A/N: Italics are a memory. Thanks for the kind reviews :)

Yi Jeong caught Madeleine's wrist as she was leaving, trailing some distance behind her parents as she was not too eager to be caught into a conversation with them.

The potter's hand on her wrist felt foreign. She resisted the urge to shake it off.

"Madeleine, I hope you don't mind, but I took the liberty of selecting something for you to wear to the exhibition. Obviously, it would be best if we color coordinate. The dress should be arriving at your father's house later in the week."

She had to admit, Yi Jeong was one of the most handsome men she'd ever seen up close, and given that his father had looked almost exactly like him at that age, she couldn't really blame her mother for falling for So Hyun Sub.

Then Yi Jeong smiled at her, and it reminded her of how Woo Bin used to smile at her when he was trying to charm her into something.

The thought, fleeting as it was, stunned and embarrassed her, and she pulled her wrist away, uncaring of how it looked.

"Oh...Oh, why, thank you...I wasn't expecting that."

"Of course." Yi Jeong bowed politely. "I will see you there then."

Madeleine straightened up and bowed stiffly.

"See you there," she replied as he began to head inside.

The way he looked at her had made her feel dirty.

He had no idea about her and Woo Bin.

She wondered if his girlfriend...or ex-girlfriend...had made it back to her apartment okay.

Not that she cared. She must be ill.

Shit, she was going crazy.

Suddenly, he turned around again, and, holding her gaze, said, "I'm looking forward to seeing all of your work. I hope as artists we might be able to understand each other. To be honest, I've never quite put on a show like the one we're planning for Saturday. I hope you enjoy it."

"Understand what?" Madeleine muttered into her glass of white zinfadel.

A knock at her apartment door forced her up from her sofa, where she could have sworn she smelled Woo Bin's cologne.

Woo Bin wasn't at the door, though.

Her mother was.

"Oh, well, please, come in. Make yourself at home," Madeleine intoned as her mother brushed past her and set her dark brown Louis Vuitton purse down on the counter. "Let me guess. You're here to beg me to reconsider." Madeleine gestured widely as she made her way back over to the sofa. "Well, you're about ten years too late."

"Madeleine—"

"You know, you two looked good together today, though not as good as in the pictures. After all, young love is so beautiful."

"I wouldn't know," her mother replied. "Someone did away with my copies years ago."

"Mm, pity." Madeleine stretched herself out so that her legs rested on the coffee table in front of her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her mother surveying the room, distaste spreading over her features. No doubt, she found the trashed state of Madeleine's apartment utterly reprehensible. Perhaps that was good. Perhaps she'd be less inclined to prolong her visit.

To Madeleine's surprise, though, her mother withheld comment except to say, "How many times do I have to tell you it's incredibly rude to put your feet up on tables?"

"Must be the French woman in me coming out."

"And yet you insist on living here."

"Why are you here? I'm surprised you haven't crawled back into your hidey-hole yet. Isn't there too much sunlight in this country for a snake like you?"

Sidestepping until she blocked Madeleine's view of the muted variety show on TV, her mother folded her arms and pursed her lips. Madeleine's mouth quirked into a small smile as she believed she had struck a nerve.

"Listen, I know I wasn't the best 'Omma.' You want to be mad at me for that, then be mad at me. But don't throw your whole life away over how stupid I've been. Don't be a fool!"

"Omma," Madeleine drawled out with fake sweetness, "do you remember when I was in the first grade and we had career day at school? I wanted to be a painter like you. We had this big show and tell in class, and all the parents were supposed to come, but you didn't show, so Abella stood next to me in the pictures."

"What are you going on about now?"

With her thumb, Madeleine swiped at the smudged lipstick on the edge of her wine glass. When she could barely see the dark pink fragments clinging to the delicate glass, she continued, "When I came home, one of the maids told me you had gone to an exhibition. It took me a long time to figure it out, but it was his, wasn't it? 'So Hyun Sub Takes Parisian Art Scene By Storm.' It was in all those newspaper clippings you saved. You still loved him, didn't you? What you were going to do? Leave us and run away with him? I'm not the biggest fool here. You're just angry because finally you have to be this close to something you can never have."

"My dear, one day you're going to grow up and learn to regret too."

"Oh, I'm sure you have loads of regrets," Madeleine muttered. "Shall we start from when you abandoned me at the hospital?"

"Madeleine, there's things you don't know about that family. Do you know why your father wants you to marry Yi Jeong?"

"Because I've been smitten with him ever since I saw his work in Paris," Madeleine replied in an affected tone.

"Don't be ridiculous. Your father might have some genuine affection for you, but he's a businessman through and through."

"Why do you think the old man agreed to it then?" Madeleine brushed her hair behind her shoulder and shrugged. "However Appa bargained for it is his business. But isn't it nice to keep it all in the family?"

"You've got it all figured out then, haven't you? You think because you know that much, you know everything."

"I always find out what I want to know."

A smug smile appeared on So Ri's face.

"And do you know the Song family?"

At the mention of Woo Bin's family, Madeleine's mask of self-assured calm faltered the tiniest bit, but she kept her tone even and answered, "I've heard of them...Oh, yes, don't they own the construction company Appa's been using for his new hotels?"

"Yes, well, look what I found." Crossing over to the kitchen island and then back to the TV, So Ri pulled a file folder out of her purse and slapped it down on the coffee table in front of Madeleine.

Madeleine stared at the offending documents, trying to breathe normally. Were those photos? Did her mother know about her and Woo Bin?

"What is that?"

"That, my dear," her mother continued, "is proof of a conspiracy to steal millions of dollars of priceless art from the So's precious museum and sell it on the black market, replacing the originals with forgeries. It seems to be all worked out between your benevolent Appa and the Songs. The only thing I haven't figured out is what old man So's getting out of it."

Madeleine's head snapped up. She looked directly at her mother for the first time since she'd walked in. That didn't make sense. Woo Bin and Yi Jeong had been best friends since kindergarten. There was no way Woo Bin would allow that to happen. Even she had to admire how loyal he was, even to a fault.

However, she didn't know that their friendship extended to their parents.

"What do you mean?" She narrowed her eyes at her mother.

"My goodness, don't look so shocked. Your father's been dabbling in art forgeries for years."

"How do you know that?"

"Your father talks when he's drunk, and I haven't spent our entire marriage curled up in the fetal position on my bed, thought I'm sure that's what you thought. Here. Take a look for yourself. This is a contract between Song Seung-Heon and your father concerning payment for the movement of certain art acquisitions within his newest resort that we will, so I'm told, soon be vacationing at with your in-laws."

She recognized the name on the contract. It was Woo Bin's uncle, not his father. Not that that meant anything.

"So...what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that if this goes south, it could end up looking really bad for certain parties," Madeleine's mother snapped. "Not to mention the legal trouble we'll be in. But I'm sure you were taking all of that into account when you decided to take your petty little revenge."

Woo Bin had been staring at the sickening photos for half an hour, sifting through them again and again, trying to piece together where they had been taken, what had happened, why no one had heard about it, and how the hell Madeleine fit into it. The girl lying on the ground—ribbons of cloth sprawled around her—was obviously Ga Eul. Though he could only see one side of Ga Eul's face in the best picture, she was wearing the necklace Yi Jeong had given her. Given that her more private parts—it felt wrong to Woo Bin to even think about them—had been blurred out, Madeleine had meant to use the photos for something. They were all edited, but he couldn't find the originals anywhere, though he'd scoured Madeleine's files for the past few hours.

He'd come to two possibilities. Either Madeleine had taken the photos herself and the originals were on another device, or someone had sent her the already edited versions. As angry as he was getting, he hoped it was the former. That way, at least she was the only person who had seen them.

Maybe.

He had to figure out where those photos had been taken.

He had to talk to Ga Eul.

Now.

The security footage from the Soleil Grand Ballroom the night of Gu Jun Pyo's engagement party had been easy enough to access for a man of his influence, but So Hyun Sub didn't quite understand why he'd bothered. He'd made a tolerable life of not caring, of not needling into anyone else's business unnecessarily. It wasn't exactly a comfortable life and certainly not a fulfilling one, but he'd long become apathetic to such aspirations.

However, today he had shocked himself by doing something halfway decent.

It just didn't sit right with him—the way Chu Ga Eul had burst upon him that night, interrupting his fairly light tête-a-tête for the evening, her hair a tangled mess and her eyes swollen and red-rimmed. And that coat—commoners might be blind when it comes to fashion, but he certainly hoped they weren't stupid. It was still summer and quite hot, even in the stairwell where he'd taken up his little dalliance.

At any rate, he'd decided he didn't care. It could only be expected of someone of her standing to crumble eventually beneath the weight of his own cruel society.

He still didn't care, he assured himself even as he followed her through the night's events up to the point where some careless waiter spilled wine all over her dress. She panicked, of course—commoners were always panicking over one thing or another—and rushed to the restroom. Then a peculiar thing happened. She didn't come back out, but a familiar face came in. Once with her cronies and once alone. An "Out of Order" sign was set out and removed. Chu Ga Eul walked into the bathroom wearing an elegant ballgown and back out wearing an over-sized trench coat, after which she disappeared into the very stairwell he had appropriated for his own purposes.

A few minutes later, the girl he had been with emerged from the stairwell, looking none too happy. She had been a bit of a bore, he remembered. They all were. Perhaps he needed a new distraction.

Because that's what his interest in the matter was, he assured himself.

Perhaps, out of mere curiosity, he would pay the kindergarten teacher a visit.

Ga Eul didn't see Yi Jeong in her dreams. She thought with all the stuff happening, she would at least have a nightmare about him. But no. Instead, she saw her brother's half-bitten nails running across the frets on his guitar, faint fragments of an original song he had written coming back to her as she stared at the home video her parents were playing. She recognized this scene. It was after her brother's funeral, after the commiserating crowd had gone home, leaving her and her parents to their solitary grief. During the service, she had sobbed. Privately, she had raged. By that point in the evening, she had thrown up all the food their neighbors had brought, what little she had been able to force down. After she had emptied herself, both physically and emotionally, she had sat in front of the couch, transfixed by the taunting images on the TV screen. Her mother had cried the entire night. She didn't bother making Ga Eul go to bed. For the first time in her twelve years of life, Ga Eul had felt grown up, the scars of mourning fresh and blistering her once-tender skin, aging it before its time. In her dream, she felt her stomach twist into painful knots like before, the shock like a bullet hitting her again and again every time she became aware of her surroundings, aware that he was no longer there.

Something should be happening, she thought. Something always happens in dreams. But no. Instead, she was stuck in some sick time warp, reliving the sound of her mother's sobs and the scratchiness of the blanket she had curled up in on the couch. She refused to get up and get another one, to leave the only comfort she had left, harsh as it was, for the cold air.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she listened to the familiar melody weaving between her mother sobs, weaving over and around them and back in to itself.

When her alarm woke her up-her head pounding from the tightness in her jaw and the grinding of her teeth in her sleep-she tried to hum it but couldn't remember.

It took her a moment to realize that she was hearing more than just her alarm. Someone was knocking-no, pounding-on her door like a madman.

Abruptly, Ga Eul shot up in bed and fumbled frantically in the dark for the glasses on her night stand. It couldn't be Yi Jeong, could it? They were supposed to stay away from each other.

But who else would it be at 6 AM?

After stumbling unsteadily to the door in her pajamas, she peered through the peephole to see a rather agitated-looking Woo Bin pacing in front of her apartment door.

She opened the door slowly, sure that he couldn't be visiting her at that hour for any good reason, but before she could get a word out, Woo Bin demanded,

"Ga Eul, is there something you want to tell me?"

Ga Eul nearly stumbled back at his harsh tone.

"W-what?"

Woo Bin held up his phone to where she could clearly see herself on the screen, covered in scraps of what had been a beautiful ballgown.