Friday morning, Ryan woke up before the alarm again, except this time it wasn’t habit.
It was the particular, low-grade alertness of someone who’d gone to sleep with a question still open.
It’s nothing you need to worry about.
He lay there a moment longer than usual, turning the sentence over the way you’d turn over a coin looking for the counterfeit stamp.
His father had never lied to him before — not about anything that mattered, not in seventeen years — and Ryan realized, with a strange hollow feeling, that he didn’t actually know what his father’s lying face looked like.
He’d never had reason to learn it.
He got up.
Breakfast, school, the usual choreography.
His mother was already gone for an early shift, which meant the kitchen was quieter than usual, just Yuna eating cereal with the specific reckless speed of someone who knew she was going to be late.
“You look weird,” Yuna said, through a mouthful.
“Thanks.”
“Not bad weird.
Just — thinking weird.
You get a face when you’re thinking too hard about something you’re not gonna tell me about.”
“I don’t have a face.”
“You have several faces.
I’ve been studying them since I was six.” She swallowed, pointed her spoon at him with the authority of a much older sibling.
“This is the Dad face.
You do the Dad face when something’s actually bothering you and you’re pretending it isn’t.”
Ryan blinked.
“The Dad face.”
“Yeah.
He does it too.
Runs in the family, apparently.” She shrugged like this was obvious, grabbed her bag, and was out the door before Ryan could decide whether that observation unsettled him more than it should have.
School blurred past the way Fridays always did, everyone’s attention already halfway out the door by second period.
Ryan barely registered most of it.
He kept catching himself staring at nothing, replaying the balcony conversation, the stillness in Uncle Baek’s hands, the word probably landing wrong twice in one day from two different mouths that had no reason to coordinate.
At lunch, Soo-ah dropped into the seat across from him without asking, which was her way of asking.
“Okay.
What’s wrong with you.”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve said four words all day and three of them were ‘pass the rice.'” She narrowed her eyes.
“This isn’t your normal quiet.
This is your something happened quiet.”
Ryan considered, briefly, telling her about the man in the alley.
He decided against it — not because he didn’t trust her, but because saying it out loud a second time would make it real in a way it hadn’t quite become yet, and he wasn’t ready for that.
“Just tired,” he said instead.
Soo-ah studied him for a moment longer, clearly unconvinced, but let it go with the particular grace of someone who’d learned that Ryan told the truth eventually, on his own schedule, and pushing only ever delayed it.
“Fine.
But you’re coming Saturday.
No excuses.
Tae-Sung already told everyone you’re coming, so if you don’t show up he’s going to show up at your apartment, and then your mom’s going to feed him, and then he’s never going to leave.”
“That is a genuinely terrifying threat.”
“I learned from the best.” She grinned, stealing a piece of his lunch without asking, same as Yuna had done three days earlier, and for a second Ryan felt the tightness in his chest loosen slightly — this, at least, was still exactly as it should be.
He almost didn’t go to Uncle Baek’s shop that afternoon.
He went anyway, because not going would have meant admitting something had changed, and Ryan wasn’t ready to admit that either.
The shop was busier than usual — a delivery had come in late, boxes stacked by the door, and Uncle Baek was on the phone when Ryan walked in, voice low, back half-turned.
Ryan caught only fragments before Uncle Baek noticed him and ended the call abruptly.
“—no, he doesn’t know anything, I told you—”
“Gotta go,” Uncle Baek said into the phone, too casual, and hung up.
The shop went very quiet.
“Who was that?” Ryan asked, setting his bag down slower than necessary, buying himself a second to read the older man’s face.
“Supplier.” Uncle Baek didn’t quite meet his eyes, which was new — in four years, Ryan had never once seen Uncle Baek fail to meet anyone’s eyes, customers, delivery drivers, the occasional drunk regular who wandered in looking for trouble.
“Restock schedule got messed up.
Boring stuff.”
“You said my name.”
“Did I?”
“You said ‘he doesn’t know anything.'” Ryan kept his voice level, the way he’d learned to keep it level around his mother when he didn’t want her to worry, except this time it was aimed the other direction, and it felt strange in his mouth.
“That’s not restock schedule, Uncle Baek.”
For a long moment, Uncle Baek said nothing at all.
He looked, Ryan thought, older than he had that morning — or maybe Ryan was only now looking closely enough to see it.
Then he exhaled, set down the box he’d been holding, and gestured toward the two stools behind the register, the ones they never used because there was never a slow enough moment to sit.
“Sit down a second.”
“I have a shift.”
“You are the shift.
Sit.”
Ryan sat.
Uncle Baek didn’t sit immediately.
He moved to the door, flipped the sign to BACK IN 10 MINUTES, which he had never done in four years of Ryan working there, not even the day his mother-in-law had a small kitchen fire two blocks over.
Then he came back, sat on the other stool, and folded his hands like a man deciding how much of a wall to take down.
“Your dad and I go back a long way,” he said finally.
“Before you were born.
Before this shop.”
“I know that.”
“You know the shape of it.
Not the details.” Uncle Baek studied him for a moment, something careful and searching in his expression.
“He asked me a long time ago — years ago, before Yuna was even born — that if certain people ever came around asking questions about him, I was supposed to say I didn’t know anything.
Not because it was true.
Because it was safer for you and your mom if it looked true.”
Ryan’s stomach dropped, slow and cold, like stepping onto ice that hadn’t quite decided if it would hold.
“What people.”
“I don’t know exactly.
Never asked more than I needed to.” Uncle Baek shook his head.
“Your dad’s not a talker, you know that better than anyone.
But four days ago someone came in here — polite, well-dressed, asked a lot of very specific questions about your family that had no business being asked by a stranger.
Where you went to school.
Whether you’d shown any signs of Awakening.
Whether your dad still had ‘the old marks’ on him, whatever that means.”
“Marks?”
“I don’t know, Ryan.
I told them I didn’t know your father, which was a lie, and I’ve been lying about it for seventeen years because he asked me to, and I never once thought I’d actually have to use it.” Uncle Baek’s voice had gone quieter, almost apologetic.
“I probably shouldn’t be telling you any of this.
But you’re seventeen, not seven, and I think you deserve to know something’s moving, even if I don’t know what.”
Ryan sat very still, the way his father sat still, he realized suddenly, with a discomfort that had nothing to do with the conversation itself.
“Was one of them wearing a dark coat?” he asked.
“Didn’t say much.
Just watched?”
Uncle Baek’s face answered before his mouth did.
“You’ve seen him too,” he said.
It wasn’t a question.
Ryan walked home slower than usual that evening, the city noise arriving muffled, like it was happening to someone else, on the other side of glass.
He kept running through everything he knew about his father — which, he was realizing with each step, amounted to less than he’d ever thought to question.
A quiet man.
A steady job.
A wife he clearly loved and never raised his voice at.
A scar along his left forearm that Ryan had asked about exactly once, at age nine, and been told work accident, boring story in a tone that had closed the subject so completely Ryan had never thought to reopen it.
Marks, Uncle Baek had said.
The old marks.
Ryan stopped walking, halfway down the block from his building, and looked up at the lit kitchen window three floors up, where he could see, faintly, his mother’s silhouette moving between the stove and the counter, ordinary, unhurried, unaware — or pretending to be unaware, and Ryan suddenly wasn’t sure which was worse.
He thought about his father’s hands.
Steady, sure, economical.
He’d always assumed that was just what maintenance work did to a person’s hands.
He was no longer sure that was the whole truth.
For the first time in his life, Ryan Han stood outside his own home and felt, instead of the familiar pull toward the warm lit window above him, something closer to hesitation — the particular unease of a person about to walk into a house they’d always believed they fully understood, and discovering, for the first time, that they might not.
He went in anyway.
There was nowhere else to go, and some part of him — the stubborn part, the part that would define most of what came next in his life — had already decided that whatever this was, he wasn’t going to find the truth by standing outside in the cold, waiting for someone else to hand it to him.
He was going to have to go looking for it himself.