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Becka had floated the idea of me writing a piece about our relationship, to clear everything up. I’d refused.

Jihoon put the box down with a strained noise.

“Jagiya, do you have bricks in there?”

“Not quite.” I flipped the lid back to show him the stacks of glossy magazines and newspapers. “Just the print copies of every edition that I’ve been published in.”

I’d decided to bring the entire box back to Korea with me after retrieving it from my parents’ house, when I’d gone home last month. I’d considered leaving it, but having it with me here in Korea felt like bringing the two biggest parts of my life together. In the end, I’d decided the air freight cost was worth it.

He nodded. “Have you replied to those publications yet?”

“Not yet,” I admitted, grimacing.

“Kaiya,” he chided, “they won’t wait forever.”

“How am I supposed to choose?” I whined, admittedly a little petulantly. “I was thinking maybe I could freelance for a while. I quite liked it when I did it the first time around. It gives me more freedom to pick and choose what I write about. And now that I have my visa, there’s no rush to pick,” I said with a rueful smile, remembering the headache it had been to go through the whole process again. But the letter had finally arrived last week.

Jihoon stepped over the box and wound his arms around my waist, looking down at me with an indulgent expression. “If that is what you want, okay. But that is still a decision you need to make. You should let those magazines know if you’re going to accept, or decline.”

“I know,” I said with a sigh. “It’s a nice problem to have.” I huffed a little laugh.

He pressed a kiss to my forehead. “Come on. More boxes.”

I groaned but followed him from the room.

We unpacked in the bedroom together. There wasn’t much left. Most of the boxes he’d pushed against the wall were clothes. An ungodly amount of designer outfits just shoved into boxes.

“They’re just shirts, Ky,” he’d said, when I’d accusingly brandished a stack of t-shirts at him, creased from being packed so haphazardly.

“I don’t think you’re allowed to call something that costs hundreds of dollars ‘a t-shirt’,” I’d grumbled, sliding each one onto a hanger and hanging them in the wardrobe.

I’d just finished with that box, when I pulled another towards me. Jihoon looked up, and something in his face halted my movements.

“What? What’s wrong?” I asked, dropping my hands back to my sides. But instead of answering, he got to his feet and crossed the room to kneel beside me.

“This is one box I could never bring myself to unpack,” he said quietly, hovering his hand over the top. His face was inscrutable in a way I had become unaccustomed to seeing on him.

“We can put it at the back of the wardrobe, if you want,” I offered gently. Lord knew there was enough space in the walk-in. Even Narnia might get lost in there.

“No,” he said in a low voice that pulled at something deep in my chest. And hesitating only slightly, he lowered his hand and ran it almost reverently over the top before moving to pull off the lid. I had to stifle a gasp when I saw what was inside.

“You kept it,” I breathed. “All of it?” I turned my face to study his, but his eyes were locked on the box.

“When we broke up, I put everything in here. I–” he faltered. “I do not have a good reason for why. I just knew I could not get rid of it.”

I turned back to the box, and dipped my hand inside. The first thing I pulled out was a little bottle of perfume. It was half-empty, and I couldn’t resist unscrewing the cap. It still smelt like me. Gently, he took it from my hands and held it in his like it might break.

“When I missed you – which was often,” he said with a small smile, “I would sprinkle a drop on my pillow.”

“Did it help?” I remembered the day I’d packed it in the box I’d sent for his birthday. I remembered feeling silly, and sentimental.

“No,” he admitted. “It made it worse, because sometimes I would trick myself into thinking you were there and if I turned around, you would be there with me. But you weren’t.”

I watched his expression for a moment, seeing the ghost of grief that passed over it before he exhaled and put the little vial back in the box. Almost like I couldn’t help myself, I reached for the next thing to catch my eye.

“The scrapbook,” I said, running my hand over the front cover of the book I’d put together for him. I flipped it open to look at the contents I hadn’t laid eyes on for years. To anyone else, none of this would make sense, but for us it was little pieces of a life we’d once had. Memories. The photo strip from a booth in West Hollywood. A note from a curmudgeonly tattoo artist. A sprig of rosemary from a rooftop garden. As I was turning the pages, a letter fell out from the back. A handwritten letter I had spent nearly five years forgetting. My fingers brushed over the crinkly page, and my eyes stung as memories slammed into me. Good, bad, all the ones in between. I didn’t need to open it to know what it said. What I had written while sitting at my desk in my bedroom in Cumbria.

I still remembered watching Jihoon’s face on the video call as he opened it, reading no more than the first few lines to himself before he’d put it away, telling me he’d read it later, and knowing it was because it hurt too much to read with me watching him from five thousand miles away.