Chapter 7: The broken vow
The alley in the scalo was silent, save for the rhythmic dripping of the rain off the concrete pillars. Taeyeon didn’t move for a long time. She sat on a discarded wooden crate, her head between her knees, her body racked with a deep, shuddering chill. The sweat on her neck had turned to ice. She stared at the mud on her boots, and as her breathing slowed, the grey Milanese sky began to bleed into the vivid, saturated colors of her childhood.
“I’m sitting in the dark, Jess, and I can see the years we built. Before the car, before the lies. I’m thinking about the years when we were the only world that mattered.”
The memory settled into the orphanage years. It was a time of “proving.” Taeyeon had quickly become the institution’s pride. Her IQ was a thing of local legend; she could solve complex logic puzzles before the other children could read the instructions. She was the strategist, the one who mapped out the best routes to the local library and negotiated extra rations of fruit from the kitchen staff.
But while Taeyeon was the “Mind,” Jessica was the “Grace.” Jessica didn’t solve puzzles; she solved people. She had a regal, quiet dignity that intimidated the bullies and comforted the younger children. She spent her afternoons tending to a small, stubborn patch of jasmine near the laundry lines—the only thing in that grey place that smelled of something other than lye and dust.
They were a closed loop. Taeyeon would sit on the grass, her nose in a textbook far beyond her grade level, while Jessica sat behind her, patiently untangling Taeyeon’s hair or humming melodies that seemed too sophisticated for a child of ten.
“You’re going to be a CEO, Taeyeon-ah,” Jessica would whisper, weaving a small jasmine flower into Taeyeon’s braid. “You’ll have a glass office in the sky. And I’ll be the one who makes sure you remember to come down for dinner.”
Taeyeon would look up from her equations and take Jessica’s hand. “I’m not going anywhere without the person who grows flowers in the mud.”
The memory shifted to the high-rise apartment in Seoul, three months before Taeyeon’s collapse. Her father’s room was bathed in a pale, clinical gold. He lay in the center of a wide bed, his breathing a rhythmic, shallow rattle.
The news of her father’s illness hadn’t come as a sudden shock, but as a cold, systematic data point delivered during the height of a merger negotiation in London. Taeyeon had been standing in a glass-walled boardroom, her mind occupied by risk assessments and market trajectories, when her phone vibrated with the clinical finality of a death sentence. Her mother’s voice on the other end was devoid of sentiment, speaking only of Stage IV progression and the immediate need for Taeyeon to return to Seoul to settle the estate. As she stared out at the London skyline, Taeyeon felt a strange, hollow fracture within her. For fifteen years, her father had been the uncompromising North Star of her ambition—the man for whom she had sacrificed her childhood and her heart. To hear that the architect of her world was finally crumbling didn’t bring her grief; it brought a terrifying, sudden silence, as if the engine that had been driving her through the dark had finally run out of fuel.
“You were always a strategist, Taeyeon-ah,” he had wheezed, handing her the dented metal box. “But a strategist must know when a variable is a liability. That girl… she was a weight. We knew that if she stayed, you would never leave that orphanage. You would have stayed in the dirt with her.”
When Taeyeon opened the box, the scent of old paper and fifteen years of suppressed truth flooded the room. Inside were the undelivered letters.
“We told her you were embarrassed by her ‘common’ heart,” he confessed, his voice a final, ragged thread. “We told her that your career was a delicate glass tower, and if she ever tried to reach out, she would be the stone that shattered it. We made her believe that the only way to prove her love was to vanish.”
The apartment dissolved back into the grey concrete of the orphanage courtyard. It was the day of the departure. The sky was the color of a bruised plum.
Taeyeon’s presence at the institution hadn’t been an act of fate, but a calculation of her parents’ ambition. In their world of corporate climbing and social maneuvering, she had been a “social orphan”—a child temporarily outsourced to a prestigious, private-run facility while her parents rebuilt a family legacy that had no room for the distractions of a toddler. To them, the orphanage was a stewardship, a high-pressure nursery where her intellect could be sharpened in isolation. But to Taeyeon, those four years were a desert where the only water was Jessica. When her parents finally returned to “reclaim” their investment, they didn’t see a daughter who had found a soulmate; they saw an elite asset that had been contaminated by a girl with no pedigree. They hadn’t come to save her; they had come to harvest the success they had paid for, and Jessica was the only thing standing in the way of their return on investment.
On the other hand, Jessica’s presence in the dormitory was the result of a quiet, desperate erasure. She was the daughter of a woman who had fled an abusive situation with nothing but the clothes on her back and a daughter she could no longer feed. Jessica had been left at the gate not because of a legacy, but because her mother believed that in a place of nameless children, Jessica might at least find a meal and a roof.
This was the true source of her “Regal Heart.” It wasn’t the pride of a fallen noble; it was a survival mechanism. She acted like royalty because if she let herself feel like a discarded child, she would break. Her poise was a shield she built from scratch. She tended the jasmine not because she was an artisan, but because it was the only thing in that grey world that responded to her touch—the only thing she could keep alive when she felt her own spirit dying.
The days leading up to the black sedan’s arrival – all orchestrated by Taeyeon’s foster parents, were a slow, suffocating countdown that neither of them fully understood. While Taeyeon was being sequestered in the orphanage director’s office for “aptitude counseling”—a move designed to keep her away from the dorms—Jessica was being cornered in the laundry room by the very people she was supposed to trust. They spoke to her in hushed, pitying tones, painting a picture of a future where her presence was a shackle around Taeyeon’s ankles. They showed her brochures of elite schools and articles about child prodigies, telling her that Taeyeon had already been “claimed” by a world that had no room for an orphan with a “common” heart. Jessica had spent those final nights sitting by her jasmine patch, her fingers trembling as she tried to reconcile the girl who held her hand with the “prodigy” the adults described, eventually convinced that her own love was the only thing standing between Taeyeon and greatness.
By the time the morning of the separation arrived, the psychological wedge had been driven deep. Jessica didn’t fight the social workers when they packed her meager belongings; she moved with the hollowed-out compliance of someone who believed she was performing a final, heroic sacrifice. She had written one last note to Taeyeon, a crumpled piece of paper promising to wait by the “Blue Door” of their imagination, but the director had intercepted it with a practiced, clinical flick of the wrist. As she was led toward the gate, Jessica looked for Taeyeon one last time, hoping for a sign—a shout, a run, a rejection of the “elite” path. But through the tall grass, she only saw Taeyeon standing perfectly still beside her parents, looking like the very success they had promised she would be. The silence from the courtyard was the final blow, sealing the lie that they were both better off apart.
Twelve-year-old Taeyeon stood behind the iron gate. The director’s hand was a cold, firm pressure on her shoulder.
“Look at the car, Taeyeon,” the director had said. “She’s not looking back. She’s going to America to be someone important, and she didn’t even ask for a photo of you to take with her.”
Through the tinted glass, Taeyeon saw the silhouette of Jessica. She was sitting perfectly still, her head bowed. Taeyeon wanted to rattle the bars until they broke, but the weight of her family’s “investment”—the elite middle school she had just been accepted into because of her high marks—felt like lead in her veins. She watched as the car pulled away.
She didn’t know that inside that car, a woman hired by her father was whispering to a weeping Jessica: “Look at Taeyeon. She’s standing with her parents. She’s already choosing her future, Jessica. If you truly love her, let her go so she can be the success she was born to be. Don’t be her anchor.”
The memory flared. The orphanage gate suddenly turned into a blinding, clinical white light that made Taeyeon’s eyes ache. She felt a sudden, sharp pressure against her chest—a heavy, localized thrumming that lasted for three long seconds. A distant, muffled sound—like a steady, electronic pulse—echoed through the alleyway, before the cold, damp shadows of Milan rushed back to claim her.
She stood up from the crate, her legs trembling. The “success” she had achieved was a tomb. She had lived a lie for fifteen years, and now, with the indigo mud on her boots and the jasmine-scented memories in her head, she knew what she had to do.
Diary Entry: September 27th
Location: Sesto San Giovanni
“I spent fifteen years being ‘perfect’ for a man who stole the air from my lungs, Jess. I thought I was protecting you by being a success, and you thought you were protecting me by staying in the dark. I’m coming to the Paper Houses tomorrow. I’m going to find the girl who grows flowers in the mud. I love you. I love you. I love you.”
be-ayan 
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