Page 13

The plane was mostly quiet now, the hum of chatter had long since settled.

Long haul flights like this had a way of making time feel slippery. The sky outside the little window had begun to slide into a hazy sort of dusk that felt somehow temporary. The lights in the cabin had been dimmed, and despite it only being early afternoon UK time, it felt as if we’d fallen across the world into twilight.

I yawned as I reviewed the notes I’d made so far, and my mind began to wander.

Since accepting the job, everything had seemed to go twice as fast. I’d needed to take action almost immediately, to do things, to make decisions and set plans in motion. I’d scarcely had the time to just sit back. In the back of my mind, I knew this was a pattern of mine. I leapt before thinking anything through. I hated making decisions, and so I often bypassed them altogether by just going with my gut and playing catch up. I’d done it with LA, I’d done it with Seoul, and now I’d done it with ENT.

It didn’t matter how many reasons there had been to agree to all of those things – I hadn’t stopped to consider any of them before throwing myself forwards head first. But here, stuck in a crowded tin can 40,000 feet in the air, there really was nowhere to hide, and I couldn’t help but wonder if my career had been the only reason I’d agreed.

I’d spent three years stuck in a perpetual loop of trying to play catch up in my own life, and while I’d achieved so many things, and felt so accomplished in so many areas, when I gave myself permission to think about the things I had more complicated feelings about, I couldn’t help feeling… unfinished. It gnawed at me. I’d spent so long feeling side-lined in my own life, and it frustrated me to never know if I would have had the opportunity to step into my story line, had I not been cut loose from it. I concluded that it was a train of thought that could drive a person mad, and I tried to concentrate on my paperwork.

Hours later, I watched Seoul coming into focus as we descended. It was still dark, barely four am local time. Nearly twenty-four hours ahead of the life I’d left in London, and yet only half a day had passed.

“Hello from the future!”

I heard the echo from my past reverberating in my head, a years-old joke and one I’d never said again. Not since the last time I’d been in Korea. Such a different time. A different me, when two worlds had collided.

I counted down the seconds until the tyres hit the runway. It was an old habit I’d formed to focus on anything other than the sideways panic that always accompanied a landing, and I gripped the armrest as we braked hard.

Next to me, the older lady patted my arm and I turned to her in surprise. She just grinned and pointed out the window.

“Uri nara-yeyo. Hanguk-ieyo.”

I nodded, feeling strangely emotional as she called it our country. Like I had any claim to this place. But I smiled anyway.

Chapter 6

Driving from the airport into central Seoul was bittersweet. In my mind I had always associated my return to Korea with my return to Jihoon. And I guess I’d never troubled myself with reshuffling this frame of mind. Perhaps I’d never considered that I might come back without him. It had just stopped occurring to me that I’d ever be back, so now that I was, it was as if I had to catch up to the concept of existing here without him.

I had to remind myself of the timeline I was in, and not the past that Seoul occupied for me. The city was so completely preserved in my mind as the place where Jihoon and I existed together that physically being here again was jarring.

Obviously, the jet-lag wasn’t helping with these mental gymnastics.

ENT had booked me into a small hotel not far from the main building in Gangnam.

I settled in easily enough. Which was to say I wheeled my case under the little desk, kicked off my shoes, hung up my coat and flopped down on to the bed to nap for a few hours, instantly breaking my cardinal rule of not sleeping until the local bed time. I had to be at ENT in a few hours for an orientation meeting. I could allow myself this brief nap, surely? How bad could it be?

“Oh my god, babes, did you sleep in a trash compactor?”

I groaned and dragged a hand down my face, Becka’s laughter sounding especially loud in the quiet hotel room.

“Hello to you, too,” I grumbled, balancing my phone in front of me. “Not quite, but I did sleep longer than I should have. Kept snoozing my watch.”

“That’s a slippery slope,” she said in a tone that implied sympathy, but simultaneously called me an idiot.

I yawned. “Rookie mistake. It’s four am back home right now, and my body bloody knows it. I shouldn’t have slept. Pulling a full twenty-four hour stint would feel better than this.” I groaned again dragging my hands through my hair.

“Aw babes. You’ll be fine. But maybe some under-eye concealer? You’ve got a little…” She made a gesture under her eyes, and I shot her a sarcastic thumbs up. But also pulled my little makeup bag towards myself.

“Are you getting a ride?” She asked, as I wiped a tea-tree cleansing wipe over my face.

“No. I said I’d walk.”

The travel coordinator had offered to arrange someone to come and collect me, but I’d declined. I knew my way around the area passably well, unless things had drastically changed in the three years since I’d left. The idea of walking to ENT again had seemed – at the time – like a nostalgic idea. But now, with my body insisting it was pre-dawn, my eyes crusty and my head full of fluff, being driven to the office seemed like something I should have agreed to. I sighed again and halfheartedly began to go through my skincare routine.

“The walk will do you a world of good!” Becka said with the kind of mock-enthusiasm you reserved for the things that were happening, whether you liked it or not.

I groaned pathetically as I smeared serum into my face, willing it to take on miracle properties.