Love - Chapter 2 Part 2

Eun-hye couldn’t sleep. She could feel it—something inside him was crumbling, silently but violently.

Then she heard him talking to Sister Agnes.

“Jung-woo… you don’t have to force yourself. No one’s pushing you.”

“Thank you. For everything.”

Her whole body went rigid. He was leaving.

“Eun-hye… she’ll be heartbroken.”

“I’ll visit sometimes.”

Liar. She wasn’t a child anymore, fooled by his white lies. When he went to juvie, he’d said it was nothing. But she knew the truth when, not long after his release, a man from prison slashed his arm open in the park. Jung-woo spent two weeks in the hospital.

He lied and called it a traffic accident.

That night, she packed in silence.

Her schoolbag, usually stuffed with textbooks, now held underwear, a change of clothes, socks, and the emergency fund she’d scraped together—20,000 won a month, painstakingly saved. She had planned for this.

“The bus is now departing.”

Just as she expected, Jung-woo didn’t say goodbye. He never did. He simply left, his duffel bag slung over his shoulder, his head bowed in a final, wordless nod to Sister Agnes.

Eun-hye didn’t go to school that day. Instead, she hid, watching, waiting—until the moment she could slip onto the same bus, her heart hammering as she ducked into the very last seat.

She had one choice.

Only one.

Follow.

Why?
Because his lies were always for her.
Because his pain was never his own.
Because if he was going to disappear into the world, she would make sure he didn’t do it alone.
And because—
Somewhere between the orphanage gates and the bus station, between the boy who once cut her hair too short and the man who now carried scars he wouldn’t explain—
She had decided:
Where you go, I go.
Even if he never asked.
Even if he tried to leave her behind.
She would follow.
Not as a child.
Not as a burden.
But as family.

Eun-hye boarded the express bus at the last possible moment, her face buried in a scarf like a fugitive. She didn’t dare move at rest stops, feigning sleep with her heart pounding loud enough to betray her.

Six hours later, she exploded off the bus in a blur, barely making it to the terminal restroom before her bladder did. When she burst back out, gasping, there he was—Jung-woo sitting obliviously on a waiting bench, his duffel bag between his feet like an anchor.

She launched herself at him, arms spread wide to block any escape. The speech she’d rehearsed a hundred times came tumbling out:

“Don’t even think about sending me back. I came prepared to live with you. Know why? The second you chopped off my hair, you signed a lifetime contract. You owe me—see this scar?” She shoved her bangs up, revealing the faint silver line. “I wear these stupid bangs because of you.”

His eyes darkened, but she barreled on, voice climbing:

“You’re thinking of ditching me right now, aren’t you? Try it. I’ll disappear so thoroughly even Sister Agnes won’t find me. I’ll become public enemy number one.”

The scar was from when she was nine—the year the gum incident happened. Jung-woo had sawed through her tangled hair with craft scissors, slipping just once. The cut bled more than it should have.

“It was my fault,” he’d told Sister Agnes, palms upturned on his knees as Eun-hye hiccuped behind him. “I wasn’t careful.”
(He’d been lying. The gum was hers, the bad decision hers. But he took the blame like it was nothing.)

Now, seventeen-year-old Eun-hye wielded that same scar like a weapon. See what you did to me? You don’t get to leave.
Jung-woo stared at her heaving shoulders, at the backpack straining with everything she owned. The truth settled between them:

She wasn’t a child he could protect by disappearing.

She was a storm he’d have to weather.