Chapter Text
LAX was a symphony of noise, bodies, and emotion.
At least a dozen languages rose and fell in uneven harmony. Some shouted, some whispered, but each one carried on the restless air of departures and arrivals. People clung to one another in tearful embraces, while others blinked hard to keep from breaking down. Boarding flights to somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t here.
Children shuffled past, some with their small hands swallowed in their parents’ grip, others standing too straight, wearing faux bravery as they stepped onto planes full of strangers.
Jon watched them with a thin, bitter smile.
They all reminded him of Zoey. Young and open-hearted. Still believing joy was endless, not something rationed and saved for special occasions.
He remembered walking through this very airport years ago, clean-shaven and bright-eyed, Yuna’s hand in his. She had been a blushing bride then, laughing softly at something he’d said. He couldn’t recall the joke, only the sound of her voice.
He’d been in awe of everything. The scale of the building, the sea of faces, the sheer variety of people. So different from the sameness of his home country.
They had come to the “land of opportunity” chasing two things: happiness and family. For a time, they had both.
The days were hard, but the rewards felt earned. They took whatever work they could find, no matter how thankless, and came home to each other. Jon would sweep Yuna off her feet when she least expected it, a bouquet of flowers cradled awkwardly in his hands. They cooked in their cramped kitchen, singing along to radio songs they barely understood.
They were broke, bone-tired, never sure if next month’s rent would be paid. But the victories, no matter how small, were sweet. A job offer. An unexpected bonus. A rainy night trapped indoors with nothing but cheap wine and each other’s company.
In time, they began to climb. Jon knocked on doors until a dealership offered him a job, impressed by his persistence and his easy charm. The pay was decent, the commission better. Yuna took shifts at a diner. Long hours, aching feet, but it helped to put a little extra in the bank.
It wasn’t glamorous. But it was progress.
They could measure it in more than bank balances: a fridge filled to the shelves, a couch that wasn’t scavenged from a curb, a car that didn’t cough and wheeze before every start.
As life steadied, the conversations turned more and more to the reason they had come in the first place. Starting a family. Jon pictured Yuna with her belly round and full, her skin alight with that particular glow he’d heard about. It was all the push he needed to double down at the dealership.
He sold sedans to first-time buyers with tentative smiles and tight budgets. Bigger and bigger trucks to men clearly compensating for something. Luxury cars to people who had never once had to decide whether it would be them or their wife who ate that night.
In the evenings, Jon and Yuna would take slow drives through quiet neighborhoods, windows down, pointing out houses with tidy lawns and white picket fences. They’d talk about having two and a half kids. A dog Jon would pretend to resent but secretly spoil. A life without debt gnawing at their sleep, with block parties and barbecues to look forward to.
One night, when the sky sagged low over Burbank and the heat of the day was fading into memory. They saw a For Sale sign at the end of a driveway. The house wasn’t much to look at. Paint peeling, moss climbing the brick like it meant to reclaim it in nature's name, but when Jon caught the expression on Yuna’s face, he couldn’t shake it. Longing, edged with resignation. Like she’d already decided it was a dream she couldn’t reach.
The next day, he went to the bank. Walked out with an approval for a mortgage large enough to buy it.
His hands trembled when he passed her the manila folder. The papers were already signed. Yuna flipped through them without speaking, her green eyes lifting to meet his black ones before she surged forward, wrapping him in a hug that sealed the thing more firmly than ink ever could.
It took months of back-and-forth, but in the end, the place was theirs.
When they first stepped inside, the plain gray walls and worn carpet didn’t matter. Ownership made them different. Jon could almost smell the possibilities over the must and mildew.
The furniture from their apartment barely put a dent in the space, but Jon didn’t care. He carried their mattress in himself, puffed up by Yuna’s praise for his strength. He looked at it lying on the floor without a frame, then back at her.
“We got the house… and sales have been good lately…”
He pulled her close, swaying in a slow dance only they could hear.
“Mmhmm,” she murmured.
“I think that means we can start… y’know… being a little less careful,” he said, sheepish.
Yuna blushed, and Jon was suddenly grateful for the lack of a bedframe to break.
Nine months later, Zoey was born. His obsidian-black eyes in her mother’s softer, younger face.
Yuna traded the clatter of the diner for the softer chaos of bottles and lullabies, pouring every waking moment into their daughter.
Jon kept at the dealership, putting in the hours, closing the deals. In time, the promotions came. The money, too, enough that bills stopped being a looming shadow over their lives.
It felt, for a while, like life had pinned a gold medal to his chest. The girl. The job. The kid. Everything in its place.
Zoey grew from a swaddled, red-faced crier into a crawling, curious little thing before Jon felt ready for it. She latched onto Disney princesses with the kind of devotion only a toddler could muster. Jon, despite himself, found he preferred the magic and color to the more familiar Korean children’s films of his own childhood. Yuna felt the opposite, but they took turns. It worked.
For years, it worked. Cars sold, laughter filled the house, the three of them found a rhythm that felt like it might last forever.
When Zoey was four, they started trying for another. Not that they hadn’t been trying before, in a casual way, but the ease of Zoey’s conception didn’t repeat itself. Months slipped into a year with nothing to show for it.
Jon wasn’t worried. It would happen eventually. But Yuna had always wanted a large family, children enough to fill the rest of their lives. With each passing month, the hope in her eyes dimmed a little more.
Jon comforted her as best he could, but words have their limits. At last, he told her to reach out to her family in Korea. They’d been less than thrilled with him “stealing” her away, but surely time had softened that.
It seemed to help at first. Her family told her it would happen soon, that she was still young.
When it didn’t… something shifted.
The way Jon loved the gamble of America, the great experiment, began to grate on her. She spoke more often of Korea, and not just her relatives. She spoke of clean air. Of better schools. Of how Zoey might have been better off if she’d been born there.
Jon didn’t disagree with all of it. But they’d built a life here with blood, sweat and tears. He wasn’t keen to tear it down.
Her calls home stretched longer as her womb stayed empty.
They still didn’t argue, but the dinners were quieter, the silences heavier. Jon began spending more time at work, telling himself it gave her space, that it kept his own mind from sinking into the same worries.
Only Zoey could bridge the gap anymore. Her smile could burn through the coldest day. With her, they laughed, they colored, they watched whatever she wanted. For a time, that was enough.
One late fall night, Jon came home to a quiet house. He tossed his suit jacket over a dining chair while the microwave hummed, heating the dinner Yuna had left for him.
It dinged just as she padded in on socked feet.
“Jae,” she said softly, “I want to go to the fertility clinic. See if one of us… is the problem.”
He crossed the kitchen and took her small hands in his.
“Of course,” he said. “Anything to make you feel better.”
She had sat by Zoey’s bed that night, watching their daughter sleep, while Jon found the earliest appointment he could for a fertility clinic.
Two days later, they walked in together.
A tense couple entered. A hollow one walked out.
The doctors said Yuna had a rare condition, her ovaries could not produce viable eggs. One in a million, they told them, that Zoey had even been conceived. They offered condolences, but they were the sort that were practiced more than meant.
Jon drove them home in silence. Took the next week off, the first stretch of days he could remember taking in years.
Yuna moved like her strings had been cut. She let Jon handle Zoey entirely. He didn’t mind. He cooked, though it was never great, and read as many bedtime stories as it took to wear their daughter out.
Eventually, he had to go back to work. That morning, Yuna stood in the kitchen, not quite herself, but moving again. Zoey, five years old and all bright energy, leaned across the breakfast table to plant a sticky kiss on his cheek, her mouth still full of Lucky Charms.
Jon sold two cars that day. On the drive home, he let himself think: Maybe it’ll all be okay.
He walked in to find a plate of food cooling under plastic wrap. He passed it without a second glance. Zoey was in the living room, struggling to load Mulan into the DVD player. He knelt to help her, the disc clicking into place.
Yuna’s voice came like a whipcrack from the doorway.
“Really, Jae? More of the Western nonsense? She needs to understand where she comes from!”
Jon raised his hands, startled more by the edge in her tone than the words themselves. The same films had once been part of their clumsy English lessons, and hearing her dismiss them now stung.
“I don’t think it’s anything to worry about… she’s watched it before.”
“As if that’s an excuse. You should be ashamed, letting our daughter be brainwashed!”
Zoey froze between them, her eyes flicking back and forth.
“Yuna. Enough,” Jon snapped. “Zoey is right here.”
He took Zoey upstairs and came back down to tell Yuna it was pointless. Wrong, even, to scold him over something so small in front of their daughter. She met his argument with that cool, unbending look of hers but, in the end, agreed not to yell in front of Zoey again.
Weeks passed without another blow-up. But the ground between them kept shifting.
Yuna’s phone calls to Korea stretched three, sometimes four hours a day. Jon still paid the ballooning bill without comment, he always had, but now he found himself wondering what she was saying on those calls. What she said about him.
She spoke more and more Korean in the house. She stopped coming to the neighborhood barbecues and block parties they had once enjoyed together.
Jon learned to move carefully. To watch where he stepped. Avoid certain topics entirely.
But sooner or later, everyone slips.
One evening, on the way home from work, he stopped at In-N-Out and brought back dinner for all of them. Something he had done countless times before.
The paper sack hadn’t even cooled when Jon stepped through the door of the house they’d once called their dream. The paint was fresh now, the moss gone from the bricks, but that didn’t mean anything.
Yuna’s eyes went straight to the bag in his hand.
“More American food,” she said sharply. “You eat it too much. We all do. Do you want us to end up like-” she waved a hand, “-them?”
He might have let it go, might have swallowed it down the way he usually did, if she hadn’t said it in front of Zoey.
He told Zoey to eat in her room, his voice tight, then turned back to Yuna and let the dam break.
“I try to do something nice and this is what I get? Another lecture? And, Yuna-” his voice cracked, “-we are American.”
That night, he slept on the couch for the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.
The arguments came more often after that, sprouting over smaller and smaller things. And in time, Zoey noticed. Or maybe she’d always known.
She started bringing them drawings, ten a day sometimes, pictures of the three of them smiling together. She’d try to herd them into the same room for movies, insisting she liked both the Korean and the American ones equally.
Jon saw the desperation in her eyes and tried, for a while. To be better. To stop fighting. It never lasted.
He wished he could blame all the barbed comments and low blows on Yuna, but that would have been a lie. In time, he learned the craft himself.
Yuna had always carried a certain steel under her gaze. It was one of the things he’d loved about her once, how she stood her ground. Jon was the opposite. He’d rather bend than clash. But when the fights turned to what Zoey should or shouldn’t do, bending felt like losing.
So he adapted. If reason didn’t work, he sharpened his words until they cut. Weakness in her no longer felt like something to protect, it was a crack in the armor to exploit.
“Gaining weight, Yuna? That’s awfully American of you,” he’d sneer, and hate himself a little even as he said it.
At some point, neither of them cared if Zoey was in the room when it started. Winning mattered more than shielding her.
Jon’s worst shame came the first time he pulled her into it.
“Well, Zoey, what do you think about speaking English more?”
She looked up at him, bright-eyed, always eager to please. She didn’t know she was choosing sides.
“That sounds great! All my friends speak English.”
Yuna’s face crumpled.
Jon took Zoey out for pizza that night, feeling like he’d won something. He didn’t realize he’d just made their daughter a weapon in a war she had no business fighting.
He told himself it was just a way to keep things even. Yuna had her mother in her ear, filling her head with arguments to use against him. He had… no one. A few friends, but no family here to call, no one who could listen without judgment or to advise him.
Years rolled on. Zoey turned nine, almost ten. The fights grew sharper, meaner. Jon had less and less time for her, but he didn’t worry. She said she had plenty of friends, always wore that big, bright smile.
Her room was split in two now, each side carrying its own flag in their quiet war. Jon didn’t know when it stopped being enough for her to love both cultures equally.
One afternoon, it started again. No real cause, just the same storm they’d been circling for years. Voices loud enough to rattle picture frames. Words sharpened enough to cut glass.
“Why are you even here?” Jon spat before he could stop himself.
“That’s a good question, Jae. Why don’t I leave?”
“Go crawling back to your mom, then! Do you even remember why we left Korea?”
“Maybe I realize now it wouldn’t be so bad to live like my parents!”
Hours bled away like that. Attack, counterattack, until the anger curdled into something else. Jon had thought about divorce before, but never seriously. Now, with Yuna not even pretending she wanted to stay, he saw no point in the act.
Still, he told himself to hold off a little longer.
“Yuna… I think we need space. I’ll rent a hotel nearby. We can take turns staying there for a few nights. Sound fair?”
He forced his voice to sound calm, reasonable. The kind of tone that didn’t belong in their arguments.
She argued, sputtered, but eventually agreed.
Jon waited until the door closed behind her before he took Zoey out. They drove to her favorite pizza place. She sang along to the radio the whole way, and he let her. He hugged her too tightly in the parking lot and cried before he could stop himself.
They ordered a large with everything. He barely tasted it.
On the drive home, he shut off the car in the driveway but didn’t open the door.
“Zoey… you know your mom and I have been fighting a lot lately.”
She nodded, confused. The look in her eyes cracked something in him.
“Well… that’s not going to be a problem anymore. Mommy and Daddy are… we’re going to live separately now.”
She blinked. “Like a divorce?”
The fragile cheer from dinner drained out of her voice.
He nodded. “Yes. A divorce. But it’s not all bad, honey. We won’t fight anymore. And you’ll get two of everything. Two birthdays, two christmas, you name it.”
Zoey nodded again, but tears slid silently down her cheeks.
“We tried, Zo,” he said. His voice caught. “We really tried. But we just couldn’t fix it.”
It wasn’t a truth or a lie. Just something grey. They had tried, once, tried to be good parents and good partners. But they hadn’t both tried to fix what was breaking. Not for years.
Jon felt the sting in his eyes, a few tears slipping free at the memory of what they’d been.
“I couldn’t let your mom fill your head with the wrong ideas,” he told Zoey, voice low. “So I wanted to be the one to tell you. But you’re still my little girl. And I’m going to fight, really fight, to make sure you don’t have to bounce between us all the time.”
That was the truth as he saw it.
He wasn’t going to let Yuna tear this family apart any further. Which is why he hadn’t told her what he was planning.
Somewhere across town, the best divorce lawyer he could afford was building a case for full custody. Jon had signed the retainer without blinking at the obscene number on the page. Tomorrow morning, when Yuna came for the hand-off, she’d be served.
He got out of the car and opened Zoey’s door, murmuring comfort as she climbed out. She didn’t seem to hear him.
That night, for the first time in years, he slept in his own bed. The couch had been his refuge from awkward nights with Yuna, but that was over now. This was one of the many small freedoms he told himself he’d have once he won.
And he was sure he’d win. He was the breadwinner, the reliable one, the man people in the community knew and respected.
Months of court followed, each hearing another drain on his time and his patience. Zoey stayed bright through it all, her sunshine smile convincing him he was right, that he was protecting her.
But Yuna’s performance in court was flawless. She played the distraught mother to perfection. Slowly, his sure victory began to look uncertain.
When the verdict came, Jon cried for a day and a night.
Every summer, the judge ruled, custody would go to Yuna. She looked stricken, but to Jon, she’d won far too much.
They didn’t speak after that. He heard through others that she was moving back to Korea. It didn’t surprise him.
Jon wanted to spend every moment with Zoey before she left, but he’d burned through all his PTO in court. Work called. He still made time, weeknights, weekends, but it wasn’t enough to replace another parent.
Zoey never complained. She kept her grades up, had friends, painted, skated, listened to music. She’d sit perfectly still though his work stories like they mattered.
What more could a father ask for?
Still, it wasn’t long before work swallowed more of him. One promotion. Then another. Soon, he was managing every dealership lot in Burbank.
He loved his time with Zoey. But the house… the house was a paradox. Every wall and corner held the joy of building a life with Yuna, and the bitterness of watching it rot from underneath his feet.
When Zoey left for her annual summer trip to Korea, Jon didn’t stay in the house. He rented a smaller place for the season. It wasn’t about the memories, he told himself, it was because he didn’t need all that space.
Her messages from Korea were few and far between. He told himself it was her mother’s doing, her family’s. But when she came back, she would always hug him like she meant it and say she’d missed Burbank, missed her friends.
Those moments made him regret losing the custody case more than anything else. If he’d pushed harder, done a little more, maybe she could have stayed.
At some point, he stopped being Jae. Changed his name to Jon. A name Yuna had never had the chance to poison.
Life became work. Day after day, week after week, years disappearing into the dealership’s calendar. Zoey was almost sixteen now.
He had driven her to LAX, same as every summer. Carried her luggage, told her he’d miss her, told her he loved her.
(More than your mother does, the thought sat bitter on his tongue.)
Then he drove back to the cold house, stayed just long enough to pack a bag for the rental. One small enough he could almost fill it with his own warmth.
The summer stretched ahead, destined to be wasted on work and the same community events that kept him busy every year.
Until the call came.
A number he didn’t recognize. A voice telling him Zoey had run away. That no one had thought to tell him. That she’d been chosen for some program, a group of promising young stars, and they wanted her to stay.
Her mother was already on the line with him when the woman, Celine, explained it. They were civil until the last word left her mouth.
“I would never let you push your agenda on this without me there to stop it!” Yuna screamed.
“Like I would let her stay in the same country as you!” Jon fired back.
Those were the tame exchanges.
Celine cut through it. Said they needed to visit. Said it would be a disservice to Zoey not to.
And so Jon found himself back at LAX, watching young children dart past in packs.
How had it come to this?
Working himself raw, seeing the daughter he fought so hard for such a little amount of time. Living in the ruins of the life he had once built with the person he thought his soulmate.
But one thing was certain, he would bring Zoey home. He would not let Yuna strip her of another choice. Not again.
*
The plane ride was brutal. Hours alone with his thoughts, his music little more than background noise for them to crawl over.
By the time he landed in Seoul, his nerves were raw. The drive to the mountains felt endless. He looked at the scenery to pass the time but none of it held a candle to the Golden Coast.
When the cabin came into view, his first thought was: This is no place for three teenagers to live.
Celine talked the whole walk up, but he barely heard her. His attention locked on Zoey the moment they stepped inside.
She was drowning in clothes too big for her, her face frozen, guarded.
Two other girls stood nearby. One was sharp-featured, pink-haired, vibrating with a fury that seemed ready to burst. Jon didn’t care what she was angry about, only that she was. The other girl, with a long purple braid, introduced herself with a polite bow.
He told them, and Celine, to leave so they could speak as a “family”.
It went the way it always did. Yuna and him, circling the same old battlefield. Their thousandth fight, no different than any of the others. He tried to turn Zoey toward his side, outrage tightening in his chest when he learned why she’d run away, how Yuna’s mother still had her claws in.
He rested a hand on Zoey’s shoulder, the gesture meant to anchor her, to remind her where she belonged. Yuna did the same. Zoey looked up at him with tears in her eyes, but he got the feeling that she was looking for someone else.
The cabin door opened with a slam.
Two shapes filled the doorway. Two girls, but not.
The pink-haired one, Mira, looked ready to break teeth. Jon could understand that; Yuna had upset Zoey, and friends defended friends.
The other one, Rumi, was something else entirely.
A miasma of power seemed to cling to her, thick enough to taste. Her eyes never left Zoey, but Jon could see they were wrong. Slitted, gold, the eyes of an apex predator.
One moment she was in the doorway, telling them to release their daughter. Jon froze despite himself.
The next, she was pressing her forehead to Zoey’s, and Mira’s voice was ordering them back, forcing Jon and Yuna against the wall.
The conversation that followed barely registered. Jon could hardly speak under that gaze. Rumi’s voice was calm, collected, but her eyes promised something he couldn’t name. A promise violence that went beyond anything humans could comprehend.
Yuna pushed, like she always did, and the calm broke. The thing inside Rumi surged to the surface. The flimsy estraints, whatever they were, snapped. Her voice demanded they leave. Demanded they stop calling Zoey theirs.
After that, it blurred. Jon signed something Celine put in front of him without reading it. He didn’t argue with Yuna. He didn’t even try to pull Zoey away again.
He got on the first flight back to California.
(His brain screamed the whole way: Put as much distance between you and that… thing… that wears the flesh of a girl as you can.)
One thing was certain, his time as Zoey’s guardian was over. Maybe that was for the best. He’d hurt her more than he’d ever admit.
But she was still his daughter. Despite dragging her into the war between him and Yuna, he still loved her. And now she had a protector fiercer than any other. Two, in fact.
By the time the plane touched down, he’d decided to sell the house. There was nothing left in it but ghosts anyway.