She made it back to the apartment at 21:47. Thirteen minutes before the scheduled delivery. Her lungs burned from the sprint, her socks were soaked with ditch water, and the black phone from the mysterious man was still clutched in her palm. She kicked off her shoes, ran to the bathroom, and locked the door. She pulled up the draft message on the stranger's device—the photo of her terrified face, the timer set for 22:00, the recipient listed as "Ren." She cancelled the scheduled send, deleted the draft, and then powered the phone off entirely. She pulled out the SIM card and snapped it in half, dropping the pieces into the toilet and flushing. That photograph would never reach him.
She sat on the closed toilet lid, breathing hard. The adrenaline ebbed, leaving behind a cold clarity. She had the video, the SIM card evidence, the note from outside her door, and now she had proof that someone else was orchestrating from the shadows—but she also knew that if she didn't act before Ren returned, the window would close. He would sense something. He always did.
She walked to the kitchen, pulled the brown envelope from the trash—the one with her own photographed back—and set it on the dining table alongside the printed freeze-frame of Ren's glitched eye, the screenshot of the notebook file, and a typed transcript of the three messages from the mysterious man. She arranged them like a hand of cards. Then she sat down and waited.
The electronic lock beeped at 22:14. Ren came in, loosening his tie, a faint smell of grilled meat clinging to his jacket. He saw her sitting at the table, saw the spread of evidence, and stopped mid-step. For a full two seconds he didn't move. Then he smiled—that same gentle, lopsided smile he wore on every livestream—and said, "What's all this? A scrapbook project?"
"Take a seat," Suyeon said. Her voice was steady, but her fingers were interlaced in her lap to hide their trembling.
Ren set down his bag, pulled out the chair opposite her, and sat. He glanced at the items one by one. When his eyes landed on the freeze-frame of his own face—the 0.3-second glitch—the smile flickered. Just for a moment. Then it returned. "That's from my run video, right? Bad connection. I think the network dropped around the river—"
"Shut up," Suyeon said quietly. She slid the MP4 file's printed screenshots toward him—the two figures on the bench, the time stamp, the moment his hand reached toward Kim Jisoo's neck. "I found the original file in your backup folder. The one you edited. The one that stops right before you killed her."
Ren stared at the images. The smile didn't so much vanish as it froze, like a mask glued to his face while the face behind it moved elsewhere. He tilted his head. "You went through my computer."
"Yes."
"And you sent something to the police, didn't you? That's why you were at the cybercafé today." His tone remained calm, almost curious. "I had someone watching you. He told me you went into a net café, but he lost you after the subway."
Suyeon felt ice slide down her spine. So the grey-jacket man was Ren's tracker. But then who was the mysterious figure on the riverbank? Two separate people? Or had the tracker been duped by the other? She forced herself to focus. "I sent the video to the police this morning. They'll be here soon. You have maybe an hour to tell me the truth—not for them, for me."
Ren leaned back in his chair. He folded his hands behind his head, an oddly relaxed posture for a man accused of murder. Then he laughed—a short, hollow sound that she had never heard from him before. "The truth? You want the truth? Fine." He gestured at the screenshots. "She found me two years ago, after I got famous. Said she'd expose our old relationship—that I'd promised to marry her before I left Hanju, that I owed her. She wanted money. I gave her a little, but she kept coming back. That day, she said she'd go public unless I paid her a lump sum. I met her at the bench to talk her down."
"And then?"
Ren's eyes darkened. The mask slipped further, and beneath it was not rage, not grief, but something empty—a flat, curious detachment. "She got angry. She stood up, turned to leave, and I reached out to stop her. My hand caught her scarf. She twisted, stumbled, fell backward onto the concrete edge. Her neck hit the corner of the bench support. It was an accident. She was dead in under two minutes. I didn't plan that."
Suyeon's throat tightened. "But you didn't call an ambulance. You didn't report it. You came home, changed your clothes, and did a two-hour livestream like nothing happened."
Ren nodded slowly. "Because I had seventy thousand people watching me run. If I called emergency, they'd trace me. I'd lose everything—the brand deals, the fans, the life I built. So I edited the video I'd secretly recorded—I always record my meetings for leverage, you know—and I kept only the part before she fell. I hid the rest. Then I ran the river route as planned, let the stream prove I was elsewhere at the critical time. It worked perfectly." He paused, and his lips curved into something that wasn't quite a smile. "Until you opened that shoe cabinet."
Suyeon felt tears burning behind her eyes, but she refused to let them fall. "Why did you keep the hoodie? Why didn't you burn it?"
"Because I'm a collector," he said softly. "I keep everything. Every letter, every gift, every piece of my past. That hoodie had her blood on it. It was proof that I'd been there, that I'd touched her. I couldn't throw it away. I wanted to remember."
She stared at him. Seven years of waking up next to this man. Seven years of gentle morning kisses, of handwritten notes in her lunchbox, of late-night whispered conversations under the duvet. And all that time, he was a hoarder of moments—not for love, but for memory's sake, like a historian preserving artifacts he never emotionally participated in.
"You never loved me, did you?" she whispered.
Ren didn't answer immediately. He looked at her with that same curious tilt of his head, as if she were a puzzle he hadn't finished solving. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his phone. He scrolled for a few seconds, then turned the screen toward her. On it was a video—an old, grainy recording of a young man with soft features, laughing as he fed a slice of cake to a girl. The girl was Suyeon, years younger, her face radiant with joy. That man was her first love, the one who had died in a traffic accident a year before she met Ren.
"I found this in your old laptop when we first moved in together," Ren said. "I studied it. Every gesture, every tilt of his head, every pause in his laugh. I copied them. That's why you fell for me, Suyeon. You weren't loving me—you were loving his ghost. I just wore his face as a suit."
The room tilted. Suyeon gripped the edge of the table to keep from falling. Her first love—the one she'd wept over for months, the one she'd told Ren about on their third date, the one she'd thought she'd finally healed from—and Ren had been mimicking him the entire time. Every reassuring hand on her shoulder, every soft joke, every tender glance—all borrowed from a dead man's archived smile.
"You're a monster," she breathed.
"No," Ren said, standing up. "A monster feels. I don't. I simulate. There's a difference." He walked toward the door, but before he could reach it, the electronic lock beeped again—not from his key, but from outside. A series of sharp knocks followed. "Police! Open up!"
Ren stopped. He turned back to Suyeon, and for the first time, his composure cracked—not with fear, but with something like disappointment. "You really did it," he said. "I thought you'd hesitate."
She didn't answer. She watched as the door swung open, revealing three uniformed officers and a plainclothes detective. Ren raised his hands, still wearing that half-smile, and said, "Gentlemen, I think there's been a misunderstanding."
They cuffed him. As they led him past her, he leaned close and murmured, just for her ears: "You'll always wonder—was any of it real? The kiss this morning? The hand on your waist at night? That's the part I love. The part that will never let you sleep."
Then he was gone.
The trial was held three months later, in the winter of 2026. The courtroom was packed with journalists, fans, and curious onlookers. The prosecution presented the recovered video—the unedited version that Suyeon had eventually found hidden in a secondary cloud account after Ren's arrest, which showed the exact moment of Jisoo's fatal fall. The defense argued for manslaughter, citing accident and lack of intent. But the jury saw the editing, the concealment, the calculated livestream alibi. They returned a verdict of murder in the second degree.
Suyeon took the stand on the final day of testimony. She spoke calmly, recounting the discovery of the hoodie, the SIM card, the notebook file, and the glitched livestream frame. Then she paused, looked directly at Ren—who sat in the defendant's box in a plain grey suit, his expression unreadable—and said: "I spent seven years sleeping beside a man who studied my dead lover's tapes to learn how to hold me. He told me he never felt a thing. And the worst part is—I still don't know if that was a lie, or the only true thing he ever said. Because if it was true, then I was never married to a person. I was married to a performance. And the actor walked off stage the moment the lights went out."
The courtroom fell silent. Ren's lips parted slightly, as if he wanted to respond, but he said nothing. For the first time, his mask seemed to fail him—not into emotion, but into a blank confusion, as if he genuinely didn't understand why her words had struck the room so hard.
The judge sentenced him to eighteen years of penal servitude, with consideration for the accidental nature of the fall but full weight for the subsequent cover-up and psychological manipulation. The media dubbed it the "Glitch-Eye Murder," and for weeks, social media dissected the 0.3-second freeze frame, debating whether the true evil was in the crime or in the decades of deceit that preceded it.
Suyeon moved out of the apartment the day after the verdict. She took only a small suitcase—clothes, toiletries, and a single framed photo of her and Ren on their wedding day, which she placed in a drawer and never looked at again. She found a small studio in the outskirts of Sakura-to, away from the familiar streets, away from the river, away from the golden ginkgo tree. She started a new job, changed her phone number, and cut ties with anyone who knew her as "Ren's wife."
But every night, before she fell asleep, she would open her old laptop and play that 0.3-second clip—the glitch, the dropped frame, the moment when the mask slipped. She would stare at his eyes, searching for the monster, searching for the ghost of her first love, searching for any trace of the man she'd thought she knew. And every time, she found only one thing: a stranger. A stranger who had shared her bed, her laughter, her grief, her silence. A stranger who had never been there at all.
One evening, six months after the trial, she received a plain white envelope in her mailbox. No return address. Inside was a single photograph: a still frame from the riverbank, taken from the same hidden angle as before—but this time it showed Ren, alone, sitting on the bench after Jisoo had fallen. He was staring at his hands, and on his face was an expression she had never once seen on any livestream, any video, any stolen moment. It was not a smile. It was not rage. It was a profound, hollow bewilderment—as if even he had just realized that he could feel nothing, and that nothing was all he would ever have.
On the back of the photo, in the same black marker as before, was a handwritten line: "He wasn't lying. He never did."
Suyeon turned the photo over and over. She knew the mysterious figure would never reveal himself—maybe he was Jisoo's brother, maybe a private detective, maybe just a vigilante who had watched the whole tragedy unfold. But his message was clear. Ren's final confession had been the only truth he ever gave. The emptiness was real. And she had kissed that emptiness every morning for seven years.
She placed the photo in the same drawer as the wedding picture, closed it, and walked to her window. Outside, a familiar ginkgo tree swayed in the dusk—smaller than the one on their old street, but the same colour of fading gold. She pressed her palm against the cool glass and watched the leaves fall, one by one, like frames dropping from a perfect livestream.
She thought of the last thing Ren had said to her, whispered as the officers cuffed him: "You'll always wonder."
And she knew—he was right. Not because she loved him, but because she would never again look at anyone she loved and trust that the face they showed her was the only face they had. The glitch was permanent. The frame would never be repaired.
She turned away from the window, walked to her bed, and lay down in the dark. For a long time, she stared at the ceiling, counting the shadows that the streetlamp cast through the blinds. Then she closed her eyes, and for the first time in months, she did not dream of the bench, or the blood, or the glitch.
She dreamed of a face she had never seen—a face that might have been kind, or might have been cruel, but at least was not borrowed from the dead. And she woke up not knowing if that was hope, or the cruelest deception of all.
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