Chapter 8: What Somin Doesn't Tell Her

The messages had started because of a song.

That was the thing Somin kept returning to, the fact she used to reassemble the sequence into something that made sense: it had started because of a song, not because she had done anything to invite it. She had been in the laundry room on the fourth floor—the one nobody used because the second machine on the left made a grinding sound that unsettled people—folding her practice clothes on the table and listening through one earbud to a playlist she'd built over two years of covers and live cuts and soundcheck recordings that had made it onto someone's fan account. She had been listening to a three-year-old performance of Junho's—a stripped acoustic version of a track from his second EP, recorded at a radio station with a noticeably different sound balance than the studio cut—when her phone had lit up with a number she didn't recognize.

*The session recording. You found the one with the piano, not the strings. Most people don't.*