Chapter Text
Chae-gyung knows he is in the room the moment he enters it. A surreptitious glance around the room confirms what she feels is true.
She will always be the North Pole to his South. His hair is much shorter and he's sporting a slight five o'clock shadow, and he's much thinner, which made him look more fatherly than she remembered.
She feels like the bubbly liquid in her champagne flute. She is giddy in his presence; she can even be giddy with a memory.
She told him once, "When you're beside me, sometimes it made me happy and sometimes it gave me courage." She realizes, with an almost physical force, that much has not changed.
Chae-gyung hugs Hae-myung unnie and gives her a brighter smile than she had in a while. They share hosting duties and charm the room.
Last night, she couldn't sleep for the fizz running through her veins. She flipped through the photographs that her sister-in-law put in her hand after dinner.
"Shin took these," she smiled. Chae-gyung could almost sense the wink in her words.
They were pictures of the Square and the Park, the view at the Seaport, against the Bridge, the Skyline, in the Museum.
But there was one, at the bottom of her pile, of the slight profile of Shin against a familiar red-bricked building. He was here.
It was her first fresh visual of him in the one year, two months, twelve days since they've been apart.
Her apartment walls have his face, mostly from photographs she had been able to save from the few times they had taken pictures together. In the dining room is where they have the complete family portrait; in her bedroom, that one on the beach when Shin took her to see the sunrise.
She tells herself it is for Yang and Ryong, to always remember. What she never admits is because she wants them to remind her of him, too.
She remembers his every response to her letters. They are all warmly but properly worded, addressed to "My Queen," in his regal penmanship. Each one is a treatise of their sons, a proclamation of his pride and respect of their shared parenthood. But he indicates nothing between the lines of how they are--whether he considers them still, as husband and wife.
As she examined his picture, blurry even (Hae-myung seemed to have taken it in secret and in a hurry), she remembered her dream of a chinky-eyed daughter, another with her father's smile, maybe another son. She couldn't take her eyes off them: both picture and dream.
Between midnight and first light, she had tossed coins and picked petals off flowers. Do I come to him, do I come to him not? He loves me, he loves me not?
Before exhaustion took over, she finally decided. He should take a step towards me. He should call me Chae-gyung. Her last whisper, a prayer was, "Please let this not end in goodbye."
She catches his eye.
She almost forgets herself. Her toes are inching their way towards him.
She makes herself stop in that moment. Because she wants the sign.
Or this will be pretending again--and she already knows she cannot be queen and love him, he cannot be king and love her.
Either way this ends in goodbye?