Wrong Number, Right Heart!

Chapter 1: The Silence of a Soul

Seoul never truly slept. Even in the dead hours past midnight, the city pulsed — streetlights humming above near-empty roads, the occasional late-night taxi rolling by, and distant music floating from apartment windows like forgotten lullabies. But within one apartment nestled in the quieter edge of Hapjeong-dong, the world was still — unnaturally still.

The kind of silence that screamed.

Y/N sat on the cold wooden floor, her back against the couch, knees drawn to her chest beneath an oversized gray hoodie that still faintly smelled of him. The candle beside her flickered uneasily, casting soft shadows that danced across the walls like ghosts with no name.

She hadn't turned on the overhead lights. Couldn't. Brightness felt invasive — like pretending things were okay when they weren't. She preferred the shadows now. They didn't ask questions. They didn't remind her of what she had lost.

On the table beside her, her phone lay face-up, locked, yet glowing faintly with life. Her hand hovered over it. Her chest was heavy — not in a physical way, but in that suffocating, unrelenting ache that never really went away.

She unlocked it.

There it was again:
Lin Yi 💫
Still pinned at the top of her messages. Still there. As if nothing had changed. As if he was just on a long trip and could come back to her any second.

But he wouldn't.

It had been eleven months and twenty-six days since the accident.
A rainy morning. A faulty red light. A car that never stopped.
And a call that shattered her world in one breathless moment.

She hadn't deleted his contact. Couldn't. It felt like erasing a part of her — like pulling out a thread and unraveling everything that made her her. She still sent him messages. Every single night. Not because she believed in miracles, but because silence was unbearable. Silence reminded her he was gone. Talking — even if to the void — made her feel like he was still somewhere, listening.

And tonight... tonight was worse than usual.

She opened the chat.

Her fingers trembled slightly as she began typing:

"You'd probably laugh if you saw me today.
I burnt the rice. Again. Twice, actually.
I know you always said I couldn't cook without supervision. You were right.
I ended up eating instant noodles and crying into the bowl. That's your fault too. You're not here to scold me."

She paused. Her vision blurred. She blinked fast, biting the inside of her cheek, but the tears still came.

"You remember the spot near Han River where you told me you wanted to marry me someday?
I walked past it today. There was a couple there. A man had his hands on the girl's cheeks and she was laughing like the world hadn't broken.
And I... I just stood there.
For a full five minutes.
I couldn't breathe.
Because I kept thinking: That should've been us."

Her fingers hovered again.

The ache deepened in her chest — the kind that didn't scream, didn't stab. It was quieter than that. A numb, constant, hollow sort of ache. The kind that turned living into surviving.

"Everyone says I should move on.
They don't say it out loud, but I see it in their eyes.
They want me to stop texting you. To stop crying in the bathroom at work. To laugh again.
But how do I explain it to them?
How do you move on from someone who was your forever?"

She exhaled shakily. A tear hit the screen and trailed down to the edge of the phone.

"I just needed you tonight.
Like always."

Her thumb brushed the send button. She didn't even hesitate this time.

Message sent.

It disappeared into the void, just like the others. She didn't expect anything back. She never had. The comfort didn't come from receiving — it came from releasing. From pretending, just for a moment, that the space between them wasn't death but distance.

She placed the phone screen-down on the coffee table, curled into herself tighter, and let the silence reclaim the room.

Behind her, the candle burned lower.
Outside, a soft wind swept through the trees, brushing against the windows like a whisper — a whisper that might have carried a voice she still longed to hear.

She didn't know that something had changed.

Because miles away, in an upscale apartment cloaked in secrecy — a place where the walls knew more songs than words, and the only company was a silent piano and the echo of old lyrics — a man stared at the very message she had just sent.

Kim Taehyung.

He sat cross-legged on his studio couch, a half-written notebook open beside him, his guitar resting against the wall. He'd only recently activated the new number — an untraceable line meant to be private, untouched, unknown. It was meant to give him silence, freedom, peace.

And yet, here it was — a message from an unsaved number.

Long. Emotional. Too real to be fake. Too sad to be spam.

He read it once. Slowly. Each word lingered like smoke in the room.

Then he read it again.

Not out of confusion... but out of curiosity.

Out of something else he couldn't name.

The words didn't feel random. They didn't feel misdirected.
They felt intended.
Personal. Heavy. Haunting.

He stared at the screen, unmoving, for several minutes. And then, instead of deleting it, he carefully locked the phone, set it face-down on the coffee table, and leaned his head back against the couch.

His chest felt tight. Not in pain — just... unsettled.

As though he had been pulled into something bigger than he could see.
A story already in motion.
One he hadn't meant to enter.
But couldn't step away from.

And as the wind howled outside his window — the same wind that had brushed against hers — Taehyung whispered to the quiet,

"Who are you?"