Nam Jisu's house. It was the evening before Lunar New Year, but dinner was a simple affair.

Sandwiches and salad.

A hot cup of coffee sat in front of Gi Hyeonseo.

While Nam Jisu's maternal grandfather was alive, people had gathered at her mother's family home every holiday.

The house had bustled with guests and relatives bearing gifts.

Scenes like that didn't happen anymore.

Her grandmother, saying she was too old and it wore her out, wouldn't even let her own children come.

Their father, Nam Gwan, who ran a venture business, was out entertaining clients again tonight.

All he'd said was that there was someone he had to meet before the holiday. Only the mother and her two daughters sat at the table.

"Yuri-ya. No appetite?"

Gi Hyeonseo looked at her elder daughter's plate. More than half the sandwich was still there.

"No. I'm eating."

Nam Yuri picked the sandwich back up. It wasn't that she wasn't hungry.

Her mind kept drifting somewhere else. It had been like that ever since she came back from Yongpyong.

First came the news that Gu Changjin had been hurt, and then word that his mother, Min Seoyeong, was going around meeting people.

At first she'd taken it as an attempt to find out what had happened that day.

But as time went on, the talk she heard was full of thorns.

In the Cheonghwa High School alumni group chat, and among the chaebol friends she kept up with, people started putting in a word or two.

A hoobae with no manners. An upstart bastard. An ill-bred little shit who treated his sunbaes like dirt.

It was nothing like the impression she'd gotten of Ha Tae-ung, short as their time together had been.

Through the blizzard and all of Gu Changjin's obnoxious antics, he'd never lost his head.

Even when Gu Changjin got worked up and started shouting, he'd answered calmly. She could still see that face clearly.

Nam Yuri couldn't shake the feeling that he was going through something he didn't have to, because of her.

What if she hadn't been there?…