Page 147 of Lethal in Pink

I watch him fight the wheel. In my rearview, illuminated by my own taillights reflecting off the wet road, I can see his hands—white-knuckled, correcting, overcorrecting, the particular desperate geometry of a man who understands physics well enough to know what’s happening and not well enough to stop it. The Audi slides. The rear tires find the gravel shoulder. The back end drops, and the car pivots, and for one stretched, impossible second it seems to hang at the edge—nose pointed toward the road, tail hanging over the void—and then the gravel gives way, and the car is gone.

I hit the brakes. My own car shudders to a stop, the ABS kicking in with a rhythmic pulse that travels up through the pedals and into my shins. The sound of the crash is not what I expected. Smaller. A metallic crunch, distant, followed by the slide of gravel and rock, and then—silence. Just the rain on my roof, the engine idling, the wipers still dragging across the windshield in their metronomic half-circle, clearing nothing because there is nothing to clear except the dark and the rain and the particular hollow quality of a night that has just swallowed something whole.

I get out of the car.

My hands are shaking. Badly. The kind of shaking that starts in the wrists and works its way up to the elbows, a full-body tremor that has nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with the particular wiring of a nervous system that has just done something it cannot undo. I press my palms flat against my thighs. Hard. The pressure helps, or it doesn’t help, or it creates a different kind of pain that temporarily distracts from the first kind, and either way my hands stop shaking long enough for me to walk to the edge of the road.

The drop is absolute. My headlights reach maybe twenty feet down the cliff face before the beam dissolves into darkness, and beyond that there is nothing—just the sound of the ocean, louder now that I’m standing at the edge, the particular hollow boom of waves hitting rock two hundred feet below. No lights down there. No wreckage visible. Nothing but the dark and the rain and the particular, grinding certainty that I have just done exactly what I came here to do.

I stand there. Soaked through, the satin of my dress clinging to my shoulders like something that has given up on its original purpose, water running down my face in tracks that could be rain or could be something else and I am not going to examine the difference. The cliff edge is rough under my shoes—gravel and wet dirt and the particular unstable texture of a boundary that was not designed to be stood on.

Then I walk back to my car. Get in. Drive away.

The news breaks at 2:17 AM.

I’m sitting in my apartment with the lights off and a towel around my shoulders that stopped being useful approximately forty minutes ago, and my phone lights up with a push notification from an entertainment blog I don’t follow: KAI RYU IN SINGLE-VEHICLE ACCIDENT. The headline is all caps, the kind of aggressive typography that news outlets reserve for stories they know will drive traffic before the facts have been fully established. I open it. The article is three paragraphs long, heavy on speculation, light on details: remote coastal road, storm conditions, vehicle recovered partially submerged near Hurricane Point, no body found, search ongoing.

By three AM, ThornsUp is flooded. Memorial edits—Kai Ryu photos filtered to monochrome, lyrics superimposed in delicate white text, the particular digital grammar of grief that social media has perfected in the last decade. Fan accounts go dark. Then they explode. The comments sections on every major outlet are running at a frequency that makes my phone warm in my hand, thousands of messages per minute, the particular chaotic architecture of a fanbase that has just been handed the worst possible outcome and is processing it in real time, publicly, with the particular unfiltered intensity of people who have never been taught that some emotions should be private.

The Blackthorn student paper runs their piece before morning. Someone from the business school—a classmate, probably, someone who sat near Jae in finance or operations or one of the courses where he kept his head down and his contributions minimal—files a remembrance that reads like it was written by someone who barely knew him but is determined to sound like they did. They quote his clinic supervisor. They mention the graduation, the diploma, the particular quiet competence that made him stand out in a program full of people who were trying very hard to be noticed. They do not mention the pink-loving law student who was seen with him at Beaned & Brew’d approximately seven hundred times over the past eighteen months, because nobody made that connection, or nobody thought it was relevant, or the universe, in its particular indifferent mechanics, has decided that some threads are better left uncut.

The underground receives confirmation at 4:22 AM. My secure line buzzes once—Penelope’s pattern, two short, pause, two short—and when I answer, she doesn’t say hello. She reads a string of numbers. The payout. Clean, complete, already clearing to the account I set up years ago under a name that is not mine and a passport that will never be stamped. The cold arithmetic of a contract fulfilled.

She pauses. I can hear her breathing on the other end—slow, measured, the particular careful rhythm of someone who is choosing her next words with more attention than the situation technically requires.

“It’s done,” she says finally. Quiet. Flat. The weighted quality of a sentence that contains more than its constituent parts.

“It’s done,” I agree.

The call ends. The phone goes dark in my hand. Outside, the rain has stopped, and the pre-dawn light is the particular gray shade that means the city is about to wake up into a world that contains one fewer person than it did yesterday, and nobody knows it yet except me, and the pressure of that knowledge sits across my chest like something I agreed to carry without reading the terms.

I close my eyes. The apartment is quiet. The pink throw pillows are arranged on the couch in the haphazard configuration that happens when someone has been sitting in one spot for several hours without moving, and the diploma is on the coffee table where I left it, the creased edge visible in the gray light, and the city beyond my window is doing its Tuesday thing—traffic building, deliveries starting, the white noise of a place that has no idea what happened on a remote coastal road in the middle of the night and would not really care if it did.

I sit there until the sun comes up.

Chapter fifty-four

Amiyah

The apartment doesn’t feel empty; it feels haunted.

My phone sits face-up on the blush sectional, screen dark, then lighting up with another push notification, then dark again. The espresso machine went cold somewhere around ten this morning. A full mug sits on the kitchen island, a gray film of skin hardening over the top—hours of nothing happening while I stay frozen in the exact same spot.

I don’t drink it. I don’t move it. I don’t do anything except sit with my legs pulled up and my pink oversized hoodie swallowing my hands and my hair loose against my shoulders in a way that would piss me off if I had the capacity for annoyance right now. The hoodie smells like him. Like Jae—like…Kai. The clean-cotton-cedar thing that clung to his clothes after laundry, which I noticed approximately months ago and have been pretending not to notice ever since, and now the hoodie smells like it because I slept in it last night, or the night before, or whenever the last time I changed clothes was, and at some point the boundary between his scent and mine dissolved completely, and now the hoodie just smells like both of us, which is a hell of a problem for a garment I am currently wearing in an apartment where one of those people is officially dead and the other one is officially losing her fucking mind while she tells herself she is fine. Everything is fine.

The TV over the fireplace loops the same five minutes of footage. Seoul stage lights, purple and blinding. A practice room mirror, sweat-dark hair, a laugh caught off-camera. Then the internet grief: monochrome photos, white font lyrics slapped over sad piano tracks. Candle emojis piling up by the thousands. I’ve watched it long enough that my brain stopped registering it as language and just started treating it like wallpaper.

The montage stutters, the screen goes blue for half a second, and then his parents are there.

His father first. A man in a navy suit standing in what looks like a corporate lobby in Seoul, the Crown & Throne Records logo visible on a wall behind him, rendered in the minimalist geometry that costs more money than most people will ever see. His voice is measured. Public. The careful register of a man who has been giving statements to cameras since before the invention of high-definition. Our son lived courageously and loved deeply. Each word placed with the precision of someone setting silverware. He found purpose in service to others, and in his final years, he built something that belonged entirely to him.

Then his mother. She stands a half-step behind her husband’s shoulder, her hand on his arm, her eyes holding the camera with a warmth that cuts through the high-definition like something that wasn’t meant to be captured at this resolution. He spent his final years exactly as he wished, she says, and her voice has a tremor in it that his father’s does not—small, controlled, the vibration of a woman who is holding something together through sheer force of maternal will. Surrounded by people who made him happy.

My jaw tightens. The muscle works along the hinge, a slow, grinding pressure that travels up into my temple and settles there like a headache that’s decided to take up permanent residence. My chest rises and falls in a rhythm so shallow it barely qualifies as breathing. Inhale: one-two-three. Hold: one-two. Exhale: one-two-three-four. The cadence Marcus taught me for situations where your autonomic nervous system has decided it no longer wishes to be autonomic, and you need to manually override the damn settings before you pass out.

My eyes don’t water. My hands don’t shake. I have been sitting in this exact configuration for long enough that the sectional cushion has molded to the shape of my body, and the TV has cycled back to the promotional photo—the one where he’s mid-laugh, head tilted, looking at something off-camera with the bright focus of a man who has just been surprised by joy and is allowing himself to be surprised by it. The photo is high-resolution. I can see the crease at the corner of his eye, the way his lower lip catches against his teeth when the laugh is real, the small shadow under his jaw where the stubble had started to come in that afternoon because he’d shaved that morning and then spent eight hours in whatever photo call produced this goddamned image.

I don’t cry. Crying would require a decision, and decisions require energy, and energy is a resource I allocated elsewhere approximately forty-eight hours ago and have not yet replenished. So I sit. The mug goes colder. The TV cycles. The phone buzzes, goes dark, buzzes again. The world continues its indifferent rotation around an axis that no longer contains Jae Kim, and I am fine, I am completely fine, I am sitting on a blush sectional in a pink hoodie not crying, which is the textbook definition of fine, and if anyone were to walk through that door right now and ask me how I’m doing, I would say fine with such convincing certainty that they would believe me immediately, because fine is a performance I have been refining since approximately the age of twelve, and at twenty-six, I have achieved a level of technical proficiency that borders on art.