, when the jjigae was finished and the conversation had moved through the schedule and an argument about whether a recent music video director's creative choices had been interesting or pretentious (James: interesting. Martin: both. Seonghyeon: pretentious is the new interesting. Keonho: quiet, smiling, refilling everyone's bowls), Keonho sat down beside Juhoon against the wall and the room reconfigured around them into two conversations — Seonghyeon and James falling into something about a game, Keonho drifting to the kitchen with the dishes.

"You sleeping?" Martin said.

"Getting there," Juhoon said, which was true in the literal sense of getting there, as in: closer than before, as in: something had been helping.

Martin looked at him for a moment. He had a way of asking the second question without asking it — of letting the silence run past the easy answer and wait for the real one.

Juhoon looked at his beer.

"I found something," he said finally. "That helps. With the nights."

Martin waited.

"Just — a thing I listen to. Someone talking about the city." He paused. "It sounds small."

"Small things," Martin said, "are usually the actual things."

Juhoon looked at him.

"You say things like that and then everyone wonders why you're the leader," he said.

Martin smiled, the small real one that didn't make it to stages. "Go to sleep at a reasonable hour for once in your life, Juhoon."

"I'll try," Juhoon said.

He did not, entirely. But he tried, which was more than he had been doing.

Chapter Seven: December

December arrived with the earnestness of a season that knew its own significance.

Seoul in December decorated itself with the kind of commitment that suggested the city had opinions about joy and was going to express them regardless. The streetlamps grew halos. The department stores on Myeongdong put up lights that could, from a distance, be mistaken for the grid of a small city that existed only at night. The Han River park installed warming tents where people sat and drank coffee and looked at the illuminated bridges and felt, for a few hours at a time, that the world was manageable.

Hazel loved December in Seoul with the specific love of someone for whom Christmas had always been more about the idea of the season than the execution of it — the philosophical proposition of warmth, the aesthetic of candlelight and cold air, the old cultural memory of the concept of home gathering itself around you even when you were technically a foreign student in an apartment with a radiator that expressed its mood through sound.

She was, in December, also developing a problem.

The problem was that she had begun to find herself narrating the city to the anonymous caller. Not out loud — not in messages, she was careful about that — but internally, as she moved through it. Standing on the Mapo Bridge watching the evening lights multiply on the water, she thought: he might like this. He said the river made him think of time passing differently. Walking through the Christmas market in City Hall Plaza, smelling cinnamon and roasted chestnuts, she thought: he mentioned once that cold weather in cities felt cleaner than cold weather outside of cities. He's right. This is clean cold.

She had not even realized she was doing it until one Thursday morning she had woken up and thought: I wonder if he uploaded anything new and then corrected herself, because he did not upload, she did, and he sent notes, and the distinction was important because it maintained the appropriate structure of their — not relationship. Their correspondence. Their exchange.

She was catastrophically interested in a stranger.

She held this information in both hands, examined it, put it away.

Then she took it back out.

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 52 — FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3 [HOST, HAZEL]

"It's raining in Seoul tonight. I know that's not news — it rains here more than people imagine, and it does something beautiful to the city at night, the way the lights double in the puddles, the way sound travels differently. Tonight I walked home from the river and it was raining lightly, the kind of rain that doesn't require an umbrella so much as a philosophical adjustment.

I've been thinking about proximity lately. About the way you can be close to something — geographically, emotionally — and still not be touching it. There's a word in Korean, 그리움 — geurium — which doesn't translate cleanly but gestures toward a longing for something absent. A missing that's also a kind of love. You don't miss something you didn't love. The missing is evidence of the love.

I think about that word sometimes at 3 a.m. when the city is very quiet and very present and still very far away at its edges.

I think about it when I wonder about people I don't know and won't meet. Whether the missing is its own form of connection.

I don't have an answer. It's just the question I brought with me tonight, and I thought you might want to keep me company with it."

He sent a note on the same Friday:

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 53 — TUESDAY, DECEMBER 7 [LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS, PLAYED WITH PERMISSION]

"I heard the episode about geurium. I know that word. I've known it for a long time without knowing it was a word, which is its own kind of strange comfort — learning that the language already has a container for the thing you've been carrying around formless.

I want to tell you something. I'm not sure I'm going to, but I'm going to get close.

When I listen to this podcast, I feel like I'm in a room I recognize. Not a room I've been in before. A room that feels like mine, or what mine could feel like, if I had built it myself. Does that make sense?

I spend most of my time in rooms other people built. Beautiful rooms. I'm not complaining about the rooms. But they weren't mine.

This is the only place I've found in a while that felt like I could breathe differently in it.

I don't know how to thank you for that without making it strange.

So I'll just say: thank you. And I'll be here Tuesday."

Hazel listened to this note four times before Episode 53 and then spent twenty minutes sitting in her apartment with the lights off, in the specific way of someone who has received something that requires processing time, who is afraid of being moved but is moved anyway.

She played it near the end of Episode 53. She did not speak after it. She played the sound of the city instead — three minutes of rain and traffic and Seoul at night — and let it end there.

In the comment section, which she read on Saturday mornings with a cup of tea like someone reading the newspaper of the previous week's emotional weather, someone wrote: if that man is listening, the room is yours too.

She almost responded. She did not.

She thought: I know.

Chapter Eight: January — The Distance Between Frequencies

January brought Cortis to Europe.

Twelve days. Germany, France, the Netherlands. The particular cold of a European winter that operated differently from Seoul's — drier, less personal, the light failing by four in the afternoon in a way that felt almost apologetic.

Juhoon sent voice notes from Hamburg, from Paris, from Amsterdam. He did not note the cities, but she could hear the difference — the ambient sounds, the specific acoustic quality of old architecture, something in the background hum that read as elsewhere to her trained ear.

She played them all. She was, by now, responding to him directly in her hosting sections — not by name, not with attribution, but in ways she suspected he recognized, because he responded to those responses in his next notes, and the conversation had developed a recursive quality, a back-and-forth built from episodes and voice notes like a correspondence conducted across weeks and mediated by a quiet hour and a small audience of insomniacs.

In Hamburg, after the second night's show, James found him on the roof terrace of the hotel — an impractical roof terrace for January, but both of them had been spending enough years in climate-controlled interiors that cold outdoor air had acquired a value beyond temperature.

James handed him a bottle of water without preamble and leaned on the railing beside him.

They looked at the city for a while.

"You were different tonight," James said eventually.

Juhoon glanced at him.

"Different how."

"Present." James said it without inflection, matter-of-fact, the way he said things that he had thought through already and didn't need to dramatize. "Like you were actually in the set and not — the other thing."

Juhoon was quiet for a moment.

"The other thing," he said.

"The thing you do sometimes where you're there but you're also clearly somewhere else. The fans call it your concept. It's not your concept." James looked at him. "So whatever it is — good. Keep it."

He did not ask what had changed. This was the thing about James: he had very good instincts about what questions were his to ask and which ones belonged to you, and he moved between those categories with a precision that Juhoon had come to rely on without ever saying so.

"It's nothing big," Juhoon said.

"Okay," James said.

"I've been listening to something. That helps."

"Good," James said again. He straightened up, finished his water. "Amsterdam tomorrow. Try to sleep before three."

He went back inside. The city spread below in its winter darkness, and Juhoon stood in the cold for another ten minutes thinking about a voice in Seoul and a window that was probably open even now, talking to the night.

In Paris, Seonghyeon knocked on his hotel room door at 11:30 p.m. and asked if he wanted to walk somewhere. This was how Seonghyeon processed new cities — by moving through them at night when the performance layer had been removed and the city was just a city.

They walked for forty minutes and Seonghyeon talked about the album they were supposed to start recording in March and the specific feeling of having an idea for a bridge section that he couldn't yet describe to anyone because it existed in his head as a texture rather than a sequence of notes. Juhoon listened and contributed occasionally, and Seonghyeon paused once outside a lit patisserie and took a photo of it and said: "Do you think anyone is happy in there right now?"

"It's closed," Juhoon said.

"The light is on."

"Bakeries prep overnight."

Seonghyeon considered this with genuine satisfaction. "So somewhere right now someone is making something. In the dark. For other people to find in the morning."

Juhoon thought, unexpectedly, about a podcast uploaded at 2 a.m. He did not say this.

"Yes," he said. "Exactly that."

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 56 — TUESDAY, JANUARY 11 [LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]

"I'm in Paris. I know that sounds like a sentence that should come with a different tone — a lighter one, I mean, the Paris-is-Paris tone. I don't have that tone right now. I have the other one, which is: I'm in Paris and I missed the entire city except through a car window, and it's midnight, and I'm in a hotel room, and I'm tired in a way that I can't sleep off anymore because it's not in my body. It's somewhere else.

I heard your episode about geurium. I wanted to say that I have been missing you lately.

Not you — not you specifically, I don't mean — I mean the frequency you're at. The room you described. I go back to Seoul and I think: the podcast is there. She's there. Somewhere in the city is that voice, and the open window, and the rain.

I think I might be homesick for a place I've never been."

Hazel paused the audio file.

She pressed her hand flat against her sternum, where something was pushing against the inside of her ribcage with a pressure that wasn't quite pain.

He had said her.

He had caught himself and corrected to the frequency and the room but the word had come first, undirected and true: you.

She pressed record.

"To the caller who's been to seventeen cities," she said, and then stopped, because she had just identified him aloud, had given him a name — even an unnamed name — on air for the first time, and that felt significant, felt like a door opened between two hallways, and she needed a moment.

She pressed on.

"You said homesick for a place you've never been. I wrote that down. I might need to give it back to you sometime, because I think it's the most accurate thing anyone has sent me in fifty-six episodes."

A breath.

"The room is there. The frequency is here. Come home when you can."

She did not understand, hearing herself say it back in editing, why come home had felt so natural. She deleted it twice and reinstated it twice, and then left it, because it was true, and editing out true things for comfort was exactly the habit she was trying to break.

Chapter Nine: February — Falling, Which Is Not the Same as Landing

February was when Hazel admitted it to herself.

Not to Mira. Not on air. Just to herself, on a Wednesday morning in her apartment, standing at the window with her tea, watching the street below where a man was trying to fold a broken umbrella against a stubborn wind, looking at the specific shade of winter sky that had no color really but managed to be beautiful anyway.

She was in love with a stranger's voice.

She was not going to do anything about this, obviously. You could not do anything about this. The entire construct of Sleepless in Seoul depended on its anonymity — for him, for her, for the listeners who sent things at 2 a.m. that required the dark to say. The moment she reached through the format for him specifically, the magic collapsed. More than that: it would be a violation. He had come to the podcast because it was safe, because nobody was looking, because the room could hold him without requiring him to be held.

She was not going to do anything about this.

She was just going to know it. Quietly, in the way you know things that you can't change — with the specific accommodation of the true insomniac, who understands that not everything requires resolution, that some things you simply carry through the dark hours and watch them change shape under different lights.

She turned from the window and put the cup in the sink and went to her desk and opened her laptop and began planning Episode 59 with more than usual care, because the care was what she could give him, and she was going to give it.

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 59 — FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18 [HOST]

"I've been thinking about what it means to know someone.

I mean this in the smallest, most specific sense: not the legal sense, not the biographical sense, but the — interior sense. To know someone's interior weather. The specific way they think around a problem rather than through it. The way they laugh when something surprises them versus when something delights them. The rhythm of their silences.

We talk about knowing people in terms of facts. We know their histories and their allergies and their preferences. But I think there's another kind of knowing that lives somewhere else — somewhere below facts, in the register of presence. You've either been in the room with someone's actual self or you haven't. Most of us are in the room with the version people bring to rooms.

I think the voice is different. The voice, in the dark, at an hour when the performance has stopped — I think the voice is closer to the actual self than most things we're given access to.

I know things about some of you that I couldn't name. Can't put in a sentence. But I know them. In here."

She pressed her hand to her sternum.

"That's enough. That's more than most people get."

He sent a note that same Friday, which was unusual — his notes typically came between episodes, not on the day of one.

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 60 — TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22 [LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]

"I heard tonight's episode and I'm not sleeping anyway so I thought I'd send this now.

You said the voice in the dark is closer to the actual self. I've been thinking about that for three hours. I've been thinking about the last time I felt like my actual self in a room. Not the version I carried in. Not the version required.

I think — I'm almost sure — that this is it. These notes. Tuesday and Friday.

I don't say that because I want to make it strange. I say it because you said honesty was the reason for the hour, and I'm trying to practice. The actual-self practice. It's harder than it sounds.

I'm working up to something. I'm not there yet. I want you to know that I am, though. Working up to it.

Also: it snowed last night in Seoul. I stood on my balcony for a long time. I thought about something you said three episodes ago about how cities look honest in the snow, how they can't hide their shapes. I think I've been hiding my shape for a while. I'm trying to stop."

She did not play this note on air.

She sat with it in her inbox for three days, and then sent a message through the portal:

The snow is still on the rooftops on my street. The city looks exactly like you said — honest. Like it got tired of the performance too. I'm glad you're here. Tuesday and Friday. I'm glad it's you.

His response came at 11:47 p.m.:

I'm glad it's you too.

PART Ⅲ: THE WEIGHT OF BEING KNOWN

Chapter Ten: March — What the Fans Noticed

Fame had its own ecosystem, and within that ecosystem there were people — a specific subset, dedicated and observant and possessed of a collective intelligence that operated like a distributed computer — who noticed things.

The fan community that had gathered around Cortis over six years was vast and internally differentiated, with its own hierarchies and dialects. There were casual listeners, there were dedicated followers, there were the people who attended every available fan event and the people who tracked schedules and the people who ran analysis accounts and the people who maintained collaborative wikis of increasingly granular detail.

And there were, in March, several of these people who began to notice something about Juhoon.

It was not one thing. It was a collection of things, and the collection was only visible to people who paid very close attention to the pattern of things rather than the things themselves. It was the fact that since approximately October, Juhoon had developed a habit of using the word frequency in interviews when asked about his emotional state — not often, but repeatedly enough that someone catalogued it. It was the fact that he had said, on a music show in January, when asked what he listened to when he couldn't sleep, that he listened to "a podcast" with an expression that was unusual for him — not guarded, not performed, but private in the way of someone protecting something soft. It was the fact that his most recent lyrics, which he had written for the new Cortis album, contained images of open windows and cities at night and a specific phrase — the room I recognize — that a dedicated enough reader would have recognized as a paraphrase of something that appeared, if you knew where to look, in an obscure episode of a small anonymous podcast called Sleepless in Seoul.

The fan who made this connection was a twenty-year-old in Daegu named Kim Soojin, who ran an analysis account with eight thousand followers and had the methodical patience of someone who genuinely found the puzzle interesting for its own sake.

She posted her analysis on a Thursday in March with appropriate caveats — this is speculative, this might be nothing, I am not trying to start anything — and the analysis was, methodologically, excellent. It laid out the pattern clearly without conclusions she hadn't earned.

The post received twenty-three thousand likes in four hours.

The comment most frequently made was a variation of: who is the podcast person.

Hazel was entirely unaware of this.

She had eighty-eight thousand listeners as of March, which was still small in the landscape of podcasts but had been growing steadily, and she still had not told anyone who she was. She had received press inquiries twice, from small music blogs who had written about the podcast's unique format, and had declined both times. She was, in some ways, well-positioned to be found — a foreign national in Seoul, an English-speaking podcast about the city, a distinctive voice — but she had structured the anonymity carefully, and the fans who arrived at Sleepless in Seoul through the analysis post found: a voice, episodes, and an inbox.

They sent thousands of messages in three days.

Most of them were kind. A few were not. Most asked versions of the same question — is JH from Cortis the anonymous caller — with varying degrees of tact. One sent a ten-paragraph analysis of voice note acoustic patterns that was genuinely impressive and reached the correct conclusion.

Hazel read all of them on a Saturday morning with her tea going cold, and by the time she reached the end of the inbox, the tea was room temperature and something in her chest was very loud and confused and frightened.

She knew the name. Everyone in Seoul knew the name. Cortis had released their latest album six weeks ago and it had been on every playlist and every café speaker and every subway advertisement for a month and a half, and Hazel had listened to it — she had listened to it three times, actually, because she had good taste in music and the album was genuinely exceptional — and she had not — had not once — connected—

She opened the fan analysis post on her phone.

She read it very carefully.

She read it again.

She turned her phone face-down on the table.

She sat for a very long time in the specific silence of someone who has just been handed information that reorganizes everything and is not yet sure in which direction.

Chapter Eleven: What She Knew and What She Didn't

She did not tell him.

This was important. This was the decision she made within the first hour, sitting at her table with the overcast March light coming through the window. She did not reach into the inbox and say: I know who you are now. She did not send anything. She sat with the information and let it settle and tried to understand what it meant to her.

What it meant, initially, was terror.

Not because he was famous — or not only because of that, though the fame was large enough to require some processing on its own. But because the analysis post had made something visible that she had been keeping carefully unexamined: she had feelings. Real ones. Not the interesting-intellectual-aesthetic feelings she had been willing to admit to. The kind that rearranged your priorities and made you think about a person at 3 a.m. in the way you thought about something whose absence would actually cost you something.

She had those feelings about a person she had never met, whose voice she knew and whose face now appeared on her phone screen if she looked him up, which she had, once, briefly, before putting the phone down again.

He was exactly what you would expect. Which was not the point. The point was that the voice she knew was the voice of someone who existed in the world in a way that was vast and surveilled and managed, and she was an anonymous podcast host in a fifth-floor apartment in Mangwon, and the distance between those two lives was not merely geographic.

She thought about what Mira had said, months ago: you don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.

She thought about the specific way his voice had said I think I might be homesick for a place I've never been.

She thought about her own voice saying come home when you can and the word she had deleted twice and reinstated twice.

She thought: this is what it is. You fell in love with a voice in the dark, and the voice turned out to belong to someone, and someone turned out to be real, and now you have to figure out what to do with that.

She pressed record.

She did not tell him what she knew. She recorded Episode 61 as she always did — the city, the hour, the state of things — and she played two listener notes that were not his, and she spoke for seventeen minutes and recorded three minutes of Seoul breathing at the end.

She uploaded it at 2 a.m. on Tuesday.

She lay down afterward and stared at the ceiling with her heart beating strangely.

He sent a note three hours later.

[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS, NOT AIRED]

"I heard tonight's episode. You sounded different.

Not bad different. Just — like something had shifted. Like you were speaking from slightly further back.

I notice things like this. I've been listening long enough now that I know your voice the way you know someone's footstep pattern. I know when you're tired and when you're uncertain. Tonight you were uncertain.

I hope you're okay. I hope whatever is making you uncertain is the kind that resolves rather than the kind that stays.

I'm in Seoul. I've been here for three weeks now, which feels like a long time by my standards. I've been thinking about — I've been thinking about a lot of things. About what it would mean to —

I'm not going to finish that sentence yet.

But soon."

She read this in bed at 5 a.m. and thought: I know.

She wrote back:

I'm fine. Still here. You don't have to finish the sentence yet.

She pressed send and put her phone face-down and made herself sleep.

Chapter Twelve: Mira Figures It Out

The thing about Mira was that she was relentlessly perceptive, and this was both her greatest quality and the thing that made her difficult to hide things from.

She showed up at Hazel's apartment on a Wednesday evening in March with groceries and the specific energy of someone who had been assembling evidence all week and had now arrived to present it. Hazel let her in without particular apprehension, because she had been telling herself she was fine.

She was not fine.

"Sit down," Mira said, depositing groceries on the counter and taking off her coat with the purposefulness of someone who had not come to cook but was using the groceries as context.

"I live here," Hazel said.

"Sit."

Hazel sat.

Mira pulled out her phone and laid it on the table between them, screen up. The fan analysis post was on the screen.

Hazel looked at it for a moment.

"How did you find that," she said.

"Because I follow eight Cortis fan accounts, as anyone with good taste in music does, and this has been everywhere this week." Mira sat down across from her. "And because I remembered you said the podcast listener spoke with a deep tired voice and was on tour a lot and was probably a public figure and said I'm surrounded by people and I'm completely alone."

A silence.

"And?" Hazel said.

"And," Mira said, "his voice on the recent album documentary is — Hazel, his voice is—"

"I know," Hazel said.

The silence that followed was the kind that Mira had learned, over three years, to give space to.

"How long have you known?" she said finally.

"A week."

"And?"

"And I'm processing it."

"That's a word," Mira said. "Let's try different words."

Hazel looked at the table. Outside, the rain that had been threatening all day finally arrived, a sound against the window that she had been using as emotional texture for eighteen months and was now simply grateful for because it gave her somewhere else to direct her attention.

"I think I'm in love with a voice," she said. "And the voice has a face, and the face is—" She gestured helplessly.

"Famous," Mira said.

"That's the smallest part of it."

"What's the largest part?"

"The largest part is that I don't know how to—" She pressed her hands flat on the table. "When I didn't know who he was, it was clean. It was just — two people in the dark, being honest with each other. I didn't have to think about what it meant or whether it was possible or whether he was performing some private version of himself for an anonymous podcast the way people perform everything else."

"Do you think he was?"

Hazel was quiet for a moment.

"No," she said. "I don't think he was. That's the thing. That's why I'm — that's the problem. I don't think it was performed. I think he came to the podcast because it was the one place nothing was required of him."

Mira looked at her friend with the particular gentleness she kept under all the opinions.

"So what are you afraid of?" she said.

"That it was never about me," Hazel said. "That it was about the anonymous room. That I was just the container for something he needed to put somewhere."

"And if that's not true?"

"Then I'm afraid of it being true in a different direction — that it was me, specifically, and that when he finds out who specifically I am, I won't be—" She paused. "He lives in a world I can't imagine. People follow him. People study him. People have feelings about him that go on for paragraphs. I am a person in a small apartment in Mangwon who runs a podcast that eighty-eight thousand people listen to, which is a lot but is nothing compared to—"

"Stop," Mira said.

Hazel stopped.

"You are not nothing compared to," Mira said. "You are a specific person who a specific person sends voice notes to at 1 a.m. in hotels in European cities. You are the room he described. You are the frequency. He said that — you told me he said that."

"Mira—"

"He said it. Not to JH-the-idol's hypothetical future girlfriend. To you. To your voice. To the you that talks about the city at 3 a.m. and says geurium correctly and lets the silence mean things."

Hazel blinked. Something was happening behind her eyes that she was going to prevent from becoming tears, because she was a person who cried rarely and in private.

"He doesn't know it's me," she said.

"He knows more about you than most people who have had coffee with you," Mira said.

This, Hazel thought, was possibly true. It was also not an answer to the problem. It was, if anything, the description of the problem from a new angle.

"I don't know what to do," she said.

Mira reached across the table and put her hand over Hazel's.

"I know," she said. "But here's the thing. You don't have to do anything yet. He's still sending notes, isn't he?"

"Yes."

"So keep going. Keep being the room. And trust that something is going to happen that makes the next thing clear."

Hazel looked at her friend.

"That is completely uncharacteristically soft of you," she said.

"I have depth," Mira said. "It's a whole thing."

Chapter Thirteen: The Album

The new Cortis album was called Seventeen Cities.

Juhoon had written three of the twelve tracks on his own, which was unusual — he had always contributed to the group's songwriting but not in this quantity, not with this specificity. The album's B-side had a song called The Open Window that was quieter than anything he had released before, almost uncomfortably personal, and the music press had noticed this and commented with varying degrees of insight. One review had called it "a departure into interior territory." Another had called it "JH's love letter to insomnia." A third, more perceptive, had noted that it sounded like "the documentation of something that happened rather than the invention of something desired."

Juhoon had read that review in the back of a van and thought: yes. That's exactly right.

The lyrics contained a line that his co-writers had questioned — not critically, but with the curiosity of people who wanted to understand the reference — which went:

I heard your voice and it was coming home to a place I'd never been but always known

He had kept it because there was no version of it that felt less true, and the alternative was writing something that sounded like a love song but wasn't, and he had enough of those.

He had been thinking, all of March, about the unfinished sentence.

He had said: I've been thinking about what it would mean to—

And stopped himself.

What he had been thinking about, and what he had not sent into the voice note, was this: what it would mean to reach through the podcast's anonymous format and say something direct. To ask — carefully, with appropriate respect for the container they had built — whether there was a way to be in the same room that wasn't mediated by audio files and inboxes.

He had been thinking about this since February.

He had not done it yet because he was not sure of the grammar. Because there was something that worked only in this specific dark-and-anonymous space, and to dismantle it in pursuit of a more conventional kind of proximity seemed like a risk that required certainty he didn't have. He was afraid that knowing would not improve on not-knowing. He was afraid that the version of themselves they had built in the dark, without faces, without the weight of the world either of them moved through — that version was fragile, and he had never held anything fragile well.

He was also, and this was the true thing underneath all the others, afraid that he was wrong. That the feeling was one-directional. That she was a podcast host who treated all her dedicated listeners with this specific warmth and that he had misread the warmth as directed.

He had listened, more than once, to the episode where she said: I know things about some of you that I couldn't name. He had turned the phrase in his hands. He had wondered if he was in the some of you or if he was flattering himself.

On a Tuesday in late March, after listening to Episode 63 and sitting for twenty minutes on the floor of his apartment — his good floor, the flat honest floor — he sent a note that was the closest he had come to finishing the sentence.

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 64 — TUESDAY, MARCH 29 [LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]

"I want to tell you something, and I want to tell it carefully, because the space we've built — the Tuesday-and-Friday space — is the most honest one I've had in years, and I don't want to damage it by asking it to hold more than it was designed for.

But I think I have to. I think I have to try.

I've been listening to your voice for six months. I've been sending you things I don't send anywhere else. And the person who sends those things — the one at 3 a.m. on hotel floors and apartment floors and in cities I couldn't locate on a map afterward — that person feels more like me than the one I carry around the rest of the time.

I don't know you. I know your voice and the way your mind moves and the city you live in and that you're awake at 2 a.m. and that you love rain and that you said geurium once in a way that I've been carrying with me ever since.

I think that's knowing.

I think I want to find out if I'm right.

I don't know how to ask this appropriately inside the format we have. So I'm going to ask it here, and if it's wrong, you can keep this note out of the episode and I'll understand: is there a way to be in the same city without the microphone between us?"

She listened to this voice note alone, at 1:30 in the morning, on a Tuesday, the city audible through her window.

She listened to it twice.

She pressed both hands against her face for a moment, covering her eyes, taking a breath.

Then she opened the portal, and wrote:

I think there's a way. But I need to tell you something first. Can we talk in here — in writing, just the two of us, before we talk in the same city? There's something I know that I should have told you sooner, and I want to tell you before it tells itself.

He responded twenty-three minutes later:

Yes. Tell me.

PART Ⅳ: THE COST OF BEING SEEN

Chapter Fourteen: What She Told Him

She wrote it carefully.

She had drafted it three times in a document before she sent it through the portal, and the three drafts showed the stages of how you tell someone something true: the first draft was too apologetic; the second was too clinical; the third, which she sent, was simply what had happened.

[PORTAL MESSAGE — HOST TO ANONYMOUS LISTENER — MARCH 29, 2:14 A.M.]

I've known for three weeks. A fan community made a connection between your voice notes and some things you've said in other contexts — I won't explain the chain of reasoning, but it was thorough and I believe it. I didn't come looking. It came to me. And then I went still for a while because I didn't know what it meant and I didn't know how to say it and every time I thought about opening this window I— I want to be honest about why I didn't tell you immediately: I was afraid. Not of who you are. Of what it might do to the thing we built here if the weight of who you are walked into the room. This space has worked because neither of us has had to carry the rest of ourselves into it. And I didn't want to be the one to end that. I still don't know if this is the end or the beginning of something. I know that I should have told you when I found out. I know that sitting with it for three weeks while you sent me notes was not entirely honest, even though I wasn't performing anything — everything I have said to you has been true, is true, will continue to be true. I'm sorry I waited. Tell me what you need.

She pressed send. She sat. She put the kettle on, because she was a person who dealt with large emotional moments by making tea, which was not the most sophisticated coping mechanism but was thermally reliable.

She was on her second cup when the response came.

[PORTAL MESSAGE — ANONYMOUS LISTENER — MARCH 29, 3:07 A.M.]

How long have you known. I know you said three weeks. I mean — which version of what I said. Which notes. How much.

She understood the question. She typed:

All of it. I've kept it from air when you asked. Everything else I've heard.

A longer pause this time.

[PORTAL MESSAGE — 3:24 A.M.]

I need a few days. Not because I'm angry. Because I need to think. Is that okay.

Yes, she wrote.

The room is here. I'll be here.

Three days became five.

She recorded Episode 64 on Tuesday as scheduled, because the podcast was not contingent on him, had never been contingent on him, and the eighty-eight thousand people who listened deserved her full presence regardless of the specific state of her own heart. She talked about March and the way seasons in Seoul were opinions rather than facts — March insisting it was spring while wearing winter's temperature like borrowed clothing. She did not mention anything personal. She played four listener notes, none of them his.

She uploaded at 2 a.m. and sat in the quiet afterward and thought about a man she had never met in a city she shared with ten million people, sitting somewhere in the dark, deciding.

He listened to Episode 64 on a Wednesday morning, alone, in his apartment, lying on the floor.

He listened to it twice.

He thought about the three weeks she had known and not said. He turned it over carefully, looking for the thing that would make him feel betrayed — looking for the performance, for the manipulation, for the evidence of a game he had been inside without knowing.

He could not find it.

What he found instead, when he was honest about what he found: someone who had received knowledge that would have broken the container, and had sat with it and been afraid, and had chosen to keep the room exactly as he had left it rather than dismantle it in a moment of revelation. That was not manipulation. That was a specific kind of care — the kind that cost the person doing it something rather than nothing.

He listened to her voice in Episode 64 saying: March in Seoul insists on things.

He thought: I know that voice. He had known that voice for six months. He had told that voice things he had never told a room of people or a therapist or the oldest friend he had in the world. The voice had not changed when what lay behind it changed.

It was a million tiny little things, he thought — and the thought arrived not as a sentence but as a weight, a collection, the accumulated mass of Tuesday and Friday and Singapore and Paris and Seoul in the snow and the room I recognize and come home when you can — and when you added them all up, they were the shape of something that meant: we were supposed to be here.

He sent a message through the portal on Friday morning.

[PORTAL MESSAGE — FRIDAY, APRIL 1]

I'm not angry. I want to be clear about that first. I've been thinking about what it would feel like to have someone know something about me and choose to keep the room safe rather than do anything with the knowing. I've been in situations where people knew things about me and the knowing immediately became something they used — for access, for leverage, for content, for the feeling of being adjacent to something. I've been around that for six years. You knew. You sat with it for three weeks and you kept Tuesday and Friday exactly as they were, and you kept the voice notes private when I asked, and you said things on air that were directed at me without ever making it about me in a way that cost me anything. That's not nothing. That's the opposite of nothing. I want to ask you something: do you listen to the music? Not in a — I'm not asking for approval. I'm asking because I'm trying to understand what you knew before you knew who I was. How much of what you thought you understood about me was correct. Because I'm afraid that what you actually heard in the voice notes and what gets performed in the other context are so different that I'm asking you to believe in the voice without the face and I don't know if that's fair.

She read this twice and then put the phone down and thought for a long time.

Then she typed:

I listened to the album three times before I knew. I thought it was about insomnia, which it partly is, and about the loneliness of travel, and about something I recognized from the podcast but didn't connect. The open window song — I had feelings about it that I was trying not to articulate. The voice in the notes and the voice in the music are different in production and context and purpose. But underneath both of them: same person. Same rhythm. Same silences. I'm not in love with your work. I'm in love with a man who lay on hotel floors in European cities and sent me notes about not being able to sleep.

She stared at what she had written for a long time.

She sent it.

She put the phone face-down.

Her hands were shaking very slightly, which was unusual, because she had good emotional regulation as a general rule.

The response came eleven minutes later.

I'd like to be in the same city without the microphone between us. I know I asked before, and things were different then. I'm asking again. Is Saturday okay.

Chapter Fifteen: April — The Other Side of the Glass

The place he suggested was a small coffee shop in Yeonnam-dong that he had described, three months earlier in a voice note, as one of the only places in Seoul where he felt invisible enough to think. He had not given the name. He had described it precisely enough that she had found it — the one with the green door and the records on the walls and the table by the second window that caught the light in the late afternoon.

She recognized it immediately because she had been there twice.

She arrived seven minutes early and sat at the table by the second window and ordered a coffee with both hands wrapped around the cup, because her hands were still doing the slight thing from the night before, which she was attributing to general circumstance and not specifically to what she was about to do.

It was a Saturday in April. The cherry blossoms along the streets had peaked and begun to fall, which meant the streets looked like what April believed about itself, and the light was doing the thing it did at four in the afternoon in this city where it came in at an angle that made everything look like it was being remembered rather than currently occurring.

She was watching the door.

He came in at 4:08.

She knew him immediately, and not from his face, which she had looked at exactly once before putting the phone away. She knew him from the quality of his attention — the way he scanned the room not with the alert defensiveness of someone used to being recognized, but with a specific looking that was clearly searching for one thing. That particular searching stillness. She had heard it in his silences. She knew it in his body.

He found her.

The moment was nothing like what the movies would do with it — no swelling music, no clean emotional detonation, no dialogue landing with practiced weight. It was simply a man and a woman looking at each other across a small coffee shop for the first time, and the look containing everything that a voice contains: recognition. Relief. The particular terror of having finally arrived somewhere you have been trying to reach for a long time.

He walked to the table. He sat down across from her.

They looked at each other.

"Hi," she said. Her voice was exactly as it sounded on the podcast — warm, careful, with that slight husk of someone who was being honest in real time.

"Hi," he said.

His voice. She had listened to his voice for six months in the dark, and now it was three feet away from her, directed entirely at her, in a room that smelled like coffee and old records, with the April light coming in at the right angle for a thing that was happening that mattered.

It was like coming home to a place she had never been.

She knew that was too much to think within the first fifteen seconds of meeting someone. She thought it anyway.

He had not known what to expect. He had run through versions in his head, the way he ran through scenarios before anything high-stakes — concert openings, media appearances, meetings where the thing on the table was larger than the thing being said. He had imagined various configurations of the meeting: awkward and tender, or formal-becoming-warm, or the particular disaster of reality failing to match six months of constructed feeling.

She was not what he had imagined, and she was also exactly what he had imagined, which was the confusing thing — the way you could know something from a voice so well that the face was simultaneously a surprise and an inevitability.

She had red-chestnut hair and dark eyes and she was holding her coffee cup with both hands wrapped around it in a way that suggested she was cold or nervous or both, and she was looking at him with an expression he recognized from the podcast in a way that was strange, because this was not a face he had heard before. But the expression — that combination of directness and restraint, the thing that opened and then carefully managed the opening — that he knew.

"I listened to Episode 64 four times," he said, because the first thing that came out of his mouth might as well be true.

"I know which part you listened to," she said.

"The March one. The seasons-insisting."

"That was for you."

"I know."

A pause. The coffee shop moved around them — two students at a laptop, a couple near the window, the record player on the counter spinning something old and warm.

"I want to say something," he said, "and I want to say it before we figure out the rest of it, because I think the rest is complicated and I want to say the simple thing first."

She waited. She was good at waiting. He had known this about her.

"When I listen to your voice," he said, "I feel like myself. Not the self I carry around. The one underneath. The one that's still there."

She looked at him for a moment.

"I know," she said. "Your notes do that for me too."

"I know," he said. "You said so. Episode 59."

They looked at each other, and then — simultaneously, and with the slight inevitability of two people who have been circling the same frequency for six months — they both smiled. Not the big public smile she had seen in photographs. A smaller one. The real one.

They talked for three hours.

This was not romantic in the cinematic sense, which was perhaps the most romantic thing about it — no confession scene, no dramatic crossing of the room. They talked the way people talk when they have been saving things up: with the relief of a pressure released, conversation flowing in multiple directions at once, looping back, going deeper. He talked about the tour with the specificity of someone who had been waiting to describe it to someone who would actually hear it. She talked about the podcast the way she had never talked about it to anyone — the things she chose, and why, and what the listener community meant to her.

He knew the specific episodes. He had opinions about her editing choices. He quoted a line back at her from six months ago, word for word, and she looked at him with an expression that was surprise and also not surprise.

"You have a very good memory," she said.

"I have a very good reason," he said.

And she looked at the table and then back at him and they understood each other.

She walked home at seven in the evening through the April streets with cherry blossom petals on the pavement beneath her feet, and she called Mira.

"Well?" Mira said.

"He knows the episodes by number," Hazel said.

A pause.

"Hazel," Mira said.

"I know," Hazel said.

"You're okay?"

"I'm more than okay," she said. "I'm — I'm something without a clean name."

"Geurium?"

"No. The opposite. The thing geurium is the missing of. The presence. The having-arrived."

Another pause, different quality.

"Good," Mira said. "I'm very, very glad."

"Me too," Hazel said.

She kept walking. The petals fell. The city held her, as it always had — generous and awake and indifferent to the enormous things that happened quietly inside it, as enormous things always do.

PART Ⅴ: THE COST OF BEING FOUND

Chapter Sixteen: Public

Hazel had been naive in exactly one respect, and it was a large one.

She had believed — had allowed herself to believe, in the specific hopefulness of the first weeks, when everything was contained and careful and new — that the fan community's theory about the anonymous caller had been speculative enough to remain speculative. Unconfirmed. A theory among theories.

She had underestimated, significantly, the collective intelligence of eight thousand observant people with time, search tools, and genuine investment.

The photograph was taken on their third Saturday meeting, at a different café — one further from Juhoon's usual territory, in a quiet alley in Seongbuk-dong that neither of them had been to before. It was a single photograph, slightly blurred, taken from outside through glass. It showed two people at a table: a young man whose face was partially turned away but identifiable to anyone who had been looking, and a young woman with red-chestnut hair and both hands around a coffee cup.

It appeared on a fan forum on a Sunday morning.

By Monday it had appeared on three Korean entertainment news sites.

By Tuesday it had been picked up by international K-pop coverage.

By Wednesday Hazel had been identified.

The identification was not difficult, in the end. She was a foreign student at a specific university. Her voice was on eighty-eight episodes of a podcast that a large number of people were now searching with the specific intention of finding. Someone found a faculty photo of her from a university event. Someone cross-referenced her voice with the podcast. Someone matched the podcast's general Mangwon geography to the area of the photograph.

The comments were varied. This was the diplomatic way to say it.

Some were warm: she sounds incredible, I've been listening all week. Some were curious: the podcast really is beautiful, you can understand why he likes it. Some were protective of Juhoon in a way that was explicitly hostile toward Hazel: she obviously knew who he was the whole time, this is a manipulation. Some were simply the undifferentiated noise of mass attention, which had no particular content but a quantity that made the podcast inbox unsustainable.

Hazel's listener numbers went from eighty-eight thousand to four hundred thousand in four days.

She did not upload an episode that week. She could not.

She heard from Juhoon's management first — a call from Park Jiyoung, who was professional and efficient and did not make it hostile but made it very clear that the situation required management on multiple fronts, and that the company's position was that both parties should refrain from public statement until a strategy was developed.

She heard from Juhoon second — a message through the portal, which felt, in the circumstances, like someone choosing a room they trusted over one they had been handed.

I'm sorry. I know that's not enough. I'm sorry this came at you this way. Are you okay.

She was not okay. She was the specific kind of not-okay that came from having your quiet careful life suddenly made visible and contested and treated as a narrative by people who had no knowledge of its actual content.

She wrote back:

I'm managing. How are you managing.

They want me to not respond publicly. I disagree. But I understand the argument for it.

What do you want to do?

she wrote.

A pause.

I want to tell them it was real and tell them to be kind to you. I don't know if that helps or hurts.

What Juhoon was not writing to her, because he could not say it without it becoming something he wasn't ready to name, was that the week after the photograph had been the worst one in recent memory — not because of the news cycle, which he had lived through versions of before, but because Martin had knocked on his door on a Tuesday evening and sat down on his couch with the specific expression of a leader who had been quietly watching something develop for months and had now decided that watching was no longer the appropriate posture.

"I listened to it," Martin said.

Juhoon did not ask what.

"The whole archive," Martin said. "I started from the beginning on Sunday." He paused. "She's good, Juhoon. She's really good."

"I know," Juhoon said.

"I listened to the notes you sent her."

"I know."

Martin was quiet for a moment. He had a quality when he was being honest that was different from his performance of honesty — a stillness, something that stopped reaching for effect. It was the quality Juhoon trusted most in him.

"The one from Paris," he said. "About being homesick for a place you've never been."

Juhoon said nothing.

"I didn't know you felt like that," Martin said. "I've been here the whole time and I didn't know."

"It's not — it's not something I could have said in a room," Juhoon said. "That's the whole thing. That was the whole point of it."

Martin nodded slowly, like someone processing the logic of a feeling he hadn't been equipped to receive before.

"Okay," he said. "I get it." He looked at Juhoon directly. "She's real. What you were doing in there was real. I just wanted to say that out loud, because I think you need someone to say it who isn't on the other side of a screen."

Juhoon looked at his hands.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't thank me. Fix it." Martin stood up, with the efficiency of someone who had said the thing and was not going to dilute it by staying too long. "Also Seonghyeon went down a three-hour rabbit hole of the podcast and now he keeps quoting it at me in context. That's on you."

Despite everything, Juhoon laughed.

It was the first time in a week he had laughed at something real.

She sat with this for a while.

Let me think, she wrote.

Chapter Seventeen: The Betrayal She Hadn't Expected

The version of the story that became dominant — the one repeated and reframed across entertainment news cycles and fan forums and social media comment threads — was that Hazel had knowingly pursued a famous person through the guise of an anonymous podcast, had cultivated a relationship while maintaining false ignorance of his identity, and had used the podcast as a platform to launder proximity into intimacy.

This version was wrong. It was also extremely coherent and emotionally satisfying as a story, which made it difficult to displace.

What the version got wrong — what the version necessarily elided — was the order of things. Which was the entire point. She had not known. She had built the room before he arrived. She had fallen in love with the voice before the face, and the face had been a discovery, and the discovery had frightened her before it had done anything else.

The version did not know this. The version had access only to a photograph through a coffee shop window, and a podcast that now had four hundred thousand listeners going through it looking for evidence of design.

She understood, in a way she had not before, what it was to have your interior life narrated by people outside it. She had a new and bone-deep sympathy for what Juhoon had been trying to say in November about the glass — the one you stood behind watching yourself be interpreted.

She also understood, in a way she had not anticipated and did not know how to frame yet, what it felt like to wonder about the version of the story that was wrong.

Not the public version. The private one.

The question she had asked herself in the beginning and then set aside: had the anonymity been the point, or had she been? Was she the room, or was she the person?

She knew, in her honest 3 a.m. self, what she believed. But knowledge and fear coexisted. They had always coexisted in her — she was a person made of careful knowing and still-present fear, and she had made her peace with that most of the time.

Most of the time.

She sent him a message on a Thursday, twelve days after the photograph.

[PORTAL MESSAGE — THURSDAY, APRIL 21]

I've been thinking about something, and I want to say it clearly because I think we owe each other clarity in proportion to how much we've owed each other honesty. I don't want to be someone you're settling for. I don't mean that the way it sounds at first — I don't mean settling as in compromise. I mean: I don't want to be the version that was safe and anonymous and required nothing from you except what you chose to give. I don't want to be the podcast. I want to be the person. But I'm also — I'm afraid that the podcast was the person, and that the person is not separate from it, and that when the podcast becomes four hundred thousand strangers looking for a story, the person inside it gets — smaller. Less distinct. I am afraid of being less distinct. I know who you are now. I knew before, but now I know it differently — I know it the way the world knows it, which is a lot of information and very little of it true. And I'm afraid that the world's version of you is going to be the version I'm dealing with now, and not the man on the floor in Singapore who sent me a note about rain. Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me what's actually happening in there. Not the version that gets managed. The floor version.

The response came two hours later, which was fast by his standards — she had learned the timing of his thinking.

[PORTAL MESSAGE — THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 11:52 P.M.]

The floor version is this: I am frightened that you are going to decide that the distance between our lives is not crossable and that the math is wrong and that I am too much — not as a person, but as a thing to be attached to in the world. I am frightened that the month the world spent narrating us has cost you something you didn't choose to spend. I am frightened that you heard the voice and the voice was enough, and then the voice got a body with a world attached to it, and the world is not what you signed up for. I do not know how to make the world smaller. I have been trying to do that for six years. I have not succeeded. What I know: the man in Singapore is the same one who sat across from you in the café. He had different things to carry around him, but he's the same. The floor version and the performance version are the same person in different weather. You have met both. You know which one is which. I'm not settling. I'm the opposite of settling. I have spent six years in rooms built by other people and you were the first room I walked into that felt like mine. You asked me to tell you what's actually happening in there. That's what's happening in there. Tell me what to do next.

She read this four times.

She sat in the quiet of her apartment with the city breathing through the window and the radiator muttering under the sill and the April darkness holding everything at arm's length except the thing it couldn't hold, which was this.

She had told Mira she was afraid of being the container. She had been.

She had told herself she was afraid the anonymity had been the point. She had been.

And now she had his words on a screen at midnight — the first room I walked into that felt like mine — and the fear was still there, the way fear is always still there, but it was smaller than the other thing, which was this:

She believed him.

She typed:

Come to Friday's episode. Not on air. Just come to where I am. I'll leave the window open.

Chapter Eighteen: Friday

He knew the neighborhood but not the building. She sent him the address through the portal at 10 p.m. on Friday, with a message that said: fourth floor. The light will be on.

She had considered, on the way home from campus that day, what she would say. She had arrived at: nothing prepared. Prepared things were a performance and she was done with performances, was actively evacuating them from her life. She was going to be exactly who she was in the dark at 2 a.m. with the microphone and the open window, which was the truest version available.

She set up for recording at midnight — the usual spot, the usual microphone, the window open to April. She pressed record and began talking about the city.

She talked for twelve minutes. About rain in Mangwon. About the cherry blossoms that were finished now, turned to leaves that didn't announce themselves, just quietly continued. About loneliness not as a weather condition this time but as a language — something you became fluent in, that let you recognize when someone was speaking it, that created the specific grammar of understanding between two people who had been practicing in the same room.

She heard the buzzer at 12:23 a.m.

She pressed pause. She went to the intercom and let him in and stood at the open door of her apartment while he came up the stairs — fifth floor, no elevator, and she heard him take them with a deliberateness that told her he was not rushing. Either because he was tired or because he understood that this moment, like the good moments, required a different pace.

He appeared at the top of the stairs.

He was wearing an ordinary coat. A hat he hadn't bothered to pull low, because it was 12:23 a.m. and the building was empty. He looked — she searched for the word and found it exactly: himself. The floor version. The one underneath.

She stepped back. He came in.

She had tidied the apartment, which was not its usual state, which was comfortable-and-lived-in; she had returned it to comfortable-and-lived-in after tidying it and then deciding that tidying it was itself a performance. The microphone was on its stand. The window was open. The radiator was doing its thing. The city was audible in the specific way it was audible on eighty-eight episodes of Sleepless in Seoul, which he knew well enough to have described it once as sounding like a city that had made peace with being awake.

He stood in the middle of the room and looked around.

"It's exactly like I imagined," he said. "Smaller."

"Everyone says that," she said.

"I'm not — I mean it as a compliment. It fits you. It fits the voice."

She looked at him standing in the middle of her small exact apartment and thought of all the things he had said in the dark, in the private portal messages and the voice notes and the episode where he had said I think I might be homesick for a place I've never been and she had thought: I know exactly what you mean.

"Sit down," she said. "I was in the middle of recording."

He sat on the edge of her bed — the only available sitting surface — with the particular care of someone who was trying not to displace anything. She sat back in her chair and looked at the microphone and then at him.

"Can I keep going?" she said.

He looked at her steadily.

"Yes," he said.

She pressed record.

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 67 — FRIDAY, APRIL 29 [HOST]

"It's after midnight. The city is doing its city things — delivery bikes, a distant siren, the specific wet-street sound of cars on wet asphalt after rain.

I have something to tell you, and I'm going to tell it as directly as I know how to, which means I'm going to start in the wrong place and find my way to the right one.

Six months ago, someone started sending voice notes to this podcast. I don't know if you remember. Some of you do, based on the comments. He was a man who couldn't sleep — which is how most of you found me — and he spoke carefully, the way someone speaks when they are afraid of using more words than they mean. He talked about hotels and cities and the specific loneliness of being surrounded. He asked questions he answered himself.

Over six months, I fell in love with his voice.

I want to be clear about the order of operations: I fell in love with a voice, and then a voice note became a written message, and a written message became a café on a Saturday, and a café on a Saturday became someone sitting on the edge of my bed at 12:30 a.m. while I finish recording.

I know that some of you have been part of a story about us that has gotten a lot of things in the wrong order. I understand why the wrong order felt more like a story. I understand the grammar of suspicion. I've felt it myself — the particular fear that a thing you love was built rather than found.

But I want to say this clearly, into the microphone, for the record, for the night:

It was built. Everything good is built. You build it one small honest thing at a time, until you look at what you've made and realize it has the shape of something that feels like home.

It was also found. Because you don't get to choose which voices reach you through the dark, or which ones fit the exact shape of the missing place in your chest.

Both things are true. Both things were ours.

I'm not going to say his name. He can introduce himself if he wants to. But he's here, and this room is his too, and I wanted you to know that some things that start in the dark end up in the light, and the light doesn't change them — it just lets you see what was already there."

She stopped recording.

The silence had a particular quality — the specific silence that follows the truest thing you've said in a room.

She looked at him.

He had been very still while she spoke. His hands on his knees, his head very slightly bowed. The specific stillness she recognized from his silences on the voice notes, when something had landed and he was in the process of receiving it.

He looked up.

His face was doing something she hadn't seen yet — hadn't seen in the photograph or the café or the three hours of talking or the twelve days of distance. Something that had come unstuck.

"You said it out loud," he said.

"Yes."

"On the podcast."

"Yes."

"To four hundred thousand people."

"Plus the ones who don't listen live and will find it Saturday."

Something moved across his face that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one — the relief of something long-held finally put down.

"I didn't know if you were going to do that," he said.

"Neither did I, until I did."

He stood up. He was not particularly dramatic about it. He crossed the three feet of apartment between the bed and the recording chair with the care of someone who had been practicing arrival for a long time.

He stopped just in front of her. Close enough to see the small scar above her left eyebrow that she had mentioned, three episodes ago, in the context of a childhood story about a bicycle. Close enough to be in the room rather than adjacent to it.

"I want to say something on the record," he said.

She looked up at him.

"Say it," she said.

"My name is Kim Juhoon." He said it with the slight formality of someone who had not said his name unperformed in a very long time. "I'm from Incheon. I'm twenty-six years old. I cannot sleep in hotels and I have six plants and I prefer the floor to the bed when I'm thinking, and I've been in love with a podcast host since November, which is not something I expected to be able to say to her face."

He paused.

"Also," he said, "your apartment is exactly what I imagined."

"You said it was smaller."

"I said it was smaller than I imagined. That's not a criticism. I'm bad at scale."

She laughed — surprised, real, unguarded in the way she was only at 2 a.m. when the performance had fallen away. He had heard that laugh in exactly one episode when she had forgotten herself describing a pigeon that had walked directly through a café with the confidence of someone who had made a reservation. He had listened to it three times.

He reached out and took her hand.

The city breathed through the window. The radiator muttered. Somewhere below, a delivery bike turned a corner and was gone.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," she said.

PART Ⅵ: AFTER MIDNIGHT — THE SHAPE OF HOME

Chapter Nineteen: May

May arrived, as it always does, with the quality of a season that has remembered what it was supposed to be.

The tree at the corner of Hazel's street — a ginkgo that had been bare in November and gold in October and bare again in February — was fully green now, deeply and specifically green, the particular green of something that has been through winter and has come back with the knowledge of having come back. The evenings were long and warm and the city was doing what it did in spring, which was to believe in itself with renewed enthusiasm.

Three things happened in May.

The first was that Hazel's listener numbers stabilized at two hundred and forty thousand, which was not the four hundred thousand of the scandal's peak but was triple what she had before, and the quality of the listener base had improved in the way that things improve when the casual observers move on and the genuine ones remain. The comments section was, largely, full of people who had found the podcast for the wrong reasons and stayed for the right ones — who had come looking for a story and found something stranger and quieter and more honest than a story.

The second was that Juhoon appeared on a podcast interview — a different one, a music industry one — and was asked about the past month and gave an answer that became, briefly, the top trending clip in the entertainment category for four days:

"I listened to a podcast for six months. It helped me sleep, which sounds simple. It was not simple. I think sometimes you find the frequency of a person before you find the person — you understand what they are before you understand who they are. That's what happened. And I think it means that when you arrive at the actual person, you already know them in the most important way."

The interviewer had asked whether the podcast in question was Sleepless in Seoul.

He had smiled with the small real smile and said: "I think you already know that."

The clip received fourteen million views.

The third thing was that Hazel finished recording Episode 72 at 1:45 a.m. on a Tuesday and turned the microphone off and found Juhoon asleep on her bed — not having planned to be, but simply having been there since eleven and having drifted off somewhere in the middle of Episode 71's playback editing, which she took as a compliment of the highest order: to fall asleep somewhere was to trust it.

She stood in the doorway of her own bedroom and looked at him sleeping and thought about the million tiny little things. The voice note from Singapore. The conversation about geurium. The Paris hotel room. The floor at 3 a.m. The green door in Yeonnam-dong. The sound of him coming up five flights of stairs at 12:23 a.m. on a Friday night in April, not rushing.

It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, meant they were supposed to be here. Not in some predestined cosmic sense. In the sense that people build inevitabilities from choices, from frequencies, from the specific habit of being honest in the dark until the dark becomes something you can live in together.

She turned off the overhead light. She sat in her recording chair with the window open and the city breathing and wrote the first paragraph of Episode 72 by hand in the notebook she kept for drafts:

Tonight I want to talk about home as a verb.

Epilogue: Sleepless in Seoul— Episode 75

TRANSCRIPT — TUESDAY, JUNE 7 — 2:08 A.M.

"It's raining in Seoul tonight. I know I've said that before. I say it every time it's true because it's always true in a slightly different way, and tonight it's the warm summer rain that arrives without warning and doesn't particularly care whether you have an umbrella.

I've been doing this for almost two years. Seventy-five episodes. I started talking into a microphone at 2 a.m. because I couldn't sleep and I liked my city and I needed somewhere to put things, and what I found was that a lot of you couldn't sleep either, and needed somewhere too, and that the somewhere could be shared.

I want to say something I haven't said in exactly this way before.

Thank you. For being awake with me. For sending voice notes at 1 a.m. and trusting the dark with things you hadn't said out loud. For the woman in Busan who called herself Insomniac No. 4 and who I know is listening tonight because she told me she always does. For the student with the plants. For the man in Itaewon who misses his kids in a way that makes my throat tight every single time. For everyone who arrived at this podcast looking for something and found a different thing than they expected.

Some of you found love here, at least one of you has told me. Some of you found the word for what you were feeling. Some of you found permission to not be okay, which is a different and equally important thing.

I found something too.

I want to talk about what I found, briefly, at the risk of making something private public in a way it isn't quite ready for — but the risk feels worth it because the people who listen at 2 a.m. are the people who can be trusted with the soft things.

I found that love arrives in the order it arrives. Not when you plan for it. Not in the form you're prepared for. It arrives in voices before faces, in honesty before names, in the specific recognition of a silence that fits your own silences.

I found that being known — really known, below the version you carry around — is not a disaster. It is, it turns out, the thing we were all awake looking for.

I'm still looking for a lot of things. I'm still awake at 2 a.m. with the window open. But I am looking in the right direction.

The frequency, if you're listening, is still on.

Come home when you can.

Sleepless in Seoul will be back Friday. Keep the window open. I'll be here."

[FROM THE PODCAST INBOX — RECEIVED TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2:31 A.M.]

[NOT AIRED — KEPT]

"I'm here. I heard the episode. I heard all of them, every single one, and I will keep hearing them for as long as you keep making them. The frequency is still on. I'm still on it. Come find me in the morning. I'll make coffee. — J"

[RESPONSE — SENT 2:34 A.M.]

"The window is open. Good night. — H"

THE END

Author's Note on the novel's epigraph:

The line "It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, meant we were supposed to be together" is adapted from Sleepless in Seattle (1993, dir. Nora Ephron). This novel is written in admiration of Ephron's belief that love is specific, cumulative, and — above all — worth the waiting.

permanent taglist ꩜ .ᐟ @letterstohyeon

#young2keu

Trending Tags

Recently Viewed Tags

#young2keu