A/N: Many thanks to all my readers once again and to all of you who left reviews :) Another chapter for you guys...

When Ga Eul arrived home late Monday afternoon, several enormous bags of groceries covered the top of the kitchen counter, which was located directly behind the living area. A few pots clanged together as her mother's figure emerged from behind the counter, attempting to pull something out from a bottom cabinet.

"Omma, I'm home," Ga Eul announced, setting her suitcases and carry-on down at the bottom of the stairs.

Her mother didn't answer but mumbled incoherently to herself as she flipped through the stained cookbook she had just retrieved.

"Omma?"

"Yes?" Her mother turned toward her distractedly. "Oh, Ga Eul! You're home. Did you have fun with your friends at the beach?"

"The beach?...Oh, yes. Yes, it was a lot of fun." Ga Eul hated lying to her parents, but she doubted they would think well of her staying alone with a guy—any guy—in another country for a whole weekend. She tried to make her voice sound normal, not that her mother would notice with her nose buried in that old cookbook of Ga Eul's grandmother's.

"That's good. That's good," her mother said, glancing up at Ga Eul and smiling quickly.

"Omma, are we expecting company?"

"Company?" Her mother looked up again and surveyed the room, as though expecting said company to magically appear. "No, why would you say that?"

"We have enough groceries to feed twenty people."

"Twenty people?" Her mother laughed gently, but the laughter didn't reach her eyes. "Don't be silly, Ga Eul. I just felt like doing a little cooking, that's all."

On the last occasion Ga Eul's mother had felt like doing 'a little cooking,' Ga Eul's father had lost his job at Shinwa. That unfortunate reaction of her mother's had resulted in a rare full-blown argument between her parents. Although Ga Eul wouldn't say that her parents' marriage was the happiest one, it wasn't necessarily an unhappy one either, at least as far as Ga Eul could tell, and they rarely fought over anything. They were simply two people suffering together in mutual solitude, bound by some implicit agreement to go about their responsibilities as though the action would overcome the intention, rendering their pain meaningless and numbing them to it in the end.

Her father worked, and her mother cooked.

Something had happened while Ga Eul had been gone.

"Omma, I'm just going to put my stuff in my room, and then I'll come help you."

"Don't you have homework to do? Just come eat something. This won't be ready for a while, but there's still some leftovers in the refrigerator."

"Okay." Ga Eul nodded and started up the stairs with her purse and the smaller suitcase Yi Jeong had forced upon her with all of her new clothes. "I'll be right back."

When she reached the top of the stairs, she halted abruptly. On either side of the little hallway, cardboard boxes had been piled halfway to the ceiling. The door to her brother's old room—the room her grandmother currently occupied—had been left open, and even from where she stood, Ga Eul could see that much of the room had been cleared out. Going into the bedroom, Ga Eul saw a few open boxes parked next to the dresser drawers, into which had been thrown her grandmother's picture frames, her hair curlers, her makeup odds and ends, her endless bottles of cheap perfume, her coat hangers, and the belts and bell-bottomed jeans she used to work in the garden she kept up in their tiny backyard. Several of her gardening books sat stacked on top of the dresser, accompanied by a few old romantic novels from the library, probably overdue. The baby powder scent that always clung to her grandmother's clothes hung in the air, lifelessly circulated by the ceiling fan turning slowly, slowly, slowly over the scene of her grandmother's departure.

"Omma!" Ga Eul thudded back down the stairs in her house slippers. "Where's Halmoni?"

Her mother kept her back turned to Ga Eul, hunching over the carrots she was chopping in an orderly, mechanical fashion.

"Your grandmother is visiting with some friends. She'll be moving in with your aunt a lot sooner than we expected. You might want to call her and tell her you got back from your trip all right."

Ga Eul couldn't recall her grandmother saying anything about moving before Ga Eul had left.

"What about all of her stuff? Isn't she coming back for it?"

"I think your uncle is going to come get most of those boxes on Friday."

"Why?" Ga Eul demanded. "Did something happen?" She didn't miss the way her mother's hands shook as she handled the greens she rinsed and sifted in a colander.

"They just got situated earlier than they thought, that's all."

"That isn't all. She didn't even call me."

"She probably didn't want to disturb you on your trip."

"Halmoni doesn't care about disturbing anyone."

"Besides, she was busy packing."

"Yes, it looks like she was leaving in an awful hurry."

"She had to leave sometime, Ga Eul," her mother snapped, her usually placid expression giving way to something akin to anger. Ga Eul almost stepped backward in shock. Then, almost as if taken aback with herself, her mother resumed tearing apart the greens and said, in much softer tone, "Anyway, she wasn't going to stay here forever."

Ga Eul fiddled with one of the loose cookbook pages and waited for more.

"Gong Yoo was here," her mother continued after a moment.

"Gong Yoo?" Ga Eul's frowned. "My brother's friend?"

"Yes, he was looking for you, but you weren't here. Your grandmother let him in."

"Ah…I see."

"He was in the army for six years, you know. He just got out."

Wondering if her mother might actually be willing to talk about the past for a change, Ga Eul responded, "I always wondered where he went to. I never heard anything from him after—"

"I think your father was rather upset when he came home and found Gong Yoo joining us for dinner."

"He ate dinner here?"

"He was going to, but your father wouldn't have it. You know how he gets. He's always thought Gong Yoo was a bad influence."

"But he was Oppa's best friend."

"Like I say, you know how your father gets." Her mother set the colander aside and pulled another bowl from underneath the counter. "I think Gong Yoo left something for you, though. It's up in your room." She motioned for Ga Eul to move over and laid out a few more ingredients on the counter, her rapid movements signaling that the conversation had ended.

Ga Eul moved gradually back toward the stairs, picked up her large pink suitcase, and went up to her bedroom. That room had become her safe haven over the years, with its brightly colored pink and lavender décor, wall-to-wall collages of friends and family photos, boy band posters, and ever-growing collection of stuffed animals. She liked to think of herself as a survivor, an optimist, a person for whom all the dark clouds of disappointment would always give way to the inevitable sunshine of a new day.

That day, on top of Ga Eul's long tan puppy dog pillow, which lay stretched across the bottom of her bed when not in use, sat her brother's old navy blue hoodie and beside that a small note from her grandmother: Gong Yoo wanted me to give this to you. He said to tell you hello and to take care.

The last time her grandmother had lived with her and her parents, Ga Eul had been eleven. Her brother had been alive then. Her father actually said more than two or three words to them in a day, and her mother played upbeat music and chatted with the neighbors while Ga Eul played with Jan Di in the front yard.

Back then, she'd thought the world of her grandmother—how she'd always sneak sweets to Ga Eul when her parents weren't looking, how she never ratted her out to her mom when she'd been bad, how she always had the wisest and most logical explanations for everything that went on in the world. Looking back, though, Ga Eul realized that her sugar-coated childhood memories of her grandmother had successfully glossed over this one unalterable fact: her grandmother was loud, the type of person you hear way off down the street long before you see her face show up at your front gate. She said what she thought, and she never cared who heard it or what they thought about it. Ga Eul could only imagine what she must have said about Gong Yoo's visit that managed to set Ga Eul's father off so much it sent her grandmother packing.

Her grandmother didn't answer her phone when Ga Eul called, though, so she left a message stating that she had gotten home okay, that she wished she had been there to see Gong Yoo Oppa and that she was sad her grandmother would be leaving so soon.

A few minutes later, she received a message—not from her grandmother but from Jan Di, who wanted to know everything that had gone on over the long weekend when she saw Ga Eul at work the next day.

Work.

That reminded Ga Eul of something.

After Ga Eul finished classes on Friday, she intended to go straight home to finish unpacking from her trip, which she had been putting off since she got back, and then collapse into bed. When Ga Eul had finally gotten ahold of her grandmother, she mentioned that she had gotten settled in okay at her friend's house but otherwise said very little. The whole situation unnerved Ga Eul, and she blamed where she got off the bus on her need for distraction. Now, she stood in front of the café Il Hyun owned—had been standing there for an indeterminable amount of time—and stared at the rows and rows of wine glasses through the café windows and the two couples sipping lattes at the table she had sat at the only other time she'd been there. She didn't see Il Hyun or Eun Jae, though she assumed the latter would be teaching her pottery classes.

Pottery. Yi Jeong had been right about her liking it, and she did desperately want to make him something he would like, but it had been all too odd after she learned about his past relationship with Eun Jae to keep on going to her classes. Now that Eun Jae knew who had been asking her for advice, Ga Eul doubted Eun Jae would ever want to see her again. The thought saddened Ga Eul, as she'd come to think of her as an older sister in the few short months she had been taking pottery classes.

"Ga Eul-yang? Is that you?"

Ga Eul turned around to see Eun Jae standing behind her, dressed in a light blue blouse and a cream pencil skirt, her hair pulled back in a neat bun. Ga Eul, on the other hand, wearing her brother's oversized hoodie and jeans, looked like she had just come from taking two midterms after pulling an all-nighter because, well, she had. If Yi Jeong had been there, she imagined he might have died of embarrassment at her disheveled state.

"Ah, Songsaengnim, nice to see you." Ga Eul bowed and brushed some loose hair out of her face.

"Won't you come in for a moment?" Eun Jae walked up to the door and, opening it, motioned for Ga Eul to come in. "Il Hyun just started serving these new lemon pastries. They're quite delicious."

"Oh, um, I might need to get back. My parents, they'll want me home for dinner. But it was nice seeing you again, Songsaengnim. Take care." Ga Eul bowed again and started walking away when she heard Eun Jae call after her.

"How long did you know?"

Ga Eul stopped and turned to face Eun Jae again.

"Pardon me?"

"I mean…When did you find out Yi Jeong was my first love?"

Ga Eul glanced down at her boots for a moment and then lifted her gaze back to Eun Jae. "Since…well, since one day when I was working at the Clay House—you had already left—and Yi Jeong stopped by to see me. It was a surprise. I didn't know he was coming." Ga Eul shook her head nervously. "Anyway, that was the day you gave me that puzzle piece, so I had it out next to me on the table. He grabbed it and demanded to know whose it was. So that was how he found you." Her fingers fumbled with a button on her coat. "And that was how I found out he was your first love. I didn't know before that, I promise! I'm sorry I didn't tell you, but…I had really started to like him, and I had finally gotten to the point where I thought maybe, just maybe he liked me, too, or at least was willing to give me a chance. That realization…it hurt so bad, and…I suppose I also thought it would have been a bit awkward to be around you if you knew, especially if the two of you started dating. It might be better if I just disappear."

"He really likes you," Eun Jae stated matter-of-factly.

Ga Eul's eyes widened in surprise.

"How do you know that?"

"You said he came to see you? Before he knew that was my studio?"

Ga Eul nodded.

Eun Jae smiled. "He was never like that. Women came to him…flocked to him…some more clingy than others. Even I only had his attention for so long. Whenever I saw Yi Jeong, it was because I sought him out. I always wished one day he'd come running to me. Or at least walking in my direction." Eun Jae sighed. "Seeing you two together hurt more than I'd like to admit. I know I'm engaged to Il Hyun now, and I really do love him, but I suppose some small, untouchable part of my heart will always be reserved for my first love. I think every girl is like that. But Ga Eul…" She stepped closer to Ga Eul, reached out, and took one of her hands. "What I want more than anything is for him to be happy and at peace, and I think you do that for him. Il Hyun said that you were the reason he decided not to give up on pottery."

"Oh? Yi Jeong told his brother that?"

"All I could was look on helplessly while he cried. You made him into a stronger person. If anything, I owe you a debt." Dropping Ga Eul's hand, she adjusted her purse and smiled fondly, if a bit sadly, at Ga Eul. "Aren't you going to come back and make pottery with me? I'm stuck with a bunch of old women again. Not that I mind them, but, like I said before, it's nice having someone close to my age to talk to. We budding young artists have to stick together, you know."

At that, Ga Eul smiled back.

"Songsaengnim, you really are an amazing person."

"Come on." Eun Jae nodded toward the café. "Let's get those lemon pastries. It'll give me an excuse to eat one too." Eun Jae put her arm around Ga Eul and walked her to the door. "And then you'll have to catch me up on all that's happened in the past few months…"

It was ten o'clock at night, but Ga Eul still had her makeup on. In fact, she had just finished touching it up. The one good part about her grandmother moving out was that Ga Eul got her bathroom all to herself again and didn't have to worry about her grandmother nosily listening in to her late night conversations. Speaking of which, she had been puzzling over what to wear for an hour, which was just silly consider she wasn't going on an actual date. Whose ridiculous idea was it to have a video chat anyway instead of a normal phone call?

Oh, right. Hers.

What would they talk about? Her grandmother moving out? At the moment, Ga Eul would like to forget that whole drama-including the rather irate manner in which her uncle had moved everything out the day before-so she doubted she would even mention it.

Taking up pottery with Eun Jae again? That topic still felt too awkward.

School? Again, too stressful and, quite frankly, boring.

The giant stuffed Rilakkuma bears she'd seen on sale in one of the stores near the porridge shop?

What was she? Five?

Mild panic set in as she realized she didn't really know much about Yi Jeong's interests or hobbies besides pottery and, well, the more obvious ones that went along with a reputation like his.

Then again, maybe he was freaking out as much as her.

She hoped so.

She doubted it.

Taking a deep breath, she logged onto her Skype account and, seeing he was already online, hit the video call button.

When Yi Jeong had turned on his laptop, Ga Eul hadn't come online yet, and he'd spent a few minutes alternately glancing between her profile photo and the take-home exam he'd been distracting himself with for the past hour. Although Ga Eul had only been with him for three days—two days, really—the house felt empty without her, and Yi Jeong started to wonder how he had made it for two months without hearing anything from her before.

He also started to wonder if he was turning into Jun Pyo or simply going mad.

On Sunday, he had taken her to Gamla Stan, the old town center of Stockholm, where she had taken copious amounts of photos like he knew she would, and to the Moderna Museet, which held a vast collection of priceless art from the 20th and 21st centuries. He had been a bit surprised when she suggested they visit the art museum because she seemed to like being outdoors so much. In any event, most of the girls he had dated before—however briefly—either wanted to go shopping or out to some fancy restaurant or club. The few times he had taken someone to the Woo Sung Museum it had merely been to show off his wealth, and they fawned over the pieces he had created himself for a while but quickly became bored of the museum itself. Ga Eul, on the other hand, had a genuine appreciation for art even if she knew relatively little about it, and he suspected she had chosen that place because she thought he would enjoy it, which brought a smile to his face even now as he pushed the exam papers aside and fiddled with his pen.

Before Ga Eul left for Korea, they'd agreed to call each other at this time on Saturdays. If they kept it up, it would be the most constancy Yi Jeong had had in his life in a long time.

An incoming call flashed up on his laptop, and when he had accepted it, a cheerful image of Ga Eul appeared, looking a bit too dressed up to be spending the evening at home doing nothing but homework.

"Ga Eul-yang, do you normally wear headbands to sleep? Doesn't that get uncomfortable?"

Ga Eul's cheery expression gave way to nervousness.

"W-what?" She felt up at the top of her head and pulled her sparkly purple headband down. It had a large purple flower on it and had been her favorite headband for several years, but Yi Jeong probably thought it rather childish.

"What am I going to do with you? See, I'm not even there, and I'm making you nervous."

"Who said I was nervous? I just—anyway, you haven't even said 'hello' to me yet. Most people say 'hello' when they start conversations. If you really want to be polite, you can ask me how my day was."

"Since when have you known me to be polite? I don't normally do this type of stuff, you know."

"This type of stuff?"

"I think you should show me your room."

"My room? Why?"

"I showed you my whole house. How can you not even show me what your room looks like?"

"Well…" Ga Eul glanced up at the glittery hand-painted sign she and a friend had made for an EXO concert two years before. "Okay…but you have to promise not to make fun of me."

"But making fun of you is my hobby. Besides, you always have some clever thing to say in reply."

"And people think you're so charming."

"Come on, Ga Eul-yang. You can do better than that."

Ga Eul scoffed, turned her laptop around, and walked it around the room.

A bunch of photos passed across Yi Jeong's screen—some in collages on the wall, some in single frames, some simply stuck in the bottom of her vanity mirror.

"Happy now?"

"Ga Eul-yang, how many pictures do you have in your bedroom? I'm surprised there's room for anything else."

"Well, sometimes I can't choose, so I just put them all up." Ga Eul sat back down on her bed and turned her laptop around to face herself. "I make scrapbooks too, but I haven't done any since I started college. Not enough time."

Yi Jeong appeared to think about that for a moment.

"Did you make scrapbooks of the trips you took with us?"

"Maybe."

"You should show me sometime."

"I'm not sure that you want to see them. I took a lot of candid shots. It might ruin the perception you have of yourself."

"Sure you're not worried about all the selfies you put in there?"

"Why would I put those in a scrapbook? The last thing any girl wants to do is stare at hundreds of horrible photos of herself."

"So you admit you take that many photos of yourself?"

"That's not—"

"And you always act like I'm the conceited one."

"You don't have to take photos of yourself, Sunbae. You have plenty of people following you around for that."

An unreadable expression passed across Yi Jeong's face then, just a flicker of some other place his mind must have gone to for a moment, and then it was gone, replaced by a smug grin.

"Well, you would know all about that, wouldn't you, Ga Eul-yang? And how many photos do you have of me, exactly?"

"I don't know," Ga Eul said, her face turning red. "Why should I keep up with that? Anyway, you're supposed to show me what you've been working on."

"Anything for my biggest fan."

"Pabo."