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Summary
Sunoo didn’t plan on becoming a guardian.
He didn’t plan on routines built around grief, or mornings measured in skincare steps and quiet promises, or learning how to hold his life together carefully enough that a six year old could feel safe inside it. After his sister’s death, survival stopped being about want and became about timing, control, and showing up anyway.
Riki didn’t plan on standing out.
As the only alpha teaching first grade, he lives under constant scrutiny, restrained and watchful, aware that one wrong move could cost him everything. He believes in structure, patience, and holding space without claiming it. His classroom is calm on purpose.
Their worlds overlap through Lina.
What begins as wary distance and guarded glances slowly becomes something steadier. Lina starts to laugh again. To ask questions. To trust the space she’s in. Both men are forced to reckon with what it means to care without control, to protect without possession, and to choose gentleness shaped by instinct.
This is not a story about rushing into love.
It is a story about restraint. About grief that does not move on a schedule. About bodies that demand things the heart is not ready for.