Page 125 of Lethal in Pink

“You need to come home,” he says. “Now. Today. I’ve already booked you a seat on the evening flight out of LAX. A car will meet you at Incheon. No argument, Jae. This is not a discussion.”

I listen to all of it. Head bowed slightly toward the wheel, the phone warm against my ear, the midday sun turning the dashboard an unnatural glare. A beat of silence before each reply, the way he taught me—think, then speak. Measure your words.

“I can’t,” I say. “Not yet.”

“Jae—”

“Dad.” I keep my voice level. The particular register I use when I need him to hear me not as his son but as an adult making an adult decision. “I’m weeks from graduation. Three weeks. Less. My clinical hours are done. My thesis is submitted. All that’s left is the ceremony and the paperwork, and then I’m done. I’ve spent three years here. I’m not walking away three weeks short because Seo-jin Baek decided to have a tantrum.”

The silence on the line has texture. I can feel him weighing it—the paternal instinct to drag me home by the collar versus the respect for the autonomy he’s spent my entire life cultivating. It’s a conversation we’ve had before, in different shapes, about different things. The tension between protection and trust. The line between his empire and my life.

“Three weeks,” he says finally. “Not a day more.”

“Three weeks. Then I’m on the first flight home, I promise.”

“Your mother—”

“Don’t tell her yet.” The request comes out sharper than I intend. I soften it. “Please. You know how she gets. She’ll worry in the way that doesn’t stop, and I can’t—” I stop. Swallow. “I can’t carry that from this distance. Not right now. Let me finish this. Then I’ll tell her myself, in person, where she can see I’m fine.”

Another pause. Longer.

“Alright,” he says. The word costs him something. I can hear it in the way his voice thins at the edges. “Three weeks. You lay low. No public appearances. No interviews, obviously. Change your routine. Different routes to campus. Different coffee shops. You watch your back, Jae. Every minute. You understand me?”

“I understand.”

“I love you.” His words come out rough, unpracticed.

My father is not a man who says I love you easily. He shows it in the bookings, in the security detail he’s probably already activating without telling me, in the way he’s letting me finish a degree he never wanted me to pursue in the first place. The verbal admission is rare enough that it lands like a hand on my shoulder.

“I love you too.” I say it back without hesitation. Then, because I need something normal to hold onto: “Give Sheba some scratches for me? The spot behind her ears, you know the one. She likes it when you use your thumbnail.”

“I will.” A hint of warmth, finally. The old tortoiseshell cat who sits in the sunlit window of my parents’ apartment, waiting for an owner who is currently six thousand miles away making catastrophically poor life choices. “She misses you. Sits by the door some evenings.”

“That’s because she knows I hide the good treats in the cabinet by the fridge.”

A low sound that might be a laugh. Might be a sigh. On my father, the difference is academic.

“Three weeks, Jae.”

“Three weeks. I promise.”

The call ends.

I set the phone in the cupholder and sit with the engine off and the security lights painting the interior of my car the color of cheap whiskey.

I signal. Pull out. Merge back onto surface streets heading downtown because forward is the only option I have, and the ice cream is still waiting, and somewhere in this mess there has to be at least one thing that doesn’t require me to hold my breath.

Scoops & Co. lives in a storefront on Spring Street that should be too small for the volume of humanity it regularly contains. Pastel tile. Neon signage that buzzes at a frequency just below audible. A line that stretches out the door and down the block despite the fact that it’s midday and rational people should be home doing responsible things like paying bills or contemplating their mortality.

The music is too loud for the square footage. Some bass-heavy track that makes the glass display cases vibrate slightly, the scoops of ice cream jiggling in their trays like they’re trying to dance. The air smells like sugar and cold and the particular funk of too many bodies in too little air conditioning.

Amiyah is at a high-top near the back, surrounded by what our Blackthorn circle has informally dubbed The Usual Suspects: Logan from vet med, his permanent dark circles somehow darker today; a law student whose name I should know but don’t because she only speaks in constitutional amendments; two business school guys who are debating cryptocurrency with the particular fervor of men who have recently lost money. Amiyah is pink—pink top, pink nails, pink phone case—and she’s laughing at something Logan has said, her head tipped back, the sound cutting through the music like a blade.

She looks up. Clocks me across the room. Something shifts in her face—a warmth that arrives fast and genuine, her eyes finding mine with a focus that makes the knot in my chest loosen by one turn. She raises a hand, waves me over. Not the performative wave of someone being polite. The specific, eager motion of a woman who has been waiting for you to arrive.

I don’t tell her about the call. I don’t tell any of them. The words sit behind my teeth, heavy and hot, and I swallow them down with the particular discipline of someone who has spent his life learning which weights are his to carry alone.

I order something involving mint and chocolate that the teenager behind the counter assures me is “literally so fire bro” and carry it to the high-top where Amiyah has already shifted to make room. Our arms brush when I sit. She doesn’t pull away. Her shoulder presses against mine, warm through the thin cotton of my shirt, and the contact is so normal, so stupidly mundane, that for a second I forget about Baek entirely.