The next morning arrived quietly. Jaemin had half-expected something to have shifted in the house overnight—the air recalibrated, some new awkwardness installed in the corridors to mark what had and hadn't been said the evening before.
But when he came down to breakfast, Do-hyun was already at the table with a cup of coffee in front of him. Ji-young greeted him in her usual way, and Nakyung, still groggy and half-asleep over her toast, lifted two fingers in greeting without raising her head.
Nobody asked about what it had taken for Kang Do-hyun to be sitting there with them, scrolling through the morning news on his phone.
Jaemin took his seat, understanding. That's just what it was, the unspoken acceptance of family.
Nothing changed with the routine that he had established across the last two weeks. After breakfast, he headed for the music room, trying not to think too much about what Do-hyun would be doing with himself that day while Jaemin worked.
He shouldn't have worried. Because not long after he'd set his things on the piano, Do-hyun walked in.
He didn't announce himself. He didn't ask permission. He simply appeared and settled into the chair, much like his sister had done, his cedar scent primly in check yet somehow still quietly occupying the room.
Or maybe it was just Jaemin. It took perhaps twenty minutes for the self-consciousness to dissipate. Fifteen after lunch, and ten the next morning. Before long, it was gone before it could begin, the way the ticking of a clock blends into the room.
…
Two days passed this way: unremarkably. Do-hyun had taken to appearing at the music room in the mornings, arriving after Jaemin had already settled at the piano, taking up residence in the chair by the window that had previously been Nakyung's domain.
He didn't comment on the music. He brought a book, or his phone, or sometimes nothing at all, and simply existed in the room while Jaemin worked. It was, Jaemin discovered, an easier thing to adjust to than he would have predicted.
And then Nakyung arrived on the third afternoon without knocking, the way she always did—and stopped.
She looked at Do-hyun. Looked at the chair. Looked back at Do-hyun with the aggrieved expression of someone being met with a situation they had not been briefed on.
Do-hyun looked up from his phone to meet her gaze, and a beat passed between them with the density of a conversation that didn't require words because both parties already knew exactly what the other was thinking.
"You're in my chair," she said.
"It's not your chair."
"I've been sitting in it every day for two weeks."
"Not every day. You haven't sat in it for the past two days. I did."
"Sure, but before that," Nakyung said, with great precision, "you were hiding in the west wing."
Do-hyun's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "I wasn't hiding."
"Yeah, right. You weren't not hiding either."
From the piano bench, Jaemin kept his eyes on the keys. Keeping his composure was a fight he hadn't anticipated. He played a quiet scale, slowly, as if deeply absorbed.
"There are other chairs," Do-hyun said, with the careful patience of a man exercising significant restraint.
"So? I like that one best." Nakyung was already dragging a different chair across the floor with a deliberate, unhurried scrape that made something flicker dangerously in Do-hyun's expression. "Also," she dropped down in her usual way, "you owe me. Two weeks of moral support while you were hiding—"
"I was not—"
"—Hiding, and not once did anyone say thank you." She pulled out her phone, and began scrolling with the serene composure of someone who had achieved everything she came for. "You're welcome, by the way," she finished off-handedly.
Do-hyun bristled, but said nothing. After a moment, he turned back to his own phone, apparently deciding to let this one go.
At the piano, facing away from both siblings, Jaemin ran a hand over his face to hide a smile.
…
It became a strange, unofficial routine: the three of them in the music room, Nakyung and Do-hyun conducting a low-grade territorial tussle that neither of them seemed inclined to resolve, while Jaemin worked. He found, to his own surprise, that he liked it. The room had been solitary for long enough. The sound of the two siblings bickering, or silently fuming—familiar, familial, the specific frequency of two people who had been getting on each other's nerves for twenty-four years—was its own kind of warmth.
The days settled into a cadence.
Mornings saw Jaemin at the piano, Do-hyun in the chair, Nakyung arriving sometime closer to lunch with the energy of someone who had decided the music room was a communal space regardless of anyone else's opinion on the matter.
Afternoons were looser, the composition running long, the three of them falling into a kind of orbit around each other that none of them had planned and none of them remarked upon.
But the nights were something else.
It had started without intention—Jaemin working through a particularly challenging passage that resisted him, Do-hyun setting his book down to listen more closely. A remark offered quietly, then another, the clock on the mantle ticking past ten and then eleven without either of them noticing. By the time Jaemin lifted his hands from the keys and registered the darkness beyond the windows, it was past midnight and something in the composition had shifted; not finished, but further along than it had been.
They had walked through the quiet house in companionable silence, Do-hyun sending Jaemin to the door of the guest bedroom before wishing him goodnight and retreating to his own. Jaemin had not thought about it until he was already in bed, and then he had thought about it for longer than was strictly necessary.
It happened again the following night. And the night after that.
By the fifth morning, Jaemin was arriving at the piano already tired in a way that felt, strangely, entirely worthwhile.
…
The fight started, as the best ones do, over nothing.
It was afternoon, late, the light beginning its slow amber shift toward evening, all three of them in the music room in their usual configuration. Jaemin was working through the composition's second section, Do-hyun seemingly immersed in his book. Nakyung was in her chair with one leg hooked over the armrest, her foot swinging in a slow, rhythmic arc that produced, with each pass, a faint but perfectly consistent sound against the chair leg.
Scuff. Scuff. Scuff.
Jaemin was aware of it the way you become aware of a dripping tap: gradually, and then all at once.
Do-hyun's patience lasted longer than Jaemin expected it to, until finally he said, "Nakyung."
She didn't look up. "Mm."
"Stop that."
"What?" Scuff.
"That."
She looked up then, with an expression of completely contrived innocence. "I'm not doing anything."
"You're scuffing the chair."
"No I'm not."
"You're swinging your leg and scuffing it."
"My leg is resting."
"It's moving."
"Legs do that sometimes," Nakyung said, with the patient tone of someone explaining something very simple. "It's called circulation. Some of us need it."
Do-hyun set his book down. "You've been in this room every day for two weeks making noise," he said, with the careful, deliberate diction of a man who had been storing this up. "You drag the chair. You tap your phone. You giggle. You hum."
"I hum very quietly on occasion."
"You hum constantly."
"It's a music room, Oppa. Humming is practically mandatory."
"It's distracting."
"For who? You're reading."
"For Jaemin."
They both looked at Jaemin.
Jaemin, who had stopped playing approximately five seconds into this exchange and had been watching with the focused attention of someone witnessing something wonderful, quickly schooled his expression into something neutral.
"I don't mind the humming," he said.
It was true—it was usually his melodies that she was humming along to—but it was also, he realized in the next second, entirely the wrong thing to say.
Do-hyun's jaw dropped open—not quite betrayal, but adjacent to it. Nakyung's mouth curved high with the satisfaction of someone whose position had just received official corroboration. She turned back to her brother with renewed serenity.
"See?" she said.
"That's not—" Do-hyun started.
"He doesn't mind."
"That's not the point—"
"In fact," Nakyung continued, warming to her subject, "I would argue that I have been helpful. Two weeks of keeping Jaemin company while someone," she gestured vaguely into the air, "was unavoidably unavailable. Two weeks of listening, of giving feedback, of making sure he didn't skip meals—"
"I'm willing to bet as a fact that you never once gave feedback."
"I gave implied feedback. Which is a more sophisticated form."
"That's not a thing."
"It absolutely is." She uncrossed her leg and sat forward, now fully engaged. "And also, I was invited. The first day I came in here, I asked if it was okay—"
"You mean you asked if you could grab something real quick and then overstayed your welcome?"
"I don't recall—" Jaemin started.
"—and Jaemin said yes, which means I was invited, which means this is as much my space as yours, and you've only been here for four days, so if anyone should be—"
"I live here," Do-hyun said flatly. "In case you forgot, this was my house before it was yours."
"And I also live here, now," Nakyung returned, matching his flatness precisely, "for significant portions of the year, which you would know if you visited more than just twice annually, and moreover—"
"'Moreover'?" Do-hyun scoffed. "You're using 'moreover' now? Is this an essay??"
"What can I say, I contain multitudes of impeccable intellect."
"You contain the specific ability to be insufferable in multiple registers—"
"Um, Do-hyun—" Jaemin tried to cut in.
"—simultaneously, which is impressive but not something I need to experience in my own music room—"
"YOUR music room?" Nakyung's voice climbed half an octave, genuinely affronted now. "It was Appa's music room, and then it was basically abandoned for a decade. Then it was Jaemin who came and filled it with music again, which is more than anything you've done with it in the last eleven years, so I would be very careful about using the words 'my music room'—"
The sentence hit the air and stayed there. It wasn't cruel, exactly, but it had landed on something tender—not aimed, but landing precisely anyway.
Nakyung heard it a half-second after it left her lips. Something shifted in her expression, her combative energy deflating slightly.
Do-hyun had gone quiet. Not the simmering quiet of restraint, but something stiller than that.
Jaemin opened his mouth, a completely instinctive impulse to say something, anything, to put himself between the moment and wherever it was going—
"You're right," Do-hyun said.
Nakyung blinked. "What?"
"You're right." His voice was even, not stiff. "I haven't been around enough. That's fair."
A beat. Nakyung looked at him with an expression that was recalibrating rapidly, the argument having ended somewhere she hadn't expected. She pressed her lips together. Looked down at the phone in her hand. Sighed. Looked back up at her brother. "I didn't mean it like—"
"I know," Do-hyun said. He reached down to pick up his book, which had fallen to the floor. "Just stop scuffing the goddamn chair."
Nakyung was quiet for a moment. Then she straightened and placed both feet flat on the floor with deliberate, exaggerated care. "Fine. There."
"Thank you."
"I'd sit still better if I had my chair back though."
"Kang Nakyung."
"Just saying."