Chapter 371

[ 1,120 words ]

Julian’s POV

Aiden’s face lit up immediately, as though he had been waiting his entire short life for exactly this question.

“How about exploring South Korea?” he said, with the confidence of a boy who had clearly been thinking about this answer for longer than the conversation had actually been happening.

“Does your mom love South Korea?” I asked, genuinely curious, running through everything I knew about Katia’s interests and coming up with nothing that pointed anywhere near this country.

“Dad,” Aiden said, with the kind of exasperation only a child could summon for an adult who had clearly missed something obvious, “you have no idea. At some point I thought she might marry someone called Oppa p>

“Who is Oppa?” I asked.

Aiden looked at me the way he looked at his teacher when she asked the class an easy question nobody had gotten wrong before him, the expression of a child mildly disappointed in the adult standing in front of him.

“Dad, you are way too behind,” he said, shaking his head slowly, as though the gap in my education pained him personally. “Mom loves Koreans. Their movies. She is so obsessed with all these oppas who are way more handsome than you p>

“Show me,” I said.

“Dad, don’t even try it,” Aiden said, shaking his head with the seriousness of a much older person delivering unwelcome news. “Because you are not like them. They are very handsome. If you see them, you might even cancel this trip to South Korea out of jealousy p>

“Jealousy,” I said.

Aiden nodded, satisfied that he had made his point, and slid off the couch to go find his breakfast.

I sat there for a moment after he left, listening to the sound of cabinets opening and closing in the kitchen down the hall and the familiar clatter of a cereal bowl being set on the counter with more force than necessary. I thought about the version of myself I had been six months ago, a man who would have found the idea of losing an argument to a child about handsome Korean actors almost insulting. That version of me would have dismissed the entire conversation within thirty seconds and gone back to whatever he considered actually important that morning.

I did not feel that way anymore.

I pulled out my phone and typed South Korea into the search bar, scrolling through images of Seoul at night, the skyline lit in a way that reminded me faintly of Manhattan but softer somehow, less aggressive about announcing its ownwealth. I thought about Katia, about whether Aiden’s assessment of her interests carried any truth to it, and found myself smiling at the idea of her sitting somewhere watching a show with subtitles, invested in the fate of a fictional man named something I would never be able to pronounce correctly on the first attempt.

I had spent two years assuming I understood every version of Katia Kensington there was to understand. The version who ran IG Technologies with a precision that made grown executives nervous. The version who drove through underground circuits at speeds that should have terrified her and clearly did not. The version who had built an entire company from nothing while raising a son alone, carrying secrets I had only recently begun to understand the weight of.

I had never once considered the version of her who apparently had opinions about fictional men named Oppa.

There was still so much about my own wife I did not know, small, ordinary things that had nothing to do with boardrooms or company deeds or the seven years we had spent orbiting each other without either of us understanding what the other actually was. Aiden knew things about his mother that I did not. That fact settled into my chest with an odd mixture of humility and something close to hope, because if there was still this much left to learn about her, then perhaps there was still this much time left for both of us to figure it out together.

I stood up and walked toward the kitchen, already deciding I was going to ask Katia about South Korea myself and see exactly how much of what our son had told me turned out to be true.

She was standing at the counter when I walked in, coffee in hand, watching Aiden pour milk into his bowl with the concentrated focus of a boy who took cereal preparation extremely seriously.

“Morning,” she said, not looking up from her cup.

“Morning,” I said. “I have a question for you p>

That got her attention. She glanced up, one eyebrow raised slightly, waiting.

“South Korea,” I said. “Apparently there is a man named Oppa I should be concerned about p>

Katia’s face went through several expressions in the span of half a second, surprise giving way to something close to embarrassment before settling into a look of pure betrayal aimed directly at our son, who was suddenly very interested in the exact position of his spoon.

“Aiden,” she said.

“I did not say anything wrong,” Aiden said, not looking up from his cereal. “I only told him you love Koreans p>

“Oppa is not a person,” Katia said, turning back to me, her cheeks faintly pink in a way I found more interesting than I probably should have. “It is a word. It means older brother, or it is used for an older male you are close to. In the shows I watch, every lead actor gets called that by the woman who is in love with him. Aiden heard me use it while watching something and apparently decided it referred to one man I was planning to run off with p>

“So there is no actual man named Oppa,” I said.

“There is no actual man named Oppa,” she confirmed, though the way she said it carried the faint suggestion that if there had been, she would not necessarily have minded.

I looked at Aiden, who shrugged without an ounce of remorse, clearly unbothered by having been caught slightly misrepresenting the facts in service of a vacation he wanted badly enough to invent a rival for.

“South Korea,” I said, looking back at Katia. “Is that somewhere you would actually want to go p>

She considered the question for a moment longer than I expected, something thoughtful passing behind her eyes.

“Yes,” she said finally. “I would like that p>

Aiden pumped his fist in the air without looking up from his breakfast, and I found myself smiling in a way that had very little to do with Korean actors and everything to do with the fact that, for the first time in weeks, planning something together had felt entirely uncomplicated.

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