That night, Nara barely slept at all.
She lay beside Raka, who had finally fallen asleep after their long, difficult conversation in the study, but her thoughts continued spinning endlessly: her mother's name listed among the witnesses, the old photograph of a small child with the initials “Kang, J.”, and Raka's final words still echoing clearly in her ears.
It wasn't something that should have been over twenty-two years ago.
She stared into the darkness at the bedroom ceiling, listening to the slow ticking of the wall clock in the living room.
Every now and then, Raka shifted in his sleep and mumbled something unintelligible before settling down again.
Nara watched her husband's peaceful face, so different from the fear she'd seen there a few hours earlier.
She wondered how many more surprises like this she would have to face before everything was finally revealed.
Raka had promised to explain everything, but he'd asked her to be patient a little longer—long enough, he said, to make sure the explanation wouldn't put Nara or the people around her in danger.
Nara wanted to trust him.
But the patience he'd asked for felt heavier each time she remembered how much had been hidden from her all this time.
The next morning, after Raka left for work, Nara sat lost in thought at the dining table for a long time, clutching a cup of coffee that had begun to grow cold.
She picked up her phone and stared at her mother's name in her contacts, hesitating before finally pressing the call button.
“Nara?” Her mother's voice sounded as warm as ever. “What is it, sweetheart? You don't usually call this early.”
“Mom,” Nara began slowly, carefully putting her words together. “I want to ask you something. About back then, when you were still working at the Han Corp factory.”
There was a brief pause on the other end of the line. A pause far too long for someone simply trying to remember a distant past.
“Why are you suddenly asking about that?” Her mother's voice sounded slightly different now—more cautious, more controlled.
“I found some old documents,” Nara answered honestly, unwilling to lie to her own mother. “About the workplace accident twenty-two years ago. Your name was listed as one of the witnesses.”
An even longer silence followed. Nara could hear her mother's breathing becoming uneven, as if she were holding back something that had been buried for a long time.
“That was so long ago, Nara,” her mother finally said, trying to sound casual but failing to hide the nervousness beneath her words. “Why are you suddenly digging up things from the past?”
“Because that name has something to do with Raka, Mom. And maybe with someone named Kang Ji-han, too.” Nara held her breath for a moment before continuing. “Do you know that name?”
This time, the silence lasted so long that Nara began to wonder whether their call had been disconnected.
“Mom?”
“I have to go, Nara,” her mother suddenly said, sounding rushed. “Someone's here. We'll talk again later, okay?”
“Mom, wait—”
But the call had already disconnected before Nara could say anything else.
Nara stared silently at her phone screen, her heart pounding faster. Her mother's reaction wasn't that of someone merely remembering a distant past that was no longer relevant.
It was the reaction of someone who was afraid—someone keeping something to herself, something she didn't want to talk about, not even with her own daughter.
Nara tried calling her mother back. There was no answer. She tried again a few minutes later, with the same result.
With hands that were still trembling slightly, Nara opened her laptop and typed “Kang Ji-han” into a search engine.
Thousands of results appeared, most of them irrelevant. It was a fairly common name among the Korean public.
But after filtering through several pages, she found a short article from ten years earlier featuring a photograph of a young man receiving an award for his contributions to a workplace-safety advocacy organization.
The face in the photograph was clearly younger, but there was no mistaking it.
It was the same man's face from her future photograph—the face of the man in the dark jacket who had appeared briefly in the back row during her wedding ceremony.
Nara read the brief caption beneath the photograph, her heart pounding.
“Kang Ji-han, son of the late Hendra Wijaya, is now actively advocating for workplace-safety reform after losing his father in an industrial accident as a child.”
Nara's hand froze above the keyboard. She read the sentence over and over, making sure she hadn't misunderstood its meaning.
Kang Ji-han wasn't merely a strange name that had appeared by chance in a mysterious message from the future. He was the son of the man who had died in an accident at the Han family's factory.
Nara leaned back in her chair, trying to steady her increasingly uneven breathing.
The fragments that had always seemed random were now beginning to form a pattern far larger than anything she'd ever imagined—a pattern connecting her, her husband, and the stranger in the future photograph, long before any of them realized it.
And somehow, the lives of the three of them—Nara, Raka, and Ji-han—had been intertwined since twenty-two years ago, in a tragedy that had left wounds that still hadn't truly healed.