His heart stopped. “What?”

The last week, Yoo stopped eating. He stopped speaking. He only held Chae-won’s hand, their paper ring now tattered and grey. On the final night, a blizzard howled outside the hospice window. Chae-won was reading to him from a manuscript—a romance novel she had been editing. The heroine had just confessed her love.

Chae-won stood there for a long time, holding the letter. Then she did something she hadn’t done since she was twelve. She wept—not silently, not politely, but with the full, ragged, ugly howl of a woman who had loved a borrowed boy and lost him anyway.

They laughed. It wasn’t a joke.

And for the first time, she understood: some stories aren’t about happy endings. They’re about the space between the notes, the silence after the last chord, the love that doesn’t stop when the heart does.