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Afterwards, we lay in bed. He was wrapped around me, drawing patterns across my arm with his fingertips.

When he inhaled heavily, I turned to look at him.

“That was a big sigh,” I observed quietly.

“I found out something today that you should know, but I don’t know if I want to talk about it when you’re warm in my arms and looking like that.”

I quirked an eyebrow. “Looking like what?”

“Happy,” he said at once, like it was the simplest thing in the world.

“And this news might make me unhappy?”

“No. Because I’m here. And I make you happy.”

I huffed a small laugh and spun in the circle of his arms, poking him in the chest. “Caveman.”

He feigned a look of pain, rubbing his chest.

“Such violence, cheonsa.”

He was stalling. For all his teasing, I could see it in the set of his mouth, the slight furrow of his brows. I lifted my hand and smoothed out the line.

“Tell me.”

He closed his eyes for just a moment, and lifted my hand from his brow to place a kiss against my knuckles.

“Youngsoo heard from the legal team today that Hana has been sentenced. Because she travelled internationally to breach the protection order, the court decided she posed a threat of re-offence and gave her a harsher punishment.”

Air whooshed out of me, because of all the things I’d thought he was about to say, Hana’s name was not one of them.

“She was sentenced to an eighteen-month suspended sentence,” he went on, almost like he had to force the words out. “She has also been banned from ever working in the entertainment industry again.”

I inhaled sharply, and my eyes studied his expression, because for as much as Hana’s actions had felt targeted against me, I had never been her primary focus. Not really. I was an on-ramp for her broader actions.

Every photograph had put Jihoon at the centre, I’d just happened to be in the frame. Every rumour she’d spread had been about him. Even the taxi in Paris had been about using me to expose Jihoon. Using me, because she considered me his weakness.

“When did this happen?” I forced myself to ask after I’d collected my thoughts, because I had a hunch–

“When we were in Paris,” he said, confirming my suspicion.

My eyes slid closed as something complicated lanced through me. Not quite regret, and somehow also not surprise. It felt like inevitability. Like the revelation made sense. Because of course she’d find out that she was going to be being sentenced and release everything she’d ever possessed when her leverage no longer mattered. She was finished in the industry she’d constructed her life around. She had no more motivation to protect GVibes, or Jihoon, so she’d gone nuclear. As we’d always been worried she would. She’d proven us right.

“There’s something else,” Jihoon said, absently running his hands down my arms. “Her husband sent a letter to the company. It was addressed to me, but of course they didn’t give it to me. Youngsoo read it.”

I pulled back to stare at him. His eyes studied me, searching for my reaction.

“I hadn’t even known she’d gotten married.” The moment I said I felt silly, because why would I have known that? It wasn’t like she would have reached out after so long just to tell me.

I looked down as an unexpected pang of sympathy hit me square in the chest.

“I knew she had a fiancé,” I said evenly. “He had the same name as you, or, similar, anyway,” I corrected myself remembering how Hana had once joked about it.

“Jihyun, yes,” Joon nodded. “He wrote to formally apologise on her behalf.”

My mouth fell open, and my eyes rose up to meet his. He wore a contemplative expression, as if he, like me, couldn’t decide how to feel.

“Why?” I asked eventually.