What Distance Touches

The trouble began, as most worthwhile trouble did, with something small enough to be ignored if either of them had been less invested.

By then winter had settled fully over Seoul, and Singapore had entered one of its wetter moods, where the evenings held the soft metallic smell of rain and corridor lights reflected in damp tile outside Danish’s flat. Their rhythm had deepened over the weeks after his trip in a way neither of them had named outright because naming it too early felt childish and naming it too late felt dishonest.

They spoke most days.

Some conversations were brief and practical–photos of lunch, complaints about work, one-line check-ins sent between meetings. Others stretched into the late edges of night, when his room went dark except for the desk lamp and the blue-white glow of the phone on speaker, when Hannah’s voice arrived from Seoul softened by tiredness and winter and the privacy of her own room. Sometimes they watched the same thing badly over video call, pausing every few minutes to talk over the scene until neither of them could pretend the show mattered. Sometimes they said almost nothing at all, only worked in each other’s company while keyboards clicked and mugs were lifted and the silence between them became its own sort of language.

That was how something fragile became habitual.

And habit, Danish was learning, could be more intimate than intensity.

He knew now the exact tone of Hannah’s good morning voice on weekends when she had not yet fully woken. Knew the way she pinched the bridge of her nose when work irritated her. Knew that if she went unusually quiet after saying “it’s fine,” it generally meant the opposite and required patience rather than immediate fixing. She knew when he was answering emails while talking to her because his hums of agreement became a fraction late. Knew that he cleaned his glasses whenever he was choosing words carefully. Knew that when he said “I’m just tired,” the real answer was often more complicated and waiting to be treated with dignity before it would come out properly.

It should have been enough to make them feel secure.

Instead, in some ways, it made them more vulnerable.

Because once two people had built a life in the spaces between their ordinary days, the question of whether that life could survive the larger structures around it stopped feeling theoretical.

Danish understood this before he admitted it.

He understood it the night Hannah asked, in a tone so casual he nearly missed the effort behind it, “Does your mother know about me?”

He was sitting at his desk in his room, still half in work clothes, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the elbow. Rain tapped intermittently at the window. His desk lamp cast a warm circle over scattered printouts he had not looked at in fifteen minutes. On his screen, Hannah sat cross-legged on the floor of her apartment with her back against the side of her bed, a blanket folded over her legs and one hand wrapped around a mug. The room behind her was dim except for a lamp near the window and the thin reflected line of city light caught in the glass.

He looked up too quickly.

“She knows you exist,” he said.

A small smile touched Hannah’s mouth. “That sounds ominous.”

“It is not ominous.”

“It sounds like you’re describing a witness statement.”

Danish smiled, but only briefly. “She knows more than that.”

Hannah tilted her head, waiting.

He rotated the pen between his fingers once before setting it down. “She knows I care about you.”

The warmth that entered Hannah’s face at that would have been enough to steady him on another night. But she kept looking at him, and he could tell the question had not finished unfolding.

“And?” she asked.

The rain pressed lightly against the window again.

He knew, before he answered, that this was one of those turns where honesty mattered more than elegance. The problem was that honesty itself had layers, and he had not yet decided which layer he could ask her to hold without making the distance between them feel suddenly cruel.

“And she likes you,” he said. “From what she knows.”

“From your mother, that sounds serious.”

“It is.”

Hannah’s expression gentled, but there was thought under it. “Does she know I’m not Muslim?”

He looked at her.

There it was.

Not dramatic. Not accusatory. Just direct enough to remove the last illusion that faith could stay in the pleasant realm of abstract admiration forever.

“Yes,” he said.

“And?”

He let out a breath and leaned back in the chair, because sitting forward suddenly felt too exposed. “And she also knows I’m not a teenager,” he said. “So she’s not pretending that doesn’t matter.”

Hannah absorbed that without flinching. “What does that mean exactly?”

He rubbed his thumb once against the edge of the desk. “It means she’s not rude. She’s not… against you as a person. But she understands that if this becomes serious, there are things it would have to become serious about. Not later. Not conveniently. Actually.”

Silence stretched between them–not hostile, only full.

On the screen, Hannah lowered her eyes to the mug in her hands. Steam had thinned from it; the tea inside must already have gone lukewarm. “That makes sense,” she said after a moment.

Danish felt a sharp, unwanted tenderness at how calm she sounded.

“It’s not a rejection,” he said too quickly.

Hannah looked back up. “I know.”

“I don’t want you to hear it like one.”

“I’m not.” She smiled then, but it was the kind of smile that arrived to reassure the other person first. “Danish, I asked. I wasn’t expecting a magical answer.”

That should have eased him.

Instead it made him more aware of the edges around them.

Because magical answers would have been easier to survive than sensible ones.

He turned his chair slightly and stared toward the rain-dark window. Outside, someone in the opposite block was folding laundry on a covered service balcony, the fluorescent light above them making the domestic gesture look almost theatrical at this distance.

“I don’t want this to become a conversation where you feel examined,” he said quietly.

Hannah was silent long enough that he turned back.

When he did, he found her watching him with that same painful attentiveness that had undone him from the beginning–the look that always suggested she was trying to understand the thing beneath the sentence rather than merely the sentence itself.

“You’re worried that if we talk about it too directly, it will start feeling impossible,” she said.

He laughed once under his breath. “That’s annoyingly accurate.”

Her mouth curved slightly, but the warmth did not quite reach her eyes. “And are you worried because you think it is impossible?”

He held her gaze.

That was the real question.

Not whether his mother knew. Not whether faith mattered. Those were only the visible doors. The deeper fear lay in whether he himself believed he had the right to keep walking toward a woman when the road ahead was already lined with truths neither of them could ignore.

“No,” he said at last.

Hannah did not move.

“I’m worried,” he continued, “because I think it’s real enough that we’d both bleed if we got it wrong.”

The room on her side of the screen seemed to go quieter around her. Even the light from the window looked dimmer now, as if night in Seoul had leaned closer while they spoke.

For a moment he thought she might answer immediately.

She did not.

Instead she looked down and set the mug beside her on the floor. When she lifted her face again, there was something more vulnerable in it than before.

“I think about it too,” she said.

He said nothing, because interrupting would have been a kind of disrespect.

“I think about what it means that the things I like about you are not separate from your faith,” she went on slowly. “The way you speak about your family. The way you hold things seriously. Even the way you know when to stop a conversation from becoming cheap.” Her smile flickered, very faintly. “It’s all connected. I know that.”

His throat felt suddenly too tight for easy speech.

“And I think about,” she said, eyes dropping briefly before returning to him, “whether caring about someone can make you brave enough for questions you never expected to ask.”

Rain hit his window harder now, a brief scatter of sound before softening again.

He sat very still.

It would have been so easy to turn the moment into something sentimental. To tell her she did not have to be brave yet. That they could let time do its work. That answers arrived when people were ready.

All of which might have been partly true.

But none of it was the real ache inside what she had just admitted.

“Hannah,” he said, and even to himself his voice sounded lower, rougher, more careful than before, “I don’t want you to feel like you have to solve faith for my sake.”

She looked at him steadily. “And I don’t want you to think I’m asking because I’m afraid of it only as an obstacle.”

The honesty in that cut both ways.

They stayed on the call another hour after that, but the conversation never fully returned to its earlier ease. Not because anything had broken. Because something had been uncovered and now existed in the room with them, impossible to ignore and impossible, suddenly, to arrange neatly.

When they finally said goodnight, it was with gentleness, but also with a caution they had not needed in weeks.

He lay awake long after the screen went dark.

Rainwater slid down the outside of the glass in thin lines. Somewhere in the living room, the television had been turned off hours ago. The flat held the quiet breathing of a house already asleep.

His phone lay warm beside him.

He wanted to message her again. Something softer. Something less loaded. Some stupid joke about how a family discussion had escalated because he had dared to use the last clean glass in the kitchen. Anything to reintroduce the ordinary.

He did not.

Because some silences, he knew, were not abandonment. They were space given respectfully after a truth had landed.

The trouble was that space could also become its own kind of fear.

The following week taught them how quickly distance could turn uncertainty into distortion.

It began with work.

On Hannah’s side, a campaign launch went wrong in three different ways that were not her fault and therefore consumed more of her time than if they had been. On Danish’s side, quarter-end numbers dragged him into late meetings with management, each one structured to make urgency sound like strategy. Their usual rhythm faltered–not dramatically, not enough to justify alarm, but enough that its absence began to leave impressions.

A missed call because she was still in the office at ten-thirty. A delayed reply because he had fallen asleep over a spreadsheet and woken at two in the morning with his glasses still on. A voice note instead of a call. Then another.

Each one, separately, was nothing.

Together, they altered the weather between them.

He noticed it first on a Thursday evening when she sent only: Long day. I’m alive. Sleep first?

He stared at the message from the edge of his bed, tie loosened, shirt half untucked, the whole day still clinging to him like stale air.

Of course he understood. He did. She was tired. He was tired. People with jobs and families and geography did not owe each other grand emotional coherence at all hours.

Still, something in the line felt different. Not cold. Just thinner.

He replied: Sleep. We can talk tomorrow.

Then, because restraint was making him feel suddenly formal: Rest properly.

She reacted with a small heart.

He hated how little and how much that did for him.

The next day they did speak, but only briefly. She was in a taxi. He was stepping out of the office. The call cut twice because the signal on her route home was terrible near one tunnel. She laughed once about it, but the conversation never found depth. They stayed on safe ground. Food. Weather. Exhaustion.

When the call ended, he stood under the sheltered walkway outside his building while evening rain blew sideways through the open space and felt, absurdly, lonelier for having heard her voice than he might have felt if they had not spoken at all.

This, he thought, was the cruel trick of attachment.

Once a person had become part of the architecture of your day, even their partial presence could make the outline of their absence hurt more clearly.

He told himself not to be childish.

He failed.

By Sunday, the distance had grown not in kilometers but in interpretation. She sounded distracted. He sounded careful. Each noticed the other noticing. Neither said it directly because both were trying to be kind.

Which, as it turned out, was exactly the problem.

The fracture finally surfaced on a call that began badly and never recovered its footing.

It was late in Singapore and just past midnight in Seoul. Danish had waited for her because she said she might be free after finishing something for work. He had told her not to worry if she was too tired. She had said she wanted to call anyway.

By the time her face appeared on the screen, the lamp beside her bed was the only light in the room. She looked exhausted–makeup long gone, hair tied badly, one shoulder slumped against the headboard. There were papers spread beside her. She smiled when she saw him, but the smile was visibly borrowed against fatigue.

“You should have slept,” he said at once.

She pulled the blanket higher over her legs. “Hello to you too.”

He softened immediately. “Hi.”

“Better.”

For a few minutes they managed the usual recovery. He asked about work. She complained just enough to be honest and not enough to spiral. He told her Farid had once again tried to get free labor out of him at a family gathering and been publicly shamed by an aunt. She laughed properly at that.

Then, almost without transition, Hannah asked, “Did you talk to your mother again?”

Danish blinked. “About what?”

Her expression shifted very slightly. “About me.”

He sat up straighter against his pillows. “Why are you asking like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like there’s a continuation I missed.”

The line came out more defensive than he intended.

Hannah looked away briefly, then back. “There isn’t. I’m asking because you’ve seemed… somewhere else all week.”

He stared at the screen.

This, then. The thing under the thing.

“I’ve been working,” he said.

“I know.”

“And you’ve been working.”

“I know that too.”

Neither voice had risen. If anything, the softness made the tension worse.

Danish rubbed a hand over his jaw. “Then what are we doing?”

She let out a breath that sounded tired all the way through. “Trying to figure out why every conversation feels like it has something under it now.”

The sentence landed cleanly.

Because it was true.

He looked away from the phone toward the dark window beside his bed. His own reflection stared back faintly in the glass–tired, sharper-faced than usual under the lamp, already carrying the expression of a man who could feel the conversation narrowing even while wanting to widen it.

“When you asked about my mother,” he said slowly, “I answered honestly.”

“I know.”

“And since then, I feel like you’ve been…” He stopped.

“Say it.”

He looked back at her. “Further away.”

The silence that followed was instant and terrible.

Not because he had shouted. Not because he had been cruel.

Because he had said the exact thing she had likely feared he was already thinking.

Hannah’s face changed in the smallest way–barely visible if he had not learned her so closely. The mouth still. The eyes less shielded because something had reached them too directly.

“That’s not fair,” she said.

He knew immediately she was right.

But knowing it and undoing it were not the same skill.

“I didn’t mean–”

“No.” She shook her head once, not sharply. More like someone steadying a cup before it spilled. “Maybe you did.”

He sat forward now, elbows on his knees. “Hannah.”

“What?”

The question came quiet, but there was hurt under it now, unmistakable.

“What do you think I’ve been doing all week?” she asked. “Trying to punish you for being honest?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“You said I feel further away.”

“Because you do.”

The second the words left him, he wanted them back.

She went very still.

A part of him, the sane and already-regretful part, understood exactly what had just happened. Exhaustion had stripped both of them down to their least defended edges. He had felt her distance and translated it into retreat. She had felt his caution and translated it into judgment. Now each sentence arrived carrying the weight of earlier unsaid ones.

Hannah looked down at her hands in her lap. When she spoke again, her voice was flatter.

“I’ve been trying not to make my questions into a burden you have to manage.”

Danish closed his eyes briefly.

“There,” she said, lifting one shoulder in a small, tired gesture. “Now I’ve said it.”

He looked at her.

“You think I see your questions as a burden?”

“I think,” she said carefully, “that you keep trying to protect me from the harder parts of your life. And sometimes I can’t tell whether that’s kindness or whether you’ve already decided there’s a line I don’t really get to cross.”

The sentence struck somewhere deep and humiliating because it contained enough truth to wound properly.

He had been protecting her. Or trying to. Protecting the early softness between them from becoming a seminar on impossibility. Protecting himself, perhaps, from what would happen if she crossed certain lines only to find they did not lead where either of them wanted.

He had told himself this caution was maturity.

Hearing it reflected back from her side of the screen, it sounded suspiciously like control.

“That’s not what I want,” he said.

“I know.” Her laugh then was short and tired and without humor. “The problem is I also know you’d rather carry too much by yourself than let me walk toward it badly.”

He opened his mouth, closed it again.

Because yes.

Exactly that.

A long, strained silence followed.

On her side, a siren passed faintly somewhere outside. On his, the fan turned overhead with its low repetitive hum.

When Hannah spoke again, she sounded suddenly very tired. “I don’t want to be the person who makes your life harder because I don’t fit in it neatly.”

It was the worst sentence of the night.

Not because it accused him. Because it revealed the shape of the fear she had been carrying while trying not to make him responsible for it.

Danish sat up fully. “You’re not making my life harder.”

Her eyes lifted to him, and something in them had gone so careful it frightened him.

“Aren’t I?”

“Yes,” he said at once. Then, immediately, “No–I mean–”

The correction was too late and too clumsy.

She exhaled and looked away.

“Great,” she murmured.

He swore softly under his breath. “That came out wrong.”

“I know it did.”

“Then don’t pretend it didn’t.”

Her gaze snapped back to the screen. “I’m not pretending anything, Danish. That’s kind of the issue.”

The hurt in her voice was quiet but complete.

He felt it then–not like a dramatic break, not like something shattering in visible pieces. More like watching a seam split under pressure and realizing too late that the fabric had already been pulled too tight.

He forced himself to stop speaking for several seconds. Not as punishment. As restraint.

When he finally said her name, it came low and carefully spoken. “Hannah.”

She waited.

“I’m sorry.”

She closed her eyes briefly, and he could see the apology reach her without fully resolving anything. That made it worse somehow. More adult. Less cinematic. No one was storming out. No one was hanging up dramatically. They were simply two tired people at a distance, having injured each other in the exact places they had most wanted to handle gently.

“I know you’re sorry,” she said.

He swallowed once. “Then what do I say?”

Her smile this time broke his heart a little because it held no amusement. Only fatigue and feeling rubbing painfully against each other.

“Maybe nothing tonight.”

He stared at the screen.

There were moments when one could argue against that. Insist on fixing the wound before sleep. Refuse the incompleteness. But he heard something in her tone that stopped him.

Not withdrawal.

Limits.

She had no more usable gentleness left tonight without harming herself to provide it.

“All right,” he said.

Her shoulders lowered by a fraction. Relief, then. Or perhaps gratitude that he had heard the line and not demanded more from her beyond it.

“I’m sorry too,” she said quietly. “I think I’ve been trying to act less affected than I am.”

The confession was almost worse than if she had left without it.

He wanted to reach through the screen. Wanted absurdly, physically, to cross the distance and take her face in his hands and tell her not to do that with him. Not to turn her own hurt into composure for his sake.

What he could do instead felt miserably small.

“Sleep,” he said.

A soft breath left her. “You too.”

Neither moved to end the call first.

Then, after a final second of looking at each other with too much left unsaid, Hannah said goodnight and the screen went dark.

The next two days were worse precisely because nothing irreversible happened in them.

No dramatic silence. No blocking, no pronouncements, no grand conclusion that at least would have given pain a shape.

Instead there were messages measured almost painfully for tone.

Morning. Hope work is manageable today.

It wasn’t, but I survived. You?

Same. Eat something decent.

You too.

Kind. Controlled. Miserable.

Danish carried the fracture through Friday like a live wire hidden beneath his shirt. At work, numbers blurred. At lunch, he nodded through a colleague’s story and retained none of it. That evening, while helping his mother move a stack of folded linens from one cupboard to another, he set them down in the wrong room entirely and earned a long look he did not deserve to escape.

“What happened?” she asked.

He was too tired to deflect well. “Nothing.”

She shut the cupboard slowly. “That answer only works on strangers.”

He leaned one shoulder against the wall and looked at the stack of towels in his arms as if they had caused this.

“We had a bad conversation.”

His mother waited.

It had always irritated him, growing up, how she could create space without crowding it. As an adult he had come to understand that this, too, was a kind of discipline.

“We’re trying to be careful,” he said after a moment. “And I think the carefulness is making us stupid.”

One corner of her mouth twitched. “That sounds believable.”

He almost laughed.

His mother set the last folded cloth on the shelf and turned fully toward him. “Did you say something careless?”

“Yes.”

“Did she?”

“No.” He looked down. “Not really.” Then, because honesty demanded more: “She said true things while tired, and I heard them badly.”

His mother nodded once. “That is more dangerous than rudeness.”

It was infuriating how correct she remained as a hobby.

“What do I do?” he asked.

“Do you want to be understood,” she said, “or do you want to win the argument in your own head?”

He stared at her.

“You asked,” she said lightly.

The truth of it settled like a stone dropped into water.

Because he had been rehearsing explanations since the call ended. Explanations of his caution. Explanations of why the question of faith was not small. Explanations of how much he had been trying to protect what they had from pressure.

All of which centered him.

Very little of it centered the actual wound.

He set the towels down on the chair beside him. “I know what I need to do.”

His mother’s expression softened. “Then do it before pride starts wearing respectable clothes.”

That night, after Maghrib, he waited until he knew the hour in Seoul would no longer place Hannah at work.

Then he called.

Not texted.

Called.

The ringing seemed to go on longer than it actually did. He stood by the window while it rang, one hand pressed flat against the sill, rainless humidity trapped beyond the glass. The corridor lights outside cast pale rectangles across the floor of his room.

When she answered, it was audio only.

“Hi,” she said.

Her voice sounded careful, but not closed.

That alone eased something in him.

“Hi.” He kept his own tone steady. “Are you home?”

“Yeah.” A pause. “Do you want to switch to video?”

He could have said no. Could have made the conversation easier on both of them by removing the burden of expression.

But this deserved faces.

“If you’re okay with that.”

A moment later her image appeared.

She was in a loose sweater, hair damp from a shower, no makeup, sitting at the small table near her kitchen rather than on the floor by her bed. The more upright setting made the call feel formal in a way that was probably accidental and yet unavoidable.

Danish sat on the edge of his own bed and looked at her for one full second before speaking, because he wanted the first thing she saw in his face to be seriousness without hardness.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he began.

Hannah nodded once. Nothing more.

“And I think I answered the wrong problem.”

Her eyes shifted very slightly, not with confusion but with attention.

He continued before his own courage could reroute into explanation. “You weren’t asking for a theological briefing,” he said. “You were asking whether I’ve already decided there are parts of my life you don’t really get to touch. And I made you feel like the answer might be yes.”

The silence on the line was immediate and profound.

When Hannah spoke, her voice had gone softer.

“Yes.”

One word.

Enough.

He let it reach him fully before going on.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Not just for sounding impatient. For protecting things in a way that pushed you out instead of letting you come closer carefully.”

Something in her face changed. Not complete easing. But the beginning of it.

“I know why you did it,” she said.

“That doesn’t make it fair.”

“No.”

He looked down briefly at his own hands, then back up. “I keep thinking if I explain the hard parts too bluntly, I’ll scare you. Or worse, I’ll make you feel like I’m already measuring you against something impossible.”

Hannah leaned back slightly in her chair, listening.

“And then,” he said, “because I’m trying not to do that, I end up deciding too much alone. Which is its own kind of arrogance, apparently.”

To his surprise, that pulled the faintest real smile from her.

“Apparently,” she agreed.

He let the small lift of it steady him.

“I don’t want to decide alone,” he said.

This time the silence stretched longer.

He could see her breathing. Could see the way her fingers had curled around the edge of the table without his noticing until now.

At last she said, “I’m not asking you to promise me some beautiful impossible future tonight.”

“I know.”

“I just…” She stopped, looked away toward the dark window in her apartment, then back. “I need to know that if I ask questions, I’m not already standing outside your life while you answer them from the doorway.”

The sentence was so exact it hurt.

Danish leaned forward, forearms on his knees, and held her gaze. “You’re not outside.”

Her expression flickered.

“And if I’ve made it feel like that,” he said, “then I need to do better than whatever version of care I’ve been calling protection.”

For a second she said nothing.

Then, very quietly, “Okay.”

The word was small, but the kind of small that mattered. Not a solution. Permission to continue.

His shoulders lowered by a fraction he had not noticed holding.

Hannah looked down at the table between them, then admitted with a rueful softness, “I was afraid you were starting to regret how complicated this is.”

He stared at her.

The confession struck him almost physically.

Because he had spent the last two days fearing the exact mirror image–that she had begun, finally, to understand the complication and was stepping back before it could cost more.

“No,” he said at once. “God, no.”

Her eyes lifted.

“I’m not scared because I regret you,” he said. “I’m scared because I don’t.”

There it was again–that stripping away of polished language when the real thing was close enough to touch.

This time, instead of wounding, it seemed to settle into the call like heat.

Hannah’s face softened in a way he had missed with a kind of ache over the last forty-eight hours. “That,” she said quietly, “is a much better answer.”

He let out a breath that almost became a laugh. “I’m having a very educational week.”

“You are.”

“And are you?”

She thought about it. “Unfortunately, yes.”

They both smiled then–tired, chastened, not yet restored but no longer cut open in the same places.

The conversation that followed was not magically easy. Nor should it have been. They were both still careful, but now the carefulness belonged to repair rather than avoidance.

He asked what questions had been sitting with her since that first conversation about faith, and this time he listened all the way through each one without trying to turn every uncertainty into an immediate answer. She asked not only what Islam required in some distant official sense, but how faith had actually moved through his life–what prayer did to the structure of his day, how he had learned what devotion meant inside a family rather than inside theory, what frightened him about being misunderstood, what did not.

In return, she spoke more honestly than before about her own fears. Not fear of religion itself, but fear of doing violence to something sacred by approaching it only through romance. Fear of becoming a problem people would discuss in lowered voices. Fear that no amount of sincere curiosity could erase the fact that she was still, at present, standing outside a world she was beginning to care about because someone inside it had become precious to her.

The honesty of it all left him raw.

But it left him closer too.

By the time the call neared midnight in Seoul, both of them looked softer with exhaustion. The kind of exhaustion that comes not only from the day, but from having done difficult emotional work without melodrama to disguise how hard it was.

“I’m still scared,” Hannah admitted finally, one hand curled now around a reheated cup of tea.

“Me too.”

She smiled faintly. “That’s not very heroic.”

“I’m not interested in heroic.”

“What are you interested in?”

He thought about it only a second.

“True,” he said.

Her gaze held his. “Even if true is slower?”

“Especially then.”

The answer seemed to rest somewhere deep in her. Not because it solved anything, but because it matched something she already knew about him and perhaps needed to hear him say plainly.

When they finally said goodnight, the call lingered for a few seconds after the words themselves, neither of them eager to cut the thread too abruptly.

“Danish?” Hannah said just before ending it.

“Yeah?”

Her smile came small and tired and entirely real. “Next time I sound far away, ask me what I’m afraid of before you decide what it means.”

He smiled back, though there was feeling in it enough to ache. “Okay.”

“And,” she added, “I’ll try not to act fine when I’m actually trying to emotionally self-regulate in another country.”

That startled a laugh out of him. “That would help.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

After the screen went dark, he did not feel fixed.

He felt something better.

Humbled.

Which, he suspected as he set the phone down and listened to the quiet of his room settle around him again, was what real closeness sometimes required before it could deepen safely.

Outside, the corridor lights remained steady on the damp floor. Somewhere down the block, a door shut. The house around him slept.

And in Seoul, where winter still held the city in its careful cold, Hannah was no longer standing outside his life in imagination while he answered from the doorway.

The line between them had frayed.

It had not broken.

If anything, under strain, it had revealed what kind of thread it really was.