His father came home late, past nine, smelling of machine oil and cold air, and Ryan was waiting for him at the kitchen table before he’d even taken off his shoes.
“You’re up,” his father said, unsurprised, like he’d expected exactly this.
“Yuna knows something’s wrong.”
His father paused in the doorway, one shoe half-off, and something in his shoulders sagged — not surprise, Ryan realized.
Resignation.
Like a man watching a wall he’d built crack exactly where he’d always feared it would.
“How much does she know?”
“Nothing specific.
Just that you’re checking the window a lot, and that Mom’s pretending everything’s fine in a way that isn’t actually fine.” Ryan kept his voice low, aware his mother was still finishing a late shift and Yuna was, hopefully, asleep down the hall.
“She’s thirteen, Dad.
Not stupid.
She’s going to keep pulling at this until it comes apart, and I don’t think either of us can stop her once she decides to.”
His father sat down heavily across from him, finally getting the second shoe off, rubbing his face with both hands in a gesture Ryan had never seen him make before — not tiredness from work, but something deeper, the particular exhaustion of carrying a lie for two decades and watching it finally start to slip.
“I know,” he said.
“I know she will.
She’s like you were at that age.
Worse, honestly.” A faint, tired almost-smile.
“I was hoping to have more time before I had to figure out what to tell her.”
“Someone visited Soo-ah’s father this weekend,” Ryan said.
“Asking about me.
Whether I’ve shown any ‘anomalous response under stress.'”
His father’s head came up sharply.
“Say that again.”
“Anomalous response under stress.
That’s the exact phrase, apparently.” Ryan watched his father’s face carefully, the way he’d been watching everyone’s face for a week now, and saw something flicker there that he didn’t have a name for yet — not quite fear, not quite recognition, something adjacent to both.
“Dad.
What does that mean?”
His father didn’t answer right away.
He got up instead, moved to the sink, filled a glass of water he didn’t drink, just held, like he needed something to do with his hands while he decided how much more of this conversation he was ready to have.
“It means,” he said finally, back still turned, “that they’re not just asking about my past anymore.
“Meaning what, specifically.”
“Meaning they think you might Awaken.” His father turned around now, and his expression had gone carefully, deliberately calm — the same controlled calm Ryan had learned, over the last week, to recognize as the mask his father wore over things too large to say plainly.
“Late Awakening isn’t common, but it happens.
Especially in children of Awakened parents, even weak ones like me.
Especially under stress, or trauma, or—” he stopped himself.
“Or what.”
“Or triggered deliberately,” his father said, quieter now.
“There are ways to force a dormant trait to the surface.
Not clean ways.
Not safe ones.
If Clan Valen believes you’re carrying something worth waking up—”
He didn’t finish the sentence.
He didn’t need to.
Ryan sat with that for a long moment, feeling something cold settle low in his stomach, a fear shaped differently from anything he’d felt all week.
Not fear of the man in the coat, or the black car, or even the mark on his father’s arm.
Fear of himself — of some possibility sitting dormant inside him that he’d never had reason to examine, that other people apparently already believed in more than he did.
“I got tested at eleven,” he said again, the same argument he’d made to Soo-ah that afternoon, weaker now for the second telling.
“Flat result.”
“Screenings aren’t perfect at that age,” his father said, echoing Soo-ah almost exactly, and Ryan wondered, distantly, if this was simply the truth everyone in his life had always known except him.
“Especially not for—” He stopped again, and this time the pause carried weight, something he was choosing not to say rather than something he didn’t know.
“Especially not for what, Dad?”
His father looked at him for a long moment, and something in his expression shifted — not quite decision, but the beginning of one, a man weighing how much more truth his son could carry in one night before it became cruelty instead of honesty.
“Not tonight,” he said finally.
“There’s more to explain, and I will explain it, but not tonight, standing in this kitchen with your mother due home any minute and your sister down the hall pretending to be asleep.” He set the untouched glass of water down, met Ryan’s eyes directly.
“I need you to trust me on the timing of this.
Not the content.
The timing.”
“No,” his father agreed.
“It’s not.
Very little about this is going to be fair, Ryan, and I’m sorry for that more than I know how to say.
But I need a few more days to figure out exactly how much to tell you, and who else needs to know before you do, and I can’t do that well if I’m doing it exhausted, at eleven at night, half-improvising.”
Ryan wanted to push.
Every instinct he had, sharpened raw over the last week, told him to push — to demand the rest of it now, tonight, before one more day passed with half the truth sitting between them like an unlit room.
But he looked at his father’s face, at the particular quality of exhaustion there, and found he didn’t have it in him.
“Okay,” he said.
“A few days.”
“Thank you.” His father reached across the table, briefly, and squeezed his shoulder — the same gesture from the balcony, the one that had started meaning more than goodnight.
“You’re handling this better than I would have, at your age.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, actually.” A ghost of real warmth, underneath the exhaustion.
“I was significantly worse at seventeen.
Ask your Uncle Baek sometime, if you want to feel better about your own teenage decision-making.”
Ryan almost laughed, despite everything, and for a moment the kitchen felt smaller and warmer than it had all week — just a father and son, tired, worried, but still, underneath it, exactly who they’d always been to each other.
He didn’t sleep well that night.
He lay awake running through the phrase especially not for on a loop, filling in the blank with increasingly unsettling possibilities, until exhaustion finally won out somewhere past one in the morning.
He dreamed, for the first time in his life, of something he couldn’t fully remember afterward — only fragments, on waking.
A sensation of heat under his skin that didn’t belong to him.
A voice, not his father’s, not anyone’s he recognized, saying something in a language he didn’t speak but somehow understood the shape of.
And underneath it all, a low, persistent hum, like a plucked string that hadn’t finished vibrating yet.
He woke at 5:47, nine minutes before his alarm, heart going fast for no reason he could name, and lay very still in the dark until it slowed back down.
He told himself it was nerves.
Everyone’s nerves would be shot, given the week he’d had.
He didn’t quite believe himself this time either.
Something in the dream had felt less like nerves and more like a door, somewhere deep and unfamiliar inside him, creaking open by exactly one inch.
He got up before the alarm and went to school anyway, because that was still, technically, the plan, and because his father had asked him — one more time, gently, at the door — to keep living his life exactly as it was for a few more days.
He didn’t know yet how few days that actually meant.