Ryan didn’t tell anyone about the man in the alley, but he didn’t forget him either.
That was the thing about the things Ryan decided not to think about — they didn’t leave.
They just moved to a back room in his head and waited.
By Thursday, three days later, he’d almost convinced himself it didn’t matter.
Almost.
The math test was exactly as bad as expected, which was to say, not bad at all, because Ryan was good at math the way he was good at most things that didn’t require anyone to believe in him first — quietly, reliably, without anyone particularly noticing.
He finished with twelve minutes to spare and spent them watching Tae-Sung’s pencil hover over the same problem like it might solve itself out of sheer intimidation.
“You could help,” Tae-Sung whispered.
“You could have studied.”
“That’s not the same energy as help.”
Ryan slid his own paper two inches to the left, angled just enough.
Tae-Sung’s shoulders dropped in silent gratitude.
Mr.
Bae, at the front of the room, didn’t look up from his phone, which was either professional restraint or complete indifference — Ryan had never been sure which, in three years of having him as a teacher.
At the bell, the classroom exhaled all at once, chairs scraping, voices climbing back to their normal volume.
Ryan was halfway to the door when Soo-ah caught his sleeve.
“You’re coming to the tournament screening Saturday, right?”
Soo-ah sat two seats over, had for two years, and had appointed herself — without ever discussing it with Ryan — as the person responsible for making sure he left his apartment occasionally.
She was small, sharp-tongued, and Tier 4, one of maybe six kids in their entire grade who’d actually Awakened, though she never brought it up unless someone else did first.
Ryan appreciated that about her more than he’d ever said out loud.
“What screening?”
“The Youth Tournament qualifiers.
They’re showing it in the gym on the big screen because half the school’s obsessed with the Hoan bracket this year.” She rolled her eyes, though not entirely without interest herself.
“Min-jae’s cousin is fighting.
Apparently he’s Tier 3 now.”
“Impressive,” Ryan said, and meant it, a little.
“You’re not going to pretend you don’t care.”
“I’m not pretending anything.
I said impressive.”
“You said it in your flat voice.
The one you use when you actually care but don’t want anyone to know you care.” Soo-ah folded her arms, victorious.
“I’ve catalogued it.
It’s a documented phenomenon.”
Ryan didn’t argue, because arguing would have proven her point, and instead just shouldered his bag and let her walk with him toward the stairwell, half-listening as she recited bracket predictions with the specific, joyful authority of someone who’d clearly spent her entire lunch period researching this.
He liked this — the noise of it, the ordinariness.
He’d learned, somewhere around age twelve, that ordinary wasn’t something you were owed.
It was something you built, quietly, out of small unremarkable days, and it could be taken from you faster than it was made.
He didn’t examine that thought too closely either.
It belonged in the same back room as the man in the alley.
Uncle Baek’s shop was slower than usual that afternoon, the kind of slow that let Ryan restock the entire snack aisle twice and still have twenty minutes left to sit behind the register with a physics textbook he wasn’t really reading.
“You’re doing the face again,” Uncle Baek said, from the floor, where he was on his knees fixing something under the drink cooler that had apparently decided to stop working sometime around noon.
“What face.”
“The math face.
Except it’s not math this time.” Uncle Baek grunted, twisted something, and the cooler hummed back to life with an offended little shudder.
“You’ve had it since Monday.”
Ryan didn’t answer right away, which was its own kind of answer, and Uncle Baek — to his credit — didn’t push.
He’d never been the type to push.
He was the type who left the door open and let you decide whether to walk through it, which was, Ryan had come to understand over four years of afternoon shifts, a rarer quality in an adult than it should have been.
“There was a guy,” Ryan said finally.
“Monday night.
Standing outside the pharmacy.
Just — standing there.
Watching my building.”
Uncle Baek stood up, wiping his hands on his apron, and for a second something crossed his face that wasn’t quite alarm but was adjacent to it — filed away fast, smoothed over before Ryan could be sure he’d seen it at all.
“What’d he look like?”
“Dark coat.
Didn’t move much.
Looked at me for a second and then just — left.” Ryan shrugged, feeling suddenly foolish for bringing it up at all.
“Probably nothing.”
“Probably,” Uncle Baek agreed, too easily, and turned back to the cooler.
Ryan let it go.
But he noticed — the way you notice things you’ve trained yourself to notice, quietly, without comment — that Uncle Baek’s hands had gone very still for exactly as long as it took him to decide what expression to wear next.
He got home late, past eight, the smell of his mother’s soup already thick in the stairwell before he’d even reached their floor.
Yuna was sprawled on the living room floor with her tablet propped against a cushion, controller clicking rapid-fire in her hands, tongue poking out the corner of her mouth in fierce concentration.
“You’re losing,” Ryan said, dropping his bag by the door.
“I’m strategizing.”
“You’re losing strategically.”
She threw a cushion at him without looking away from the screen.
He caught it out of habit, more reflex than skill, and set it back on the couch before heading to wash up.
Dinner was the four of them, same as always, his father still in his work uniform because he’d come straight from a call-out job, his mother asking the same rotation of questions she asked every night — school, food, sleep, in that order, like a checklist she was quietly running to make sure nothing had changed that shouldn’t have.
“Anything happen today?” she asked, ladling soup into Ryan’s bowl without waiting for him to ask.
“Math test.”
“How’d it go?”
“Fine.”
“You always say fine.”
“Because it’s always fine.” Ryan accepted the bowl, careful not to meet Yuna’s eyes, because Yuna had an uncanny radar for the exact moment Ryan was hiding something, and he did not need a thirteen-year-old cross-examining him at the dinner table about a stranger in an alley three days ago.
His father, uncharacteristically, spoke up.
“Anyone new around the neighborhood lately?”
Ryan’s hand stilled, just slightly, around his spoon.
“Why?”
“No reason.” Han Jae-won didn’t look up from his soup, but something in the set of his shoulders had shifted — subtle, the kind of subtle you’d miss if you hadn’t spent seventeen years learning to read this exact man’s silences.
“Building manager mentioned someone was asking about tenants.
Probably a delivery mix-up.”
“Probably,” Ryan said, echoing Uncle Baek without meaning to, and the word sat strangely in his mouth a second time.
His mother didn’t seem to notice anything unusual — she’d already moved on to asking Yuna about her science project, some diorama involving considerably more glitter than any diorama strictly required — but Ryan caught his father’s eyes flick toward him for exactly one second too long, and then away, deliberate, controlled.
Ryan had grown up believing his father was an unremarkable man.
Steady hands, quiet voice, a job that had never once required him to raise his volume.
It was one of the few certainties Ryan had built his understanding of the world around.
For the first time in his life, sitting at that table with soup going cold in his bowl, he wondered if that certainty had ever actually been true.
Later, after Yuna had been chased to bed and his mother had fallen asleep in front of the television with a drama still playing to no one, Ryan found his father on the narrow balcony, smoking — which he never did, not since Ryan was small, not since his mother had made him quit before Yuna was even born.
Ryan stood in the doorway for a moment before his father noticed him.
“Thought you quit,” Ryan said.
His father exhaled slowly, not turning around.
“I did.”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“It’s not a habit.
It’s a night.” Han Jae-won finally glanced back at him, something unreadable behind his usually plain expression — tired, maybe, or older than Ryan had ever consciously registered him being.
“Go to bed.
You’ve got school.”
“Dad.”
“Ryan.”
“Was it a delivery mix-up?”
His father held his gaze for a long moment — long enough that Ryan almost took the question back, almost apologized for asking, the way he’d learned to smooth over moments that felt too sharp in this house of careful, well-worn peace.
“Go to bed,” his father said again, gentler this time, and turned back to the city lights spread out below them, smoke curling up into the dark.
“It’s nothing you need to worry about.”
It was, Ryan would understand much later, the first lie his father had ever told him.
He didn’t know that yet.
He just knew, standing in that doorway, that for the first time in seventeen years, his father’s nothing didn’t sound like nothing at all.
He went to bed anyway.
There was a test to grade back in Mr.
Bae’s class, a shift tomorrow, a physics assignment half-finished on his desk.
Ordinary things, waiting in their ordinary order, the way they always had.
He fell asleep before he meant to, and if he dreamed that night, he didn’t remember it.
He would, soon enough, stop being able to say the same about most nights.