Chapter 2: Kang Minjoon Arrives on a Tuesday

He arrives without announcement, which is the first thing she notices.

Jiyeon is crossing the fourth-floor corridor at eight forty-three on Tuesday morning, practice bag slung over one shoulder, coffee in hand—the cheap vending machine kind that tastes like hot water with ambitions—when she nearly walks into him. Not quite. She stops three steps short, the way you stop short of a wall you didn't see until the last moment, that specific reorientation of the body before the brain has fully processed what it's looking at.

A man. Charcoal suit. No lanyard, no visitor badge, no one flanking him with a clipboard and the anxious energy of corporate hospitality. He is standing at the junction of the east and west corridors studying the fire exit map on the wall with the focused attention of someone who is actually reading it, not pretending to while waiting for someone to come find him. Medium height, or slightly above it. Dark hair cut without flourish. The suit is good—she can tell that much even from three steps away—but he's wearing it the way people wear clothes they don't think about, which either means he has so much money that quality is just the ambient condition of his life, or he simply does not care about the signal it sends.