Page 67 of Tell Me Where It Ends

The man who would sneak off in a five-stars hotel room for a few nights, drinking champagne and pretend the world outside doesn’t exist. The casual flame I kept because he reminded me of a simpler, more reckless version of myself.

I hit answer, because I know I had to deal with this ghost too.

“Well, look who answered,” his voice is smooth, confident, and annoyingly familiar. “Just checking on my favorite headline generator. How are you holding up after the storm, Min-hee? Need a distraction?”

He means distraction in the physical sense, and the old me would have accepted the offer. But I am not that person right now.

“I’m fine, Suho. I landed safely.” My answer is clipped, tight with exhaustion and lack of interest.

“Landed? Where are you?”

“Jeju.”

A pause. Unlike Shin’s calculating silence, Suho’s is curiosity mixed with amusement. “Jeju? Alone? That sounds like the start of a drama I would watch. You could have called me to come along.”

“Suho, listen,” I say, pushing myself to sit up straight. I am not in the mood to play this easy, flirty game again. It belongs to the twenty-year-old girl who needed noise to drown out her life.

I take a breath and say the words clearly, watching the last sliver of sun disappear behind the ocean. “I think we should stop this. Whatever this is. Let’s stop pretending that we are twenty.Whatever happened between us then should be buried over, and we should open a new chapter.”

The silence that follows is longer this time, heavier. Then Suho speaks. His voice is suddenly devoid of all its usual playful sarcasm—it’s quiet, serious, and completely flat.

“A new chapter? Or just a new place to hide? I thought you were finally done running, Min-hee.”

I close my eyes, rubbing the space between my brows. The truth is too complicated for this tiny phone line, for this old drama.

“Be well, Suho.”

I disconnect the call without waiting for his response. Two ghosts down.

And there’s one ghost left to find. The biggest one. The one who ran away and opened a coffee shop in Jeju.

9c

The Last Shore Cafe

The hotel and the black sand beach look like the kind of place a drama production designer would create for a female lead who has bravely decided to “find herself” after a bad breakup.

The first few days are a study in quiet, awkward adjustment. Hondongi graduates from hiding under the bed to scratching the door with the transparent windows leading to the balcony, which I decide to count as a major breakthrough.

I, on the other hand, find it hard to relax and ‘just enjoy life,’ no matter how cliché that sounds. The interviews, fittings, rehearsals, and shoots are gone. Now my only appointment is coaxing a traumatized dog to eat a single piece of kibble. And somehow, that makes me restless.

So, I give myself a new job. My latest career is an absurdly specific blend of private investigator and professional dog therapist.

The mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find a ghost.

My clues are the faded photograph of the postcard on my phone and the appearance of the buildings mentioned by my aunt on the phone.

The search is, to put it mildly, a masterclass in failure. I spend my afternoons driving my rental car through winding coastal roads, getting lost approximately every fifteen minutes. I’ll pick a new town, find a local cafe, and awkwardly try to explain my situation to the bemused owner.

“I’m looking for a woman,” I say, trying to sound like a normal person—not a stalker. “She’s from Seoul, in her late fifties. Owns a coffee shop here in Jeju.”

The response is always the same: a polite, pitying smile and a vague, unhelpful suggestion. Jeju, it turns out, is full of women from Seoul in their fifties who have run away to open coffee shops.

But the search gives my days a purpose. It’s a slow, meditative process. In Seoul, I was a product,a headline, a scandal. Here, I’m just the weird city girl with the scared dog who asks a lot of strange questions. It’s a significant improvement.

After one week of this, I’m ready to give up. The initial, hopeful energy has evaporated, leaving behind a familiar, bitter residue of disappointment.

I’m sitting at an outdoor table in a small, unfamiliar town I’d almost driven past, nursing a lukewarm coffee and scrolling through real estate websites for my inevitable, shame-faced return to Seoul. Hondongi is lying at my feet, and for the first time, he isn’t trembling. He’s just watching the sunset, a deep, contented sigh escaping him.