Chapter 23: Chapter Sixty

Chapter sixty went live at six o'clock on Thursday evening.

Yeo-reum sat on the studio floor with her back against the drafting table and her laptop on her knees, and did not breathe.

Soo-ah sat beside her with a bowl of cold noodles she was not eating.

Jin-woo sat in the armchair he had carried across the balcony that afternoon, with his aids in, reading the page as it loaded.

He read every chapter the minute it went up.

He had told her so on the first night, and she had not believed him.

The last page was a single full-width panel.

A man stood at the balcony rail at dusk, in the blue hour, with the city behind him just going gold.

He had turned.

For fifty-nine chapters he had been a back, a hand, a shadow, a silhouette against a lit window.

Now he had a face.

Long and lean, with a flat serious mouth, dark eyes, and black hair that fell over his ears and was swept to one side.

He was not smiling, but he was about to.

At his feet, small in the corner, lay a red sock.

Below the panel she had written the last line of the chapter in plain letters.

Haeun, said Dowon, I heard you the whole time.

Jin-woo read it.

Then he read it again, and put his hand over his mouth.

"You gave him my line," he said, behind the hand.

"He was always going to say it. I only needed you to say it first."

The comment counter began to climb.

It climbed past one hundred, and then past a thousand, so fast the numbers blurred.

Soo-ah screamed into her bowl.

"They know," she said, wheezing. "Unnie, they all know it's him. Look. Look at the comments."

Yeo-reum looked.

He's real?? He's the CEO???

I KNEW IT. I KNEW HE HAD A THUMB LIKE THAT.

He can't hear and he still understood her every night. I'm crying at work.

Dowon is a real man and he read her lips for two years. I'm going to lie on the floor.

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