Three weeks had passed since their wedding.
Nara and Raka's life had begun to settle into their new rhythm as husband and wife: waking up together every morning, sharing the same bathroom, and working out who would cook and who would wash the dishes on the weekends.
Everything felt like a natural continuation of their seven-year relationship, except that their now-official legal status was on paper.
But there was one thing that had begun to catch Nara's attention, something so small that at first she simply ignored it. Raka had started receiving phone calls more often at night.
It wasn't actually strange. Raka worked as the business development director at his family's company, a position that reasonably required him to stay connected with various parties even outside working hours.
But what made Nara furrow her brow was the way he answered those calls.
Whenever his phone rang at night, Raka would leave the room, whether for the balcony or the small study in the corner of their apartment, close the door tightly, and speak in a voice too low to be heard from outside.
When he returned, he always smiled as usual, as though there were nothing to explain.
“Who was calling?” Nara asked one night, when Raka returned to the sofa after a call that had lasted nearly fifteen minutes.
“Just business,” Raka answered briefly, reaching for the TV remote as if he wanted to change the subject right away. “There’s a small issue with one of our business partners.”
Nara nodded, not wanting to sound too curious. But there was something different in Raka's tone—too quick, too brief, like an answer he had prepared before the question had even been asked.
The next day, while Raka was taking a shower, his phone vibrated on the dining table.
Nara, who was preparing breakfast, glanced at the lit screen. The contact name displayed only two initials—“K.J.”—with no profile picture and no additional information.
She hadn't meant to snoop. But the moment her eyes caught those two letters, something inside her jolted. Kang Ji-han.
She shook her head, trying to dismiss the thought. There were too many possible names that could produce the initials K.J.—a business partner, an old friend, anyone.
There was no reason to immediately connect them to the man in the photograph she had tried to forget for the past three weeks.
And yet her curiosity continued to nag at her throughout the day, like a small pebble in her shoe that she couldn't ignore no matter how many times she tried.
Nara even lost concentration for a moment during an online meeting with her team that afternoon, her thoughts drifting back again and again to the two letters that had appeared on Raka's phone screen.
That night, after Raka had fallen asleep, Nara lay in the dark, staring at the bedroom ceiling.
Her thoughts returned to the questions she had been trying to bury deep inside.
Who was the man in the dark jacket she had caught a glimpse of in the back row during the wedding ceremony? Why had Raka been so closed-off about his nighttime calls lately? And most troubling of all, why did the unknown number sending those messages know about the scar on her wrist—a detail she had never posted anywhere?
She turned toward Raka, who was sleeping soundly beside her.
His face was peaceful, his breathing steady, revealing no burden at all.
Nara reached out and gently stroked her husband's hair, trying to convince herself that all these suspicions were merely the effect of the minor trauma left behind by the night before the wedding.
I'm overthinking this, she told herself. Raka has never given me a reason not to trust him.
Yet that conviction felt increasingly fragile each time she remembered the way Raka answered his calls—hurried, guarded, as if he were hiding something he didn't want anyone to know, including his own wife.
The next morning, while Nara was cleaning Raka's small study—a task she rarely did because Raka usually took care of the room himself—her eyes fell on an old brown folder wedged among the stacks of documents on the bottom shelf, hidden behind several thick books.
The folder looked far older than the other documents in the room. Its corners had yellowed and grown slightly creased, as if it had been stored for years without ever being touched.
It was completely different from the neat, uniformly light-blue folders Raka usually used for office documents.
Nara hesitated for a moment. She knew it wasn't her place to pry into her husband's personal belongings.
But the impulse that had taken root the night before, the impulse she had tried to suppress with logic and common sense, now felt too strong to simply ignore.
Her hand was already hovering over the folder before her mind had a chance to decide anything.
She picked it up with slightly trembling hands and slowly opened the cover, noticing that the thin layer of dust clinging to its surface had recently been disturbed by someone.
And what she found on the first page made her entire body freeze.