The winter he never left

Chapter Three: A Name That Doesn't Belong to Me

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The dream didn't feel like a dream.

It felt like a memory someone had folded carefully and left behind in her chest — and now, the paper was starting to unfold.

Ji-hye woke up gasping.

Sweat clung to her neck despite the bitter chill in her apartment. Her heart was beating too fast, like she'd just run through a forest barefoot. She blinked against the darkness, disoriented, reaching for something that wasn't there.

A voice echoed in her head.

> "Harin… don't go where I can't follow."

That name again.

Harin.

She didn't know anyone with that name. But this was the third night in a row she had heard it in her sleep — whispered into the snow, murmured behind doors that never opened.

She grabbed her journal off the nightstand and wrote quickly before the fragments could slip away.

> December 3rd, 2:33 AM

I was in a courtyard. Old stones. Wooden walls. Snow was falling.

I was crying. Wearing clothes I've never owned.

Someone called me "Seorin."

I was in love with someone named Harin.

And he was leaving me.

…But the strange thing is, it felt like he already had. A long time ago.

She stared at the page.

Her handwriting was shaky.

But below the entry, in a space she swore had been blank, something else had appeared — written in delicate, elegant script she didn't recognize.

It wasn't Korean. Not Hangul. Not anything she knew.

It was… ancient-looking.

Foreign.

She touched the ink. It was dry. Like it had been there all along.

---

Later that morning, Ji-hye stood in front of her bathroom mirror, brushing her hair in silence.

The city buzzed outside, but she felt disconnected. Like she was walking slightly behind her own life.

Her eyes drifted to the scarf hanging on the back of the door — the red one. Still there. Still unchanged. She thought about how Eun-woo had looked at it that night.

Like he knew it.

Like it scared him.

---

Across the city, Eun-woo stared at the second envelope that had arrived while he was sleeping.

No postmark.

No name.

Just his.

He opened it with stiff fingers, heart thudding against his ribs like a warning bell.

Inside was a small card with just nine words:

> If you fall for her again, she will die again.

His hands tightened.

Again?

Again.

The word echoed through his brain like a stone dropped in water.

He stood in his study, surrounded by medical books and quiet — a life he had carefully built to be small, forgettable, controlled. But the river had broken that control.

She had broken it.

Ji-hye.

That name pulled something in him.

He didn't know if he loved her.

He didn't even know if they had truly met before this week.

But he couldn't stop seeing her in his dreams.

Not just once. Not just as Ji-hye.

As someone else.

Seorin.

A woman in hanbok with tears on her face.

A woman who always died in snow.

---

He sat down at his desk and opened his sketch journal.

Flipped to a new page.

Without thinking, his hand moved — lines forming.

A woman's face.

Long hair. Downturned eyes. A beauty mark beneath her left eye.

He froze.

Because when he finished the drawing, it was Ji-hye.

Exactly her.

Except… she wore clothes from a century ago.

He stared.

> "What is happening to me?"

---

Later that day, Ji-hye found herself walking the older part of town — the part with cobblestone alleys and family-run shops passed down like heirlooms.

She didn't know what brought her there.

Just a pull in her chest.

Like her feet remembered a path her brain didn't.

She turned down an alley tucked between a teahouse and a print shop — one she could've sworn wasn't there yesterday — and found an old bookstore with no name.

Its windows were dusty, and inside, shelves leaned like they were tired of standing.

A silver bell chimed as she stepped inside.

The air smelled like cinnamon and forgotten paper.

An old man behind the counter looked up. His eyes widened slightly.

Then he smiled.

> "You came back," he said.

Ji-hye blinked. "I'm sorry…?"

The man stepped closer, squinting. "Of course, you don't remember. It's always like this in the beginning."

"In the beginning…?" she echoed, heart racing.

He simply nodded toward the back wall. "Third shelf. Far right. You'll know which one."

She didn't ask why.

She walked.

---

Her fingers moved along the spines — leather, silk-bound, paper, some with no titles at all.

Then she saw it.

A canvas. Framed.

She pulled it gently off the shelf.

It was a painting. Faded with time.

Of a woman standing by a frozen river.

Wearing red.

Tears in her eyes.

It was her.

Exactly her.

Same face. Same beauty mark. Same expression.

Her legs nearly gave out.

She flipped the canvas over.

In the bottom corner, barely legible beneath years of dust:

> "Lady Seorin of Hanseong — 1837."

---

She turned back to the old man.

But the store was empty.

The counter unmanned.

The bell didn't ring.

She was alone.

With the painting.

And a name that wasn't hers… but somehow, always had been.