Chapter Text
There was nothing anyone could do in a moment like that—nothing but cry until your chest ached and your throat burned.
Lee Do and Haeil were only seven years old then, still sitting in their classroom in the middle of a lesson when their grandmother called the school and asked for them to be excused early. They didn’t understand why. Not yet.
When they arrived home, their grandmother was already waiting. The moment she saw them, she pulled them both into her arms, holding them tighter than she ever had before. Her hands trembled as she cradled their small bodies, and when she spoke, her voice was as soft as she could manage.
“Your parents… they had an accident on their way home.”
For a second, everything stilled.
Lee Do—always the quieter of the twins, the one who thought first and spoke later—usually processed everything carefully before letting even the smallest emotion show didn’t understand it—not fully. The sentence reached him, but it didn’t land. It hovered somewhere just out of reach, like a thought he couldn’t quite grasp.
His composure shattered.
“No,” he whispered, almost to himself.
His small fingers tightened unconsciously around the fabric of his grandmother’s sleeve, knuckles paling as if holding on could anchor him to something solid. A quiet refusal. A denial that barely made it past his lips. His mind tried to make sense of it, an accident, mom and dad, gone? but the pieces wouldn’t fit together. They slipped, scattered, refused to form anything he could hold.
And then it hit.
His breath hitched sharply, like something had cracked open inside his chest. The sound that followed wasn’t loud—it wasn’t like Haeil’s—but it was raw. Tears spilled before he could stop them, silent at first, then trembling, then breaking into uneven, helpless sobs. He shook his head again and again, clutching tighter to their grandmother as if she could undo it, as if she could say she was wrong.
Beside him, Haeil reacted like a storm.
“What do you mean?!” he shouted, voice breaking as it climbed higher, sharper. He pulled away just enough to look at their grandmother’s face, searching for any sign that this was a mistake, a joke, something reversible. “No—no, that’s not true! They said they’d come back! They promised!”
His hands curled into fists, hitting weakly against her arms, against her chest—not in anger at her, but at the world that had suddenly turned against them.
“You’re lying!” he cried, louder now, the denial fierce and desperate. “They can’t just—just leave us!”
Where Lee Do collapsed inward, Haeil burned outward—voice echoing, tears streaming unchecked, his grief loud and unrestrained. Even their identical faces told two completely different stories: one frozen in quiet devastation, the other twisted with raw, defiant heartbreak.
Their grandmother pulled them both close again, tighter this time, as if she could hold them together when everything else had fallen apart. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured, her own voice shaking now. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Lee Do buried his face into her shoulder, sobbing into the fabric, small hands still gripping like he might disappear if he let go.
Haeil cried against her too—but louder, harsher, his voice breaking over and over as he called for parents who would never answer again.
Unlike Lee Do, Haeil had always worn his emotions openly—loud, bright, impossible to miss. Where Lee Do was calm and quiet, Haeil was chaotic, expressive, full of noise and life. And now, that same openness made his grief explosive, raw, and uncontrollable.
Despite sharing the same face, the twins could not have been more different.
And yet, in that moment, they were the same—two children breaking under the weight of a loss far too heavy for them to carry.
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“Lee Haeil!” Lee Do shouted after his fleeing twin. “Get your ass back here!”
“Language, Lee Do!” Haeil shouted back before slipping into his room and slamming the door shut behind him. He leaned against it, panting heavily from laughter and exhaustion. “I wore it because I thought it was mine! You should’ve written your name on it so I wouldn’t get confused.”
Lee Do stopped in front of the door and banged on it loudly.
“You don’t need my name on it. It’s black, Haeil. You’ve never owned a black cardigan in your life.” He rattled the doorknob aggressively. “Yah, open the door.”
Haeil opened the door, and despite clearly being at fault, he didn’t look guilty in the slightest. Instead, he shot Lee Do a soft glare.
“How do you know I don’t own black?” He pursed his lips, eyeing the cardigan draped over Lee Do’s arm. “And that’s not even black. It’s charcoal. More like grey with too much black mixed into it.” He crossed his arms stubbornly. “And I own grey ones, you stupid.”
Lee Do immediately pointed a finger at the person sharing his exact face, narrowing his eyes. “You don’t get to call me stupid when your chemistry project got a B-minus back in high school.”
“The— Yah!” Haeil sputtered in disbelief, lunging forward only for Lee Do to sidestep him easily. “That was two years ago!”
“And yet I still remember it perfectly.”
“How dare you insult me—”
“You started first by calling me stupid, you stupid.”
“Arrrghhh!”
With a dramatic yell, Haeil launched himself at his twin. The two nearly crashed into the hallway wall as Lee Do barely caught him in time, both stumbling while shoving at each other like oversized children.
And that was how mornings often sounded thirteen years later.
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From the kitchen, their grandmother quietly sipped her tea while listening to the familiar chaos upstairs—the shouting, the arguing, the sound of something probably falling over. By now, Lee Sunhee was used to it.
At sixty-four, she had already buried a husband and watched two seven-year-old boys lose their parents far too early. Back then, as she looked at the twins sitting broken on her living room floor, she made herself a promise. I will not let them grow into people afraid of love.
So she didn’t.
She was strict about manners and gentle about everything else. She fed them warm meals, read to them at night, taught Lee Do how to press flowers between book pages, and taught Haeil how to apologize properly—which took considerably longer.
And throughout all those years, she told them the same thing with unwavering certainty. “You will love and be loved,” she would say. “That is not a wish. That is the plan.”
The Lee twins grew up wealthy. Their father had left behind a considerable stake in Lee Holdings, and their grandmother managed it with a quiet, unshakable competence that surprised the board year after year. The twins attended prestigious schools, wore expensive clothes, and had every material comfort available to children of their station.
But the most valuable thing they had was never money.
It was each other.
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When their grandmother takes custody to both of them these childhood decisions had calcified into character.
Haeil moved through the world like a warm front — announcing himself before he arrived, lingering after he left, leaving every room somehow brighter and more chaotic than he'd found it. He could make a cashier at a convenience store tell him their whole life story in the time it took to purchase a triangle kimbap. He remembered everyone's birthdays, their coffee orders, the names of their pets and their exes and their complicated feelings about their mothers.
Lee Do moved through the world like a held breath. Not cold, but more contained. He had his grandmother's stillness, her ability to make silence feel like a kind of attention. People who met him thought he was unreadable. People who knew him understood that he was simply very, very careful with his words, because he had decided at age seven that words mattered, and that once spoken they could not be taken back.
He had reasons, beyond childhood grief, to believe this. And later in life, he learned something else too: People rarely meant the things they said.
The truest parts of a person revealed themselves only when they believed no one was watching. You couldn’t be half-present with Lee Do. Every word, every touch, every gesture had to be genuine.
He would notice otherwise.
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“Halmeoni, you’re going to the company today too?” Haeil asked as he dropped into the chair beside his grandmother, already reaching for a piece of bread after their exhausting morning fight and the rushed process of getting dressed properly afterward.
Across from him, Lee Sunhee lowered her teacup with a quiet hum. “Mm. There’s a board meeting this afternoon.”
Haeil groaned dramatically. “Again? Aren’t rich people supposed to relax more?”
“You say that while living off those rich people.”
“That’s different,” Haeil replied without shame, mouth already full.
Behind them, Lee Do entered the kitchen wearing the black cardigan over a crisp white shirt, his expression still carrying the faint irritation from earlier. He moved silently around the counter, taking out fruit from the refrigerator before starting the blender.
“One of these days,” Haeil continued, pointing his bread accusingly at his grandmother, “you should just retire and let the executives suffer without you.”
“They already suffer with me,” Lee Sunhee replied calmly before sipping her tea.
Lee Do snorted softly under his breath.
Haeil immediately whipped around. “Did you just laugh at me?”
“No,” Lee Do answered smoothly while pouring juice into a glass. “I’m laughing at something near you.”
“You did! Halmeoni, he laughed at me.”
Lee Do ignored him completely, pouring another glass of fresh juice before sliding one toward his twin without even looking at him and sit comfortly across from him.
Haeil stared at it for a second before grinning.
“You still love me.”
“I made it so you’d stop talking.” Lee Do picked up a piece of bread before glancing toward their grandmother, his expression softening almost immediately. “Please don’t push yourself too hard, Halmeoni,” he said quietly. “Take a rest as much as you can after the meeting, okay?”
Their grandmother looked at him for a moment, warmth flickering gently across her face.
“You sound older than me sometimes,” she murmured.
“That’s because someone in this house has to be responsible,” Lee Do replied calmly and bites his bread while eyeing his brother.
“Yah,” Haeil protested around a mouthful of bread. “Why are you looking at me when you say that?”
“Because it applies to you the most.”
Lee Sunhee chuckled softly at the immediate outrage on Haeil’s face before reaching out to pat Lee Do’s hand affectionately.
“I’ll be careful,” she promised. “And you two should focus on your own day instead of worrying about an old woman.”
“You’re not that old,” Haeil said instantly.
“You cried for twenty minutes last week because your back hurt,” Lee Do reminded his twin.
“Stop exposing me, Lee Do. And for the record, that was emotional support crying .”
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They left the house soon after, each carrying the familiar rhythm of their mornings with them.
Before leaving, both twins leaned down to kiss their grandmother on the cheek, sending her off with the company driver waiting outside. Only after her car disappeared beyond the gates did they climb into theirs and begin the drive to the respective university.
They went to different universities — Lee Do to Yonsei for art history, Haeil to Seoul National for business, which their grandmother received with the expression of a woman who had expected exactly this and was pleased but was not going to say so in a way that would require her to repeat it.
Their grandmother had raised them in a house that always smelled faintly of pine-needle tea, camphor, and the dry-paper scent of old books. At sixty-four, Lee Sunhee's spine curved gently like a question mark, and though age had stolen the strength from her hands, it had never taken their warmth.
Lee Do became the kind of person who noticed your headache before you ever mentioned it. Haeil became the kind who talked so much the headache eventually forgot itself. Between the two of them, most problems somehow softened.
Haeil grew exactly as everyone expected him to—louder every year, endlessly charming, impossible to ignore. He studied business economics and drifted through university with the easy confidence of someone whose mind moved faster than the lectures around him.
And through it all, Lee Sunhee gave the twins everything she still had left to offer.
Stories about their parents. Recipes their mother once loved. Long evenings spent listening, teaching, waiting. She had also given them, quietly and without expectation, the understanding that love was not something you received. It was something you built, brick by careful brick, with someone who showed up.
This was the lesson Haeil would later carry into his relationship with Seo Doyoung—though that part of the story had not begun yet.
Lee Do had carried the same lesson into his relationship with Jung Minwoo.
And that was why the ending of it hurt so deeply. Not because of shouting. Not because of betrayal dramatic enough to break things apart cleanly. But because it ended through a text message Lee Do had never been meant to see.
Something inside him collapsed quietly after that. Not just his heart, but his trust in his own judgment. The part of him that once believed he could recognize sincerity in another person.
And years after that, he was still living among the ruins of it. Quiet. Careful.
Perfectly fine, he told everyone.
Perfectly fine, he told himself.
And most people believed him, because Lee Do wore composure so naturally it became almost impossible to question.
But his grandmother could.
Lee Sunhee had raised him from grief. She knew exactly what silence looked like when it was hurting.