It was close to six in the evening when Sol-woo and his uncle got back to the apartment. The late March cold hit hard on Seoul’s streets, and Sol-woo had forgotten to bring a heavy coat. Without thinking twice, he bolted from the car to the front entrance, Min-ho right on his heels. For a moment, uncle and nephew looked like a pair of kids fleeing the frozen wind.
When the apartment door opened, the warm smell of a freshly made stew met them immediately. Eun-ji was waiting in the kitchen — the table set with Sundubu-jjigae, a spicy soft tofu and seafood stew steaming in a stone bowl, alongside a bowl of hot white rice and several small dishes of banchan.
Eun-ji looked at her son with deep expectation, but fearing a discouraging answer, she turned her eyes to her younger brother instead:
"How did it go?"
Min-ho looked at Sol-woo, stepping back with a quiet gesture to let him deliver the news. Sol-woo, catching the shared nervousness between his mother and his uncle, couldn’t help letting out a soft laugh.
"It went well, Mom," he answered with an easy, reassuring smile. "Tomorrow we’ll look at the contract draft. Ask your lawyer friend if he could come with me — I don’t have a set time yet, but it’ll be during the day."
Eun-ji let out a long, contained breath of relief. Nothing comforted her more than seeing her son like this — present, light, without that weight of melancholy sitting on his shoulders.
"Yes, yes — of course," she said, her enthusiasm evident. "I already spoke with him and he said he’ll be on standby for your call. Come, let’s eat before it gets cold."
They sat down and had dinner in a calm, unhurried atmosphere. In the background, the living room television was running a preview of the ninth episode of Descendants of the Sun — the drama that had the entire country gripped those days — but Sol-woo had no headspace for a series. He focused on his plate, mentally replaying everything that had happened in the Cheongdam-dong office. He was satisfied with the step he’d just taken.
After dinner, Uncle Min-ho said his goodbyes and headed home. As the night before, his mother stayed in the living room resting in front of the television, while Sol-woo retreated to the quiet of his room. Once there, he took a quick hot shower and sat for a moment on the edge of the bed.
He’d gone several hours without checking YouTube, so he opened the app with inevitable curiosity.
The numbers stopped him cold. The play count had passed 20,000. Over 1,000 likes. More than a hundred comments. Not a single dislike. For a video that had been up for barely two days, it was a staggering figure.
Then a thought crossed his mind — what if the contract with MNO Entertainment required him to take the video down and wipe his online presence to rebuild it from scratch? The idea of erasing that first mark produced a faint nostalgia, but he set the thought aside for now.
He started reading through the comments. For the first time in his life, he felt the strange sensation of being someone with an audience — reading people who, though not formally his fans, had been caught by his music. The overwhelming majority of the messages came from Western users.
Several comments were in Spanish. One of them stood out:
"Who is this? Does he have Instagram? @Manu — please, give us your socials!"
Below that thread, dozens of Spanish speakers were asking for more information about who was behind the channel. But one message in English pulled his attention above all the rest:
"If you’re based in the United States, would there be any possibility of scheduling a meeting? We’d love to explore a proposal with Republic Records."
In that thread, listeners from the US and the UK were debating among themselves, hoping the channel owner would respond. The song had clearly touched something real in the English-speaking audience.
Sol-woo closed YouTube. He couldn’t keep feeding that expectation. He’d already made a firm decision here in South Korea — but he made himself a quiet promise: if for any reason the opportunity with MNO didn’t come through, he would find a way in the US or Europe. What he had no doubt about, not anymore, was that he would become a musician. That certainty would never die again.
Carried by the momentum of the moment, he opened Instagram. His account was practically a ghost — no posts, barely a handful of followers, and he only followed one person. He’d created the profile for her, and only for her. When he checked the following list, he noticed something that pressed lightly on his chest: she no longer followed him back.
Without overthinking it, he pressed the button and unfollowed her too.
Even so, a sudden wave of nostalgia pulled him under. With a tightness in his throat, he opened his phone’s gallery and scrolled back to the oldest photos.
He only had two photographs of them together. In one of them — taken at sunset on the Rhode Island coast — they were holding each other against the sea wind. She had that characteristic piercing gaze, dark hair falling loosely over her shoulders, and that beauty that was so distinctly hers: intense, unadorned, effortless. He stood beside her wearing a genuine smile he rarely showed anyone else. The image had captured a perfect moment of closeness that, even though it now belonged to the past, refused to fully disappear.
Sol-woo, driven by a quiet eagerness for the next day to come, drifted off to sleep. The hours passed in stillness as the early morning turned cold — that dry, biting cold that defined March in Seoul.
At seven in the morning, Sol-woo woke up with a renewed energy, as if he were ready to walk out and take on the world. He went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth with purpose in front of the mirror. Looking at his reflection, he noticed the state of his hair — long, dark strands falling in loose rebellion across his forehead, giving him a careless edge that only sharpened the lines of his face and the symmetry of his mixed features. He had the natural look of someone a camera would love without trying.
When he came out to the kitchen, his mother was already making breakfast. They exchanged a warm smile before she spoke:
"I talked to my lawyer friend. He said he can go with you in the afternoon — something came up this morning unexpectedly."
Sol-woo nodded calmly as he pulled up a chair.
"That’s fine, Mom. I’d imagine they’ll call after midday anyway. We’ll just have to wait."