Chapter 14: The Accusation Scene

She went on a Wednesday.

Not because Wednesday was significant, but because she had spent Tuesday finishing the walk she had started outside Seo-jun's steel door—figuratively, in the sense that she had covered the distance from her sister is safe because of him to I am going to stand in front of him and say what I came to say, and the gap between those two coordinates required a full twenty-four hours of methodical transit. She slept four hours. She ate toast over the sink. She wrote out what she intended to say on three pages of her notebook and then read it back twice, cutting anything that was anger instead of argument, and when she was finished she had two pages and one paragraph that she committed to memory the way she had once committed chord progressions—not word for word, but structurally, so the architecture would hold even if she had to improvise the surface.

The HanStar building was on the corner of Gangnam-daero and a side street whose name she had looked up once and immediately forgotten, which seemed appropriate. Glass and chrome, the kind of facade that communicated permanence through sheer visual expense. She had been here once before, walking out of the satellite audition space three months ago with the phrase technically fine not marketable enough compressed behind her sternum like a bruise she was not going to press.