Her Alexa app counts down to one date. Always, a single date. She can ask it aloud anytime: How many days? And she does. Ask it.
She doesn't need to. The countdown ticks in the back of her mind at the rate of her heart's beating. Slow, steady and dependable—an echo of the passage of time necessary until it will quicken and flutter: one year until she sees him again.
'My, how she loves helping young musical geniuses,' articles write about her, about the company. 'My, how dedicated a patron of the arts Ms. Yoon has become!' They are not entirely hollow, these accolades. No more so than her new-found appreciation for Chopin, for Rimsky-Korsakov. She does love helping musically gifted young people. And classical piano music has become, for her, the food of love. But it is the new NK students in the program that touch her heart the most. In every face she sees him there, in every hand sweeping over the keys in practiced, graceful elegance. She thinks of all the things that their training, that their dedication and harnessed passion might mask. As it did for him. As, she knows better than most, it still does.
Does she hide behind the music program endowment? Yes, she hides. She hides everything—everything that matters-behind it. She hides the purchase of what she considers her marital home—their mountain chalet—behind it. She hides her trips to Switzerland, her love of the music, her need to be briefed at least monthly on the new applicants, her unusually narrow focus on even the most unimportant detail of the recitals' planning, her interest in anything of news coming from NK—'it will affect our NK students!' she will say, all the while hiding. Hiding, snug in the hidey-hole of staying busy. Of any connection however tenuous to her love—to her life.
Is she happy? She is happy. Blissful.
Is she happy? No. No, she is not happy.
Not when the other side of the countdown constantly threatens. She is Persephone; six months in darkness, chained, aching to return-and six months in unfettered anticipation. She can hardly contain her laughter when she sends the funds to the local cleaner she engaged for their vacant chalet home. The woman never understands (how could she?), but is discreet enough to never question aloud why the cabinets are always kept filled with nonperishable staples, the towels and clothing recently laundered in a house occupied only two weeks out of the calendar year.
'You never know,' she told the cleaner once with a shrug. You never know when he might arrive, she finished in her head. There is always the hope that he will-through some unpredictable and unlikely quirk-end up in Switzerland when not expected, like the cyclone that first blew them together. And the house—his home-must be ready for any such surprise.
A business manager suggests she let local agents rent the property when she is not in residence. 'Fifty weeks of a year unoccupied!' they exclaim. 'Plenty of time to recoup on the investment.' She bared her teeth at them in what they thought was a smile. 'No,' she said. 'Thank you,' she said. 'No'. In her eyes was the steel of a woman who had outsmarted Cho Cheol Gang alone in an abandoned car park. But they did not know this, and so their hearts did not fail them as they might have otherwise.
The chalet is occupied, she knows but cannot tell them. Two spirits haunt it the moment their hosts leave.
The year turns 2019, and she has entered that season of anticipation where it becomes easier to bear the countdown as she is nearer the summit. She both remembers, and willfully forgets, the sets of two weeks they have shared together—remembers because the number of uninterrupted days of bliss gives her deep, satisfying joy. And chooses to forget how poorly such time balances on the scale of days she has lived alone in the meantime.
She thinks of her Swiss solo trips before he re-found her, and wills herself to shake off the exhausting loneliness of fearing he never would. This creeps in, growing and growing.
She has been asked-contracted, actually-to write her life's story/her company's story/an inspirational book about her rise to prominence. But behind this she hides, too. She is writing, daily. She allots time for such work in her daily schedule, refusing a ghostwriter. But she knows it's a ruse. She's not writing a book for binding and publication. No, she is writing daily letters to him. She knows he cannot take the document back with him. She knows this. She assures herself he can read it in the quiet times they are together, knows that she can carry him along, bring him better into her day-to-day in this way, whether he manages to read it all or not.
She pushes back against the bad feelings, the threat of exhausting loneliness. She looks only to the summit. The countdown grows smaller in its number. She hears herself make a change to her schedule. She will take an additional week this year, coming to prepare the chalet before he will arrive. She allows herself this. 'I am taking a little longer to finish some work on the book,' she tells her staff. 'Switzerland will be just the right vibe for writing.' They nod, understanding nothing, their interest temporary.
No one brings up the year prior where her return to Seoul was unexpectedly delayed. 'Food poisoning,' she had explained when she arrived back. 'Too sick to fly for a few days.' Everyone involved was solicitous for her health. None of them had looked on as she had hidden from her taxi, wrapped like a burrito in three comforters in their bed in the chalet. She had cried through trying to get dressed, she cried through abandoning getting dressed, cried through trying to cancel the taxi on her mobile, through finding it was too late to stop the driver from coming.
She fell asleep eventually, long after the taxi's horn stopped sounding and its engine noise retreated down the mountain. She woke to a swollen, trying-to-be-resolute face of her own, and to the surprised, taken-aback-at-her-appearance face of her cleaning woman who had expected a vacated chalet. 'Miss, miss,' the cleaner had begged Se-ri's pardon, 'I did not know anyone was still home—I saw the taxi. Are you, are you quite alright?' the woman asked, sweetly solicitous, clearly unsure whether Se-ri's face was consequence of medical or relationship problems.
"I will be okay," Se-ri says, tells herself, knowing that she is right. She will be okay. She is always okay. It is simply the harder part of the journey that lies ahead: beginning again at the base of the mountain obstacle that will be her path for the next 12 months. Is it like this for Ri Jeong-Hyeok, she wonders. She does not want it to be. She prays, she hopes that it is not. Let me have this burden, let me walk the rough road of this journey, she asks Destiny, petitions Fate, if it might save him from doing the same.
She stops by the recital Hotel and leaves a message for him at the desk, their always agreed-upon point of contact. She checks on the envelope there with the cellphone she keeps activated for him year-round, assuring herself that it is fully charged and ready for his use. Alexa reminds her the countdown has dropped to single digits. She collects her houseplants from the cleaner's house, where they are properly tended in the between times. She powers down her work phone just moments before she walks across the threshold of her beautiful, precious, marital home.
She passes seven days fussing over things like a new grandmother. She considers every aspect of the chalet and its construction, its decorations, and whether they ought be altered in any way before his anticipated arrival. She spends an unknown part of the day working on the viola she has rented, having left the one she bought back in Seoul. It is to be a surprise for him, that she is learning to play something that might someday result in a poorly-matched duet. She practices other music, but always returns to Song for My Brother.
Abandoning her taking-stock, she alters nothing about the chalet. It is pointless to improve perfection, she tells herself. If there is anything needing tweaked they will decide on it and take it on together. She writes for her book about the last days since she has arrived.
The countdown has nearly expired.