A/N: Happy Labor Day to my readers in the U.S.! Enjoy :)

Early December

So Hyun Sub had long since grown bored of looking at the financial figures in front of him—projections of the estimated costs and benefits of the next few months' worth of exhibitions at the museum.

Not that it particularly mattered what he thought. He had already learned from his father that the management of the museum would be in large part turned over to Yi Jeong upon his return, provided Yi Jeong took his responsibilities seriously. The thought that Yi Jeong most likely would receive the same ultimatum he had been given many years ago might have once given Hyun Sub some sick satisfaction that at least he would not be alone in his misery. A few days ago, however, a woman had turned up at his office that he thought he would never see again in this lifetime. She had the same petite figure and the same chocolate brown eyes, but she had cut all of her beautiful hair into a short bob. Suddenly, Hyun Sub was twenty years old again, watching that same woman walk away from him in a dimly lit club and knowing that once she disappeared from sight her defiant shoulders would sag and her vibrant eyes would lose the luster he had put there when they were yet innocent and invincible children.

Today, my son, you have crossed the line.

"It's been a long time," she said as soon as she stepped into the office, not bothering with formalities. "I trust you've been well."

Hyun Sub set aside the ceramic he'd been examining and stood up.

"Baek So Ri-ssi," he replied, holding her gaze. "I thought you were in France."

"Indeed, I've lived in France for over twenty years." She kept her tone even, and her eyes regarded him without emotion. "I'm back in the country for a week or so. I heard your son is studying in Sweden."

"My second son, yes."

"I'm sure you must be very proud of him. He won quite a few awards, I know. I even had the privilege of seeing one of his exhibitions abroad."

"He's very talented."

"Mmm, like father like son." Some unreadable emotion flickered in her eyes, but her expression stayed neutral, and a moment of awkward silence set in.

"Is there…something I can do for you, So Ri-ah?"

At the endearment, So Ri bristled. She looked like she might say more but ultimately gave him a tight smile instead.

"Aniyo. I was just in the museum and thought I would stop by. Forgive me for disturbing your work. Until we meet again, So Hyun Sub-ssi." Bowing as she hadn't when she had walked in, So Ri left. The door shut behind her with a firm finality that kept Hyun Sub momentarily rooted to the spot. In truth, when he sat back down at his desk, he almost couldn't believe that the occurrence hadn't been a dream or a hallucination brought on by another alcohol-induced stupor. How many times he must have dreamt of her coming back to him, he couldn't say.

As she had spoken, he had studied her rigid posture, the faint glimmer of discomfort on her face, the slight sharpness of her tone even as she sang his son's praises. Gone was the graceful woman of his dreams. Gone was the fragile girl of his past. He had heard she had married a successful businessman who owned an international hotel chain and had settled in France shortly after Hyun Sub's own marriage had taken place. For years, he'd heard vague rumors about her life from people in their circle who knew her husband through business deals. He knew she had one son who would take over the business one day and a younger daughter around Yi Jeong's age. Both of them had been born and raised in France, and, as far as he knew, So Ri rarely traveled back to Korea to visit, even with her children.

It was just as well. He had no desire to run into her at any number of the pressing social and business obligations that dictated much of his calendar.

Hyun Sub took out a bottle of red wine from a cabinet and poured himself a glass. Opening the bottom drawer in his desk, he pulled out a small glass bottle with many tiny origami stars of different patterns folded inside. The bottle's cork had a worn green ribbon tied around it, and once there had been a note tied to the cork, too.

For your birthday, it had said, I grant you one wish for every star in this bottle.

So Ri had given him that on his nineteenth birthday. On that day, she had been wearing a lavender sundress, and her long wavy hair had been tossing about in the wind as they walked along the shore of a lake at sunset. He remembered sometime later that night they drank a bit too much wine and chased each other into the lake, fully clothed, which resulted in both of them getting sore throats and in him getting a stern lecture from his father about being more responsible. They had been in college then—budding young artists with bright futures—and he had thought if they could just hold onto every moment together like that, every moment as it came, then they could hold on forever.

But today was not Hyun Sub's birthday, and neither she nor the gods had ever granted him his wish.

It wasn't Yi Jeong's birthday, but it had felt like it when he arrived home that afternoon to find a small package sitting in front of his door. International mail from one Chu Ga Eul in South Korea.

Setting the books from his morning classes down on one of his worktables, he perused Ga Eul's neat handwriting on the box before ripping off the tape as carefully as he could, careful not to disturb the box's contents. Milo hopped up on the table beside Yi Jeong's books and peered up at him curiously. Yi Jeong had started letting him in whenever he came home, and the cat seemed to be warming up to him. He wasn't overly affectionate, but he often curled up on one of the high counters in Yi Jeong's workshop and watched him while he threw clay on the wheel. Yi Jeong found this silent but constant audience encouraging—or maybe the cat just reminded him of Ga Eul—and he sometimes talked to Milo while he worked. As he pulled out the note on top of the parcel wrapped in thick brown paper and purple bubble wrap, Milo's neck craned toward him, and his tail flicked back and forth a few times.

"Oh, no. This isn't your letter, and don't think I'm going to read it to you either," Yi Jeong said, unfolding the paper. Ga Eul's pink stationery featured a few cute, colorful bears dancing across the bottom of it and miniature red and pink hearts bordering the entire page. Her letter stretched the length of the page in handwriting so perfect he thought surely she must have drafted the letter on another piece of paper before copying it onto her stationery.

The letter read:

Sunbae,

I hope you have a shelf cleared off for all the pottery you will be receiving in Sweden. Here is the first one. Please don't laugh at it. It took me a long time to get the dimensions just right, and since I had been away from pottery for a while, I had to get Eun Jae Seongsaengnim to help me with some of it. I don't think I told you, but I've started taking pottery with her again. I hope you don't mind. I thought she would be mad at me, but she's just as kind and understanding as she's always been, and I have to admit I'm glad. I had missed talking to her. She's like the older sister I never had.

Sorry, that went off on a tangent.

On second thought, maybe Ga Eul always wrote that neatly. Contrary to what she might think, he wasn't mad that she had taken up pottery with Eun Jae again. In fact, he was glad the two of them were still friends. At least he knew someone would be looking out for Ga Eul while he was gone.

You can go ahead and open up your package if you haven't already.

Yi Jeong unwrapped the first and second layers of bubble wrap and then proceeded to peel away so much paper he almost believed Ga Eul had sent him an empty box as a joke. Finally, though, he uncovered a small picture frame—a 3" x 5" he believed—that held a picture of him and Ga Eul from her visit a month earlier. They had been standing beside the Norrström River, and she had asked a passerby to take a picture of them with the water in the background.

Yi Jeong chuckled to himself. Or course Ga Eul would send a picture. The frame itself was rectangular with an oval opening for the picture in the center and had been decorated with a plain light blue glaze dotted with tiny yellow flowers.

You're laughing, aren't you? Well, I suppose that's good, anyway. Hopefully, I cheered you up if you were having a bad day.

Just remember, I'm going to get a lot better in the time that you're gone, so you have to make sure and keep up with me.

Also, Woo Bin said something about a Christmas get-together while we're all on vacation from school (except for poor Jun Pyo Sunbae, of course). I hope we go skiing again, and I hope you can come. I have to stop writing now. My mother's calling me for dinner. But talk to you soon?

Yours truly,

Chu Ga Eul

Talk to you soon, Yi Jeong thought, reading back over the letter and considering how irate Jun Pyo would get at the mere thought of someone calling him "poor." Although Yi Jeong had never kept in touch with any girl for any mentionable period of time and at first wasn't quite sure how to go about it, Ga Eul always found some amusing thing or other for them to talk about, and he looked forward to their Saturday night conversations more than anything else during the week. More, even, than working on his pottery, and pottery had always been his escape, his safe place he could run to when the outside world got too dark and heavy. It had always amazed him that he could pour any sort of emotion into a pot—anger, fear, lust, envy, pain—and it would still turn out beautiful in the end, unlike the people he took his more volatile emotions out on. Unlike how his mother turned out because of his father's licentiousness and utter disregard.

Not that Yi Jeong wanted to think about that at the moment. In fact, he'd been doing his best since he arrived in Sweden to minimize his conversations with her. He usually wouldn't answer the first time she called, but if she didn't call back within so many minutes, he would assume she was having a good day and would return her call. They chatted briefly during those times about how his classes and his pottery were going. Sometimes, she would talk about his future and would ask if he had met anyone, although he never mentioned Ga Eul to her for fear that that information would slip out in front of his grandfather during one of her episodes. It was easy during those conversations to pretend that they were a normal family and that she was a perfectly sane woman calling to ask about her son, to make sure he was eating well, to inquire about his grades, or to tease him about whatever girlfriend he must be keeping secret. Still, he would always be the first to end the conversation because he knew he was a fool even for pretending. When he was a little kid, his mother would experience rare days of rational thought where she would invite him to sit on her lap while she read to him, and, like a starving dog having a treat dangled in front of him, Yi Jeong would oblige her, listening to her soft, sweet voice until it lulled him to sleep. Sometimes he would awaken on her bed and roll over to find her asleep beside him. Sometimes he would awaken in his own bed to the sound of her screaming or crying out pitifully to his father, demanding why. Why could he not show even an ounce of human decency toward her? Why when she loved him so much, when she did whatever he asked without question, when she had given him two capable, talented sons? Questions that never got answered. Pleas that fell on deaf ears.

The caller ID on his cellphone told him his mother was calling again for the third time since he had entered the house, which could only mean she had fallen into hysteria over his father's latest mistress. Rejecting the call, he walked back to his bedroom to put up the photograph on the dresser in his bedroom. Then he scrolled through his contacts and dialed Ga Eul's number, hoping that she wasn't in the middle of class but partly not caring even if she was. Surely her boyfriend was more important than a Calculus exam.

Fat Cat's owner had gone away on business again, and Ga Eul had been tasked with feeding him twice a day, as she had done for the past six years when his owner was away. Her brother had initially introduced her to Fat Cat in much the same way she had introduced Yi Jeong to him. One day as he walked her home from elementary school, she had been teasing him about some juicy bit of information she was going to tell their parents about when he suddenly grabbed her bookbag and held it over her head to where she couldn't reach it. Just when she had given up and began pleading with him to give it back, promising she wouldn't say anything about the gossip she'd heard, he had thrown her bookbag over the fence and told her to climb over and get it. Such had been her first encounter with Fat Cat. Her mom had complained later that night about all the dog hair that had plastered itself onto Ga Eul's school uniform, but Ga Eul didn't care. She had made a new friend.

Today, she had decided to wear a blue silk blouse Yi Jeong had bought for her but paired it with one of her inexpensive gray cardigans since she felt somewhat conspicuous wearing the designer clothing. If her mother had noticed the flamboyant new editions to Ga Eul's wardrobe, she hadn't said anything, at least not yet, and Ga Eul tried to draw the least attention to them possible. However, on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays when she worked at the café, Ga Eul liked to dress nicely because Il Hyun always dressed that way, a habit leftover from his days as a chaebol and heir apparent Ga Eul suspected. After she had started taking pottery again with Eun Jae, she had learned how Yi Jeong had been chosen over Il Hyun to be the successor and how he had cut ties with the family for the most part after that. He seemed content now, though, to manage his small café and make plans with his fiancé, and Ga Eul felt glad for the both of them and happy to be included in their circle. Il Hyun had been teaching her to make latte art, and she kept joking that if she failed out of university at least she would have a promising career as a barista.

As she poured fresh water into Fat Cat's bowl, she made a mental note to make Yi Jeong one of her latte creations when she next saw him, hopefully during Christmas.

She picked up her bookbag and, after giving Fat Cat one last belly rub, headed out of the gate and turned toward her house.

"Still picking on that dog, I see."

Ga Eul froze.

"But you're not wearing your uniform anymore. How is it that you're in college already?"

That voice. It found an echo somewhere deep in Ga Eul's memory.

Slowly, she turned around. In front of the gate from which she had just emerged stood a tall man probably in his mid-twenties wearing a plain white t-shirt, jeans, and a worn black leather jacket. He wore his hair in a buzz cut, exposing a sharply defined, angular face which a familiar scar streaked from top to bottom on the right side.

"Gong Yoo Oppa?"

He nodded, grinning.

Ga Eul herself broke into a huge grin.

"Oppa!" She ran up and hugged him.

When she finally pulled back, he said, "I can't pick you up and twirl you around now. You're all grown up…You look pretty."

Blushing, Ga Eul punched him lightly on the arm.

"How can you say that? You've been away for so long I hardly recognized you. How was the army? Are you going back to school or do you have a job? Are you living with your family again?"

"Hey, hey, one question at a time. I take it back. You haven't changed at all."

Ga Eul made a pouting expression.

"You haven't changed either. You still won't answer my questions."

Gong Yoo reached over and affectionately ruffled her hair.

"Brat."

Knocking his arm away, Ga Eul replied, "Meanie." When he didn't say anything, she continued, "I heard you tried to visit me the other day. I'm sorry I wasn't there. I had gone with some friends on a trip."

Gong Yoo nodded.

"So I heard. You're friends with some pretty important people now, aren't you?"

At Ga Eul's questioning look, he explained, "Your grandmother told me about Jan Di. Wow." He stuck his hands in his pockets and looked her over. "My little sister's moving up in the world and leaving us poor old bastards behind."

"Hardly. I do have a job, you know."

"Oh?"

"Mm-hmm. I've had one since I was sixteen, no, fifteen. I was almost sixteen when I started working at the porridge shop. But now I work at a coffee shop."

"See? You haven't changed. The hard worker. The model student. I bet you even got a scholarship for college."

"Well…yes..."

"I tell you what, you're well on your way to becoming a respectable citizen of society. Not bad for someone who was half-raised by us hooligans. Me and your brother, I mean."

"You weren't that bad."

"Tell that to your dad. Remember that time—nah, you were too little to remember this—but we decided to barbecue these insects we'd found in your backyard just to see what they would taste like. We scorched a patch of grass pretty badly and nearly set the house on fire." Gong Yoo laughed. The sound was brittle, like crackling twigs. "We were always getting into some stupid shit like that. I can't say I blame him for not wanting to see me in his house. He's probably still afraid I'll burn it down."

"No, I do remember—the scorched grass, at least. I told Jan Di that was where aliens had landed in the middle of the night and tried to kidnap us, but my dad was too tough for them." She kicked at a pebble and rolled it around underneath her shoe. "I heard he kicked you out."

"Yeah, he did. It was just like old times." Gong Yoo pulled a carton of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one up.

Ga Eul coughed and waved her hand as some of the smoke blew in her direction.

"Those things are going to kill you one day if you're not careful."

"Yeah, well, from the time you're born, there's plenty of ways to die."

Gong Yoo must have noticed the shift in Ga Eul's expression because he quickly continued, "Sorry. I didn't mean anything by that."

"It's okay. I wasn't thinking anything. Oh! By the way, thank you for my brother's hoodie. I didn't even know you had it."

"Yeah, I found it when I was packing and going through stuff at my parent's house."

"You're leaving?"

"Moving to Taiwan."

"Oh. So far away? Why? Do you know anyone there?"

At that moment, Ga Eul's phone began ringing and wouldn't stop.

"Hold on a moment, will you, Oppa?" she said when she pulled out her phone and saw Yi Jeong's number.

"Hello? Sunbae?"

"Ga Eul-yang, are you busy right now?"

"Oh…aniyo, but…I'm meeting with an old friend right now. I haven't him seen in a long time. Is it okay if I call you back?"

A short silence followed, but then Yi Jeong answered, "Ah, yes, of course, it's fine. Sorry to bother you."

"I'll call you later tonight, okay? I promise."

"Yeah, sure, just call me anytime."

"Okay, bye."

"Take care."

"Sorry, Oppa," Ga Eul said as she hung up the phone. "That was…Actually, can you keep a secret?"

"Aniyo, I'm going to send your dad letters from Taiwan telling him all about this secret boyfriend you have."

"How could you tell that was my boyfriend?"

"Just a guess, but thanks for confirming it."

"You were always able to trick me."

"You're not that hard to trick. You know that, right?"

"I know you always used to make fun of me for it."

"I bet your boyfriend's having an amusing time right now. Just don't be too gullible, Chu Ga Eul. Not all guys are nice like me and your brother."

"Well, don't worry, my boyfriend is. And since you're also so nice, how about I buy you something to eat? Like a…a reunion present?"

"A reunion present?" Gong Yoo quirked an eyebrow. "All right, but no underage drinking allowed."

"I'm not underage."

"Tell that to your brother. He'd come back from the grave and kill me in my sleep if I got you drunk."

"Well, I don't drink," Ga Eul said as they started walking toward the bus stop.

"That's good because I'm not buying you anything."

"I know, I know. I'm just telling you."

"No, I'm just telling you."