Sleep was unnecessary. Wasteful, even. Jimin Park had never cared for it; nights were too valuable to surrender to unconsciousness. Night meant quiet, and quiet meant clarity.
He sat cross-legged on the floor of his small apartment, the only light a desk lamp casting a narrow glow over his notebook. The rest of the room was shadow, but he liked it that way. Shadows were honest. They never pretended to be anything but what they were.
The first page of the notebook bore her name. Dr. Hyuna Kim. He had written it three times now, once in careful print, once in looping cursive, and once in sharp, jagged block letters. Beneath the names, he had scrawled notes like a scientist cataloging a new discovery:
Doesn’t flinch easily.
Voice soft, but with steel beneath.
Wrote quickly when I spoke of empathy. She doubts me. That’s good.
Believes she’s in control. She isn’t.
Jimin tapped the pen against the paper, eyes narrowing at the last line. Not yet, anyway.
He closed his eyes and replayed the session, moment by moment. The way she had sat, straight but not stiff. The pause before she asked her questions. The faint shift in her grip on the notebook when he told her he believed in her. Most people thought strength was in their words, but he knew better—strength revealed itself in hesitation, in the places where someone nearly lost control.
And Hyuna had hesitated. That meant she was real.
Jimin smiled, leaning back on his hands. He hated pretense, hated the masks people wore to survive. But Hyuna’s mask had cracked, just for a second, and in that second he had seen her truth. She was not untouchable. She was not unreachable. She could be moved.
“Good,” he murmured to himself. “That’s good.”
He rose, pacing slowly across the apartment. On the wall above his desk hung a collage of photographs, clippings, fragments of lives he had dissected over the years. Some were strangers he had studied, others were people he had known—briefly, intimately, destructively. He stopped in front of the wall and let his gaze sweep over it, then returned to the notebook on the floor.
Hyuna’s name didn’t belong on paper. Not anymore.
He tore the page free, folded it carefully, and pinned it to the wall with a tack. A new addition. The others blurred into background, but her name stood out, crisp and new.
The beginning of something inevitable.
Jimin stepped back, arms folded, and tilted his head as though admiring art. “You’ll understand,” he whispered. “You’ll see what the others never could.”
He sat again, flipping to a blank page, and began to write—not about himself, but about her. Imagined details, invented truths. He speculated about the books she kept by her bedside, about the way she might drink her coffee, about whether she slept soundly or woke in the night with shadows pressing against her chest. He filled lines with guesses, and to him, each one felt closer to certainty.
The clock ticked toward 3 a.m., but time was irrelevant. The world was irrelevant. Only she mattered.
He tapped the pen once more against the paper, then wrote in large, decisive letters:
I’m not here to be healed.
I’m here to heal her.
Jimin leaned back, grinning at the words. His heart beat quick, not with nerves, but with exhilaration.
Tomorrow, he would return to her office as a patient. But in truth, he was her teacher.
And one day soon, she would thank him for it.
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