Mail orders from Seoul, from Busan, increase ten-fold. It becomes nearly impossible to find ingredients for their table otherwise, unless they pivot to a solely European diet. Which they could, easily enough, but she shrugs to Jeong Hyeok, 'it's not necessary, so why give up our favorite things?' With some luck she manages to get seeds for a summer garden where they plant mung beans, kabocha, shishito peppers and more. She does not waste time wondering whether importing seeds internationally is either the ethical or the legal thing to do. Chrysanthemum greens they manage to secure from a local florist who does not try to hide their gentle curiosity over why one residence would require so many.
Other than the Edelweiss, she is entirely unfamiliar with cultivating anything from seed to plant. "Must we speak to each plant individually, do you suppose?" she asks him one evening as they lazed on the porch, looking out toward the garden-area, plants there only just beginning to sprout.
"Take your viola out and play for them every so often," he tells her. "Surely, that would give them best encouragement."
"Shall I go now?" she asks, the moon rising in the sky. Making as though to walk inside and get her instrument, she lets her matching satin robe fall away into the chair she had occupied, leaving her in only the gauzy nightgown underneath that even the low light of evening could penetrate.
He reaches for the fabric's edge and catches it, "not just now," he says, "not just now." His hand tightens its hold.
They become more social once his position as a visiting professor begins in earnest. Prior, in their two weeks-stays there was no time for anyone but each other, each rarely left the room the room the other was in. Every meal, every event and moment was shared, treasured.
Now, they visit, they attend faculty dinners, and at a party they might even—for a moment, for just the slightest moment—embark on conversations with separate partners. She knows her English is improving from use, she can now hear it with her own ears, the smoother tones and more-ready vocabulary available to her. She observes how nicely he fits in, here, discussing music and academia, those past years of experience in this country and culture coming back to the fore of his mind, of his behaviors. She sees he is less reticent, somehow, more open. She overhears him dispute a point of musical notation with another professor as eloquently and promptly—without a bit of hesitance as though he had to take a moment to translate his own thoughts from Korean to Swiss German—as any other instructor in the room.
It should make her proud to see this. It should please her to notice his lack of reticence, the freedom he felt in that moment to express his mind. But she feels her heart lurch to the left, and where pride should be she finds pain, and frustration.
On the way home to the chalet in their car he asks her, "is something wrong?" his mind goes back over the course of the evening, "Are you okay?" he can think of nothing upsetting that might have happened. "What?"
"Every time I am happy I become angry," she says, and he hears something like dread—like the color of old rust-in her voice. "And I am angry all the time now, in every moment. Because I am so happy. Because every moment that you are here is making me happy. Is making my heart glad."
He doesn't say that this makes no sense to him, that happiness begets rage, he only pulls the car into the first parking lot they encounter, parking a good distance from the light of the storefront. Leaving the engine idling, he turns to see her.
She knows what she's about to confess to is not a good look. It is not jealousy, per se. Neither is it insecurity—toward him. No, it is a collapse, years of countdowns in the making. It is hours and days and months, now, where their future cannot be claimed, cannot be secured. It is the anger and frustration of her own inability to say that despite all these things she will cling beside him no matter what.
It is the embassy in Bern like a bruise on the map of Switzerland that she cannot stop herself from pressing on to remind herself, realist that she is, practical thinker and planner that she is—that it still hurts, that it can get worse and can hurt her worse. She, Yoon Se-ri, CEO of Seri's Choice, knows with all certainty that in three years' time no less than twelve new products will be launched by her brand. And yet she can say and be assured of no certainty at all where she will find herself in relationship to Ri Jeong Hyeok at that time—or in all the time in-between.
"Our life here, together, has a terminal diagnosis," she tells him. "Our time together is limited, but no doctor exists who can even tell us if it's by days or by years." Her shoulders shake with tears she doesn't want to fall, and bitterness she doesn't want to be tasting. "And I cannot even be promised to stay with you."
He listens, hearing her out.
"I count," she tells him, for the first time. "I count down until you arrive, every year. Every year. Any day of the year and I will know how many days are left until I see you again. Wake me from the deepest sleep—or put me in a room without a window for weeks on end, still, I will know the number of days."
He does not say that she has never told him this.
"I have never said this to you, because how can I? It's not your fault, this destiny. And now, do you know what I have been doing? Counting. Counting up because I have no way to know what to count down to, what number will be the one that takes you away from me. And so all this time since the end of our two weeks I am counting. But do you know what happened, days ago? I—I lost the count. I was in the middle of a meeting one day and…I could not recall the last time I had counted. I went immediately and looked it up on the calendar—there was the number—but, but—I had reached a point where I was no longer logging it. I reached a point where this was simply…my everyday." She does not say this scares her. He does not ask.
She feels deep within herself that he is moved by what she has said, knows how to perfectly read the microexpressions on his beautiful face that show his concern and dismay over hearing her confession.
He only takes her hand, there under the car's dome light, brings its palm to his cheek and presses against it with his own. "Mianhae," he says, though both know their situation is neither's fault.
"Mianhae," she echoes back, knowing she has spoilt the night, the memory of the party, revealed something particularly unlovely about herself.