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Chapter 11: The Unfamiliar

On the tenth night, the snow had stopped, leaving the Ex-Macello in a state of crystalline, suffocating silence. Taeyeon watched from her position behind the rusted industrial vents, her eyes straining against the dark. Jessica’s cardboard door remained shut long past her usual shift time, a deviation that made Taeyeon’s heart hammer an irregular beat against her bruised ribs. She gripped a heavy thermos of ginger tea and a pair of wool-lined boots, the air feeling charged with the static tension of a coming storm.

She waited until the settlement settled into its uneasy sleep before creeping toward the blue-painted door. She moved like a shadow, her boots treading softly on the frozen mud. Reaching down to place the boots on the plastic sheet, her fingers brushed the indigo surface of the door for just a second—a lingering, desperate touch she couldn’t help.

The door didn’t creak. It flew open.

Jessica lunged out like a cornered predator, a jagged piece of rusted metal clutched in her hand. Taeyeon scrambled back, slipping on the ice, her heart leaping into her throat. Jessica stood there in the new parka, her eyes wild and searching, reflecting the dim, sickly yellow of a distant streetlight. She looked at the boots on the ground, then she looked up, her gaze locking onto Taeyeon.

The silence that followed was the loudest thing Taeyeon had ever heard. She stood frozen in her expensive wool coat, her face still swollen from the punch she’d taken two nights ago, her breath hitching in the cold. She waited for the recognition. She waited for the scream, the tears, or even the blow.

But Jessica just looked at her with the cold, hollow gaze of a stranger.

“Who are you?” Jessica whispered. Her voice was a dry rasp, stripped of the melody Taeyeon had carried in her head for fifteen years.

Taeyeon couldn’t speak. Her throat felt as though it were filled with the very indigo dust that was killing the woman in front of her. She wanted to say the name—the old nickname from the garden—but the words felt like a lie. The woman standing there with indigo-stained skin and a rusted shard of metal wasn’t the girl she remembered. And the woman Jessica was looking at—the polished, successful consultant—was a person who looked like she belonged to the world that had crushed her.

“I… I wanted to help,” Taeyeon managed to say, her voice cracking. “I saw you in the city. You looked cold.”

Jessica stepped forward, the metal shard still held at her side, her eyes narrowing with a sharp, feral suspicion. “No one helps for free in this place. What do you want? Information? My spot at the laundry? Or are you with the police?”

“I’m not with anyone,” Taeyeon said, reaching out an instinctive hand before pulling it back. “I just… I remember what it’s like to have nothing but a wall to hide behind.”

Jessica laughed, a short, bitter sound that turned into a hacking cough. She leaned against the blue cardboard, her face turning a ghastly shade of grey in the moonlight. When the fit passed, she wiped her mouth with the back of an indigo-stained hand and looked at Taeyeon with a terrifyingly blank expression. “You’re a ghost, then. A rich ghost with a bruised face. Why do you keep leaving these things? The neighbors are talking. They think I’m a snitch because of you.”

“I didn’t mean to make things harder,” Taeyeon whispered. “I just wanted you to be warm. I wanted you to smell the jasmine.”

At the mention of the flower, Jessica’s eyes flickered for a fraction of a second. She looked down at the jar Taeyeon had left the night before, which sat on a small crate just inside her door. “Jasmine doesn’t grow in Milan,” she said, her voice dropping to a low, guarded hum. “It’s a trick. A dream. Like the people who say they’ll come back for us.”

“I came back,” the words slipped out before Taeyeon could stop them.

Jessica’s gaze sharpened, her eyes boring into Taeyeon’s, searching for a map she didn’t realize she still possessed. “You don’t know me. You’re just another woman looking for a way to feel good about her own life by feeding a stray. Pick up your boots and go. I don’t want your charity.”

“It’s not charity,” Taeyeon said, the salt of her tears stinging her split lip. “It’s a debt. One I’ve been carrying for fifteen years.”

Jessica stepped closer, so close Taeyeon could smell the lye and the damp rot on her clothes, cut through by the faint, lingering scent of the tea. She looked at Taeyeon’s bruised jaw, her expression softening into something weary. “You got that bruise for me, didn’t you? I heard the shouting the other night.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Taeyeon said.

“It does,” Jessica whispered, her fingers ghosting near Taeyeon’s face but never touching. “In this city, blood is the only thing that isn’t a lie. Thank you for the stuff, stranger. But don’t come back. This paper house… it burns too easily. And I don’t want to watch you turn to ash along with it.”

She stepped back into the blue darkness, the cardboard door rasping shut. Taeyeon stood there in the snow, a stranger to the only person who had ever truly known her.

Taeyeon stood frozen as the blue cardboard door settled into its frame with a final, hollow thud. The sound was a definitive rejection, a wall of paper that felt more impenetrable than the reinforced glass of her office in Seoul. She reached out, her fingers hovering just inches from the indigo paint, wanting to scream that she wasn’t a stranger, that she was the other half of the promise made in a sun-drenched garden years ago. But the words died in the freezing air. To Jessica, she was just another predatory shadow of the city, dressed in the skin of the elite.

She didn’t leave immediately. She couldn’t. She slumped against the cold stone pillar of the slaughterhouse, the adrenaline fading and leaving behind a bone-deep exhaustion. From inside the paper house, she heard the rhythmic, labored sound of Jessica moving—the rustle of the new parka being set aside, the soft clink of the tea thermos, and then that terrible, rattling cough. Every hack sounded like a tearing of silk, a reminder that the “Blue Lung” was a clock ticking toward a silent midnight. Taeyeon pressed her hands over her ears, but she could still hear the whistling breath through the thin cardboard.

The contrast between them was now a jagged glass floor she had to walk on. Jessica was living a life of “necessity”—every movement calculated for survival, every stranger a threat, every gift a potential trap. Taeyeon realized with a sickening clarity that her “charity” had been a luxury of the guilty. She had arrived like a savior with bags of expensive goods, never stopping to think that in a place like this, having something new was a death sentence or a reason to be hated. She had been playing the role of a consultant even here, trying to “fix” the problem with resources instead of presence.

A group of men shuffled past at the end of the alley, their eyes lingering on Taeyeon’s silhouette. She saw the way they looked at the spot where she had been standing—the spot where the boots now sat inside Jessica’s door. The jealousy she had witnessed from afar was now a tangible, shark-like presence circling the blue door. She realized that by being a “rich ghost,” she hadn’t protected Jessica; she had marked her. She had turned the blue door into a target for everyone who had nothing.

As the first hint of a grey, smog-choked dawn began to bleed over the horizon, Taeyon looked down at her hands. They were clean, save for the smudge of mud from her fall. They were the hands of someone who signed contracts and typed out strategies. They were not the hands of someone who belonged in a paper house. She felt a sudden, violent loathing for the wool of her coat, for the warmth of her hotel room, for the passport in her pocket that gave her the right to breathe clean air.

She looked back at the blue door one last time. Jessica had told her to go, to not turn to ash. But Taeyeon knew she was already burning. The fever she had been carrying wasn’t just a symptom of the dream; it was the slow incineration of the woman she had pretended to be for fifteen years.

The walk back to the tram was a blur of cold wind and stinging realization. Taeyeon felt a strange, dizzying duality—a high-voltage current of joy that she had finally heard Jessica’s voice, followed by the crushing weight of the words that voice had spoken. Hearing Jessica speak was like finding a pulse in a body she had feared dead, a confirmation that the girl from the garden still drew breath. But the eyes that had looked at her were hollowed out, stripped of the shared warmth that had once been Taeyeon’s only home.

To be that close, to smell the tea on Jessica’s breath and see the way her hair still fell over her forehead in that same familiar arc, only to be dismissed as a “rich ghost,” was a unique kind of agony. It was the pain of being a ghost in one’s own life. Taeyeon realized that the fifteen years she had spent building her career had created a shell so thick and polished that even the person who knew her soul couldn’t see through it. She was grieving a living person who was standing five feet away, and the grief was sharpened by the fact that Jessica was suffering for the very “progress” Taeyeon’s world represented.

By the time she reached her sterile hotel room, the plan had already begun to form, born not from logic, but from a desperate, ancestral need to bridge the gap. She knew now that words would never be enough; Jessica had been lied to by the world for too long to believe a stranger’s confession. To be recognized, Taeyeon realized she couldn’t be the woman who left gifts; she had to be the woman who shared the struggle.

She looked at her reflection in the vanity mirror—the expensive haircut, the clear skin, the eyes that had never seen the inside of an illegal textile mill. She decided – she would find the foreman of the laundry where the indigo dust was thickest, the place that didn’t ask for a passport or a pedigree. She would trade her silk and wool for the rough felt of the laborers.

She wanted Jessica to see her hands stained with the same ink. She wanted them to stand side-by-side in the sunless basements, breathing the same toxic air, until the “Blue” was the only thing left between them. It was a madman’s strategy, a slow suicide of the identity she had worked so hard to craft, but it was the only way to prove she wasn’t just “another woman looking to feel good.” She would earn her way back into Jessica’s life through the shared ritual of survival.

Dream Diary Entry: October 26th

Location: Outside the Blue Door, Ex-Macello

She saw the coat and the bruise, but she didn’t see the girl who sat with her in the laundry yard. I am a ‘rich ghost’ to her now, haunted by a name she’s buried under layers of indigo. It was the most painful conversation of my life, hearing her voice and realizing it wasn’t meant for me. But I saw her hand shake when I mentioned the jasmine. I saw the girl behind the metal shard. I’m not leaving. I’ll be a stranger for as long as it takes for her to remember that we were once the same soul.

I feel like I’ve been hit by a train, and yet I’ve never felt more awake. Tomorrow, I’m checking out. I’m leaving the designer coats and the credit cards in this room. If she lives in a house of paper, then I will learn to sleep on cardboard. If her lungs are turning blue, then let mine turn blue too. I don’t want to be her savior; I want to be her equal again. I’m going to the mills. I’m going to find the work that breaks the body and see if, in the wreckage, she finally sees the girl she used to love. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.