WHO IS THAT GIRL

Chapter 18: Threads Beneath the Surface

Night made the Kang mansion look honest.

The glass no longer dazzled; it reflected only what was inside—empty corridors, disciplined shadows, the measured glow of a single desk lamp behind a closed door.

Rihan’s door.

He sat with his jacket off, sleeves buttoned, the lamp throwing a clear circle of light across a laptop and a neat spread of papers. The anonymous message sat open on his screen like a cut that hadn’t clotted.

> The van driver didn’t lie.

Someone paid him to come through the wrong gate.

Rihan traced the return route of the number through a labyrinth of reroutes—amateurish in places, clever in others. It wasn’t a professional. It was a smart child with a borrowed blade.

He worked quietly, the way he always did—methodical, relentless. When the trace stopped skittering and finally settled on a school Wi-Fi access point, he exhaled once through his nose. Of course. Cheongdam always came with its own ghosts.

He pulled up last week’s delivery roster and compared it to the campus access logs, eyes moving faster now. There: a second entry for the driver’s name, same day, wrong time stamp, wrong gate, wrong signature. A note field that should have been empty contained a single, almost mocking, word:

> Notice.

Rihan tapped the corner of the file until the screen timed out and returned to black. In the reflection, his face looked calm. It was not.

Someone had used logistics to force attention toward the council and toward Mirae at the same time. Not to hurt her. To embarrass them. To turn the school toward a spectacle and then pull the strings as it watched.

He reopened the screen, saved three copies to three different drives, and sent a single encrypted message to himself on a separate account. He did not send it to anyone else.

For now.

---

Morning came colorless, all steel light and low clouds. The auditorium wing smelled like tape and stress. Mirae arrived early, hoodie up, lanyard tucked under it, hair pulled back again. Yuna was already there, flipping through a clipboard like it owed her money.

“You’re a lifesaver,” Yuna said without looking up. “We lost two volunteers to the debate team.”

“Are they okay?” Mirae asked, almost seriously.

Yuna’s mouth twitched. “Dramatically unwell, I’m sure.” Then, more quietly, “Listen—there’s going to be an ‘internal review’ of Friday. Don’t panic. It’s mostly paperwork. But it means we need every roster clean.”

Mirae nodded, steady. “Point me at the mess.”

Yuna tore off a sheaf of copies and passed them over. “This is the combined delivery log. We usually don’t keep hard copies, but admin wanted redundancies after the van fiasco. Red means we confirmed. Yellow means the drivers were late. If you see anything weird—initials you don’t recognize, duplications—flag it.”

Mirae spread the sheets on the folding table, the columns of names strangely soothing. The third page had a second list pasted over a first, newer tape shining faintly. She lifted the top sheet carefully and felt it loosen along one edge. Beneath it, another name, another time, faint impressions that hadn’t fully been erased—like someone had written something and then tried to make the surface forget.

Her fingertip hovered over a fragment at the bottom line. A scribble of handwriting, too small to be casual, not part of the form.

Make sure the council notices.

Her skin prickled.

“Mirae?” Yuna asked, catching the hitch in her breath.

Mirae slid the top sheet back down, heartbeat uneven. “Nothing. It’s just… messy.” She forced a small smile. “I’ll copy these clean.”

Yuna studied her and, gracefully, didn’t press. “Thank you.”

Mirae tucked the discovery under a stack and felt, for the first time, the shape of something deliberate under her feet.

---

By lunch, the school had digested the administration’s review like it digested everything—by turning it into theater. The cafeteria was a bright bowl of noise. Mirae hesitated at the threshold and nearly turned away.

Harim found her first. He always did. “You’re not eating air again,” he said cheerfully, steering her toward the windows. “I’ve appointed myself as your line manager for chewing.”

“You’re ridiculous,” she said, but it came out warm.

He grinned and handed her a tray. “I contain multitudes.”

They had barely sat down when the atmosphere shifted—the way it shifts before an argument breaks out in a room that prefers pretending it doesn’t fight. Mirae looked up and realized why.

Rihan, Taewoo, and Joonseo had converged on the same aisle. Not together. Not on purpose. But proximity made everything look like intent.

Taewoo got there first, sliding into the chair opposite Mirae like a storm cloud trying out a couch. “Councils and committees and commendations,” he said. “You must be thrilled, Hoodie—” He caught himself, and for once, corrected. “…Mirae.”

Harim’s eyes narrowed. “Try that again with less sarcasm.”

Taewoo’s smile didn’t falter. “I’m genuinely curious. Does it feel good to be the reason we all got a 6 a.m. email with the subject line ‘Constructive Debrief’?”

“Stop,” Joonseo said, arriving without ceremony and taking the seat at Mirae’s left like gravity had reserved it. His tone wasn’t loud. It never needed to be.

Rihan stood at the end of the table and didn’t sit. “There was sabotage,” he said simply. “Someone paid the driver. Administration will ask bad questions. We will give better answers.”

Taewoo’s brows arched. “And your answer is—what? ‘Everything is fine and the girl is innocent’?” His eyes flicked to Mirae, then back to Rihan. “You talk like she’s a weather system. She can answer for herself.”

Mirae exhaled slowly and set down her chopsticks. “Then ask me.”

Taewoo blinked, then laughed. “All right. Why do they care about you so much?”

Mirae didn’t look away. “Because you told them to.”

The laughter died. Taewoo’s mouth tilted; the injury landed truer than he wanted it to.

Rihan’s gaze sharpened, approving despite himself. Harim tried to cut the tension with a joke and failed.

“I want to see the paperwork,” Mirae said.

Rihan inclined his head once. “After lunch.”

“She’s not your intern,” Harim said, too fast.

“She’s a witness,” Rihan returned, calm. “If she’s willing.”

“I am,” Mirae said, before Harim could argue again. “I’m tired of people telling me what I did from hallways I wasn’t in.”

Taewoo leaned back, folding his arms. “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “this should be fun.”

Mirae met his eyes, then Rihan’s, then Joonseo’s. “This won’t be fun,” she said. “But it’s going to stop being a story someone else writes.”

Joonseo nodded once, subtle, like an agreement he’d been waiting for her to make.

---

The papers didn’t look like a conspiracy. They looked like logistics—boxes and times and stamps no one sees unless something breaks. In the cramped records room beside the auditorium, the four of them crowded a short table while Yuna guarded the door with a clipboard like a sword.

Rihan laid out the copies as if he were setting a table: roster, schedule, gate list, incident report. “Here,” he said, tapping the forged entry. “Wrong gate logged. Wrong signature. Look at the bottom.”

Mirae didn’t need to look. The words were still printed cold along her bones. She read them anyway, mouth dry.

Make sure the council notices.

Harim swore softly. “Who writes that? It’s a taunt.”

“It’s a tag,” Taewoo said, shifting forward, eyes narrowing. “A signature if you’re bored of being anonymous.”

Rihan tilted the paper to catch the light. The handwriting was careful in a way that tried to look careless. The last letter hooked up at the tail. He’d seen it before.

“Kangsan,” Joonseo said quietly.

Mirae looked between them. “What is that?”

Rihan didn’t take his eyes off the script. “A foundation. A cluster of heirs who like making their families look powerful in the most adolescent ways possible—invitation-only charity galas, rigged competitions, strategic humiliation campaigns. Our families don’t play with them. They resent that.”

Taewoo’s smile went flat. “They resent you, Rihan.”

“They resent all of us,” Rihan corrected. “But yes. Especially me.”

Harim glanced at Mirae. “So this was never about you. Not really.”

Mirae folded her arms around herself. “It became about me. That still matters.”

“It does,” Joonseo said, the two words leaving no room for argument.

Yuna knocked the table lightly with her knuckles. “Proposed plan: we stop philosophizing and decide how to not let idiots ruin the exhibition.”

Rihan’s mouth twitched, almost a smile. “Thank you, Hwang Yuna.”

She made a note on her list. “You’re welcome. Now choose.”

“Expose them,” Taewoo said immediately. “Call Kangsan out for paying the driver. Burn them publicly.”

“And drag Mirae back into the center?” Harim countered. “We just got the noise down.”

“Contain,” Rihan said. “Identify the student who placed the payment. Pressure them to withdraw for ‘medical reasons.’ Encourage the foundation to focus on their gala. We can make the whole thing evaporate.”

Taewoo snorted. “Until the next stunt.”

Mirae looked at the sheet again, at the hook of the last letter. Anger, small and hot, flared under her ribs. “They’re using me to hit you,” she said. “They know you’ll react. All of you.”

“Which is why we react smarter,” Rihan said.

“No,” Mirae said, surprising herself with the steadiness in her voice. “Which is why I react at all.”

Three sets of eyes snapped to her. Even Yuna looked up.

Mirae swallowed, then pressed on. “I’m not asking to be the face of anything. I’m asking not to be a prop. If they’re using me as bait, then I want to know who’s holding the hook.”

The room held its breath.

Joonseo was the first to answer. “Then you stay,” he said. “You hear what we hear.”

Harim nodded, fierce pride softening his features. “We do this together.”

Taewoo’s grin returned, sharper, alive. “Finally. Something entertaining.”

Rihan studied her the longest. “It makes you a target,” he said, not as a warning, but a calculation.

“I’m already one,” she replied.

He accepted that truth with a single blink. “Fine. Then we do it my way. Quietly, precisely. We’ll split tasks. Harim, you stick to Mirae’s side during exhibition prep—friendship is better camouflage than security. Taewoo, you talk to the drivers; they’ll tell you things they won’t tell me. Joonseo, you handle faculty pressure; they don’t argue with you. I’ll check the payment trail.”

“And me?” Mirae asked.

Rihan slid the roster toward her again. “You keep doing exactly what you’re doing. Work where everyone can see you, and do it well. People trust competence more than denials.”

Yuna clicked her pen. “And I’ll throw anyone out who breathes wrong.”

“Appoint her president,” Taewoo said cheerfully. “We’ll all be safer.”

Yuna didn’t smile. “Carry a crate for that comment.”

He saluted and made a show of lifting the nearest box. Mirae almost laughed, and the almost felt like breathing.

Rihan gathered the remaining paperwork. “We reconvene tonight. The old tennis lounge—no cameras, no committee eyes.” He looked around the circle. “No one talks about this outside this room.”

Four nods. One steady breath.

They left in pairs, not by plan. Yuna and Taewoo first, bickering with surprising ease. Harim and Mirae next, steps matching by instinct. Rihan lingered to erase the last hint of their meeting from the whiteboard. Joonseo waited in the doorway like a guard who imagined himself a shadow.

In the hall, Harim bumped Mirae’s shoulder. “You okay?”

“No,” she said, honest. “But I’m done being quiet while other people write my day.”

He smiled—proud, sad. “Good.”

They walked.

Rihan passed them without comment, eyes far away. Joonseo fell in behind them, not close enough to crowd, close enough to count.

In a school built on performance, they had done something unfashionable. They had made a promise that didn’t need an audience.

The storm would come. The fault lines would widen. The hook would tug.

But for the first time, the line ran through Mirae’s own hand, not just through her name.

She held it, hoodie sleeve slipping to her wrist, and did not let go.

....