EMERALD HOUR

CHAPTER ONE: Arrivals Mia landed in Seoul on a Tuesday with two suitcases, a stylist's kit she'd bought with money she didn't really have, and the kind of nerves that sit in the chest like a second heartbeat. The flight had been fourteen hours from Chicago with a layover in Tokyo that she spent sitting on the floor near her gate because every seat was taken, eating a rice ball she'd bought with coins she wasn't sure were even the right currency yet, watching the boards flip over with cities she'd never been to. Somewhere over the Pacific she'd made a list on the back of a boarding pass of everything she was scared of, because a therapist she'd seen exactly three times in college once told her that naming a fear takes some of its power away. It didn't, particularly. But she wrote them down anyway: failing publicly. Failing quietly, which is worse. Being the only one who doesn't already know the rules. My Korean not being good enough. My Korean being good enough that people expect more from me than I can give. She did not write down the thing that would turn out to matter most, because she had no way of knowing it yet — falling for someone I am contractually forbidden to fall for. You can't be scared of a thing you don't know is coming. Her mother had cried at the gate in Columbus, three days before that flight, in the particular way she cried when she was actually worried about something and trying very hard not to look like she was. Not the good kind of crying. The kind where she hugs you a beat too long and says call me when you land in a voice that's really saying something else entirely. Mia suspected what her mother was actually worried about was the thing she'd never quite said out loud in so many words — that Mia had her father's eyes and her mother's face, and the two of them had never quite made a whole country between them for their daughter to belong to. Twenty-two years of being asked where she was "really" from, on both continents, by people who meant well and by people who didn't. In Ohio, it was always the eyes — no way, really, half-Korean? You don't look it. As if her face owed someone proof. In Seoul, it was the opposite question, asked in the exact same tone, as if proof worked both directions and she'd never once had enough of it for either side. It used to bother her more than she let on. Somewhere in the last few years she'd decided it was just going to be the thing that made people remember her face on sight, first meeting, no effort required, and she might as well use it instead of apologizing for it. Wave Entertainment's offer letter had been three lines long and hadn't read like it was written by someone who especially wanted her there. Junior Stylist Intern, Idol Division. Start Monday. Report to Yeji-ssi, Styling Team 2. No welcome paragraph. No benefits summary. Just an address and a name and an expectation that she'd show up already knowing what she was walking into, which she very much did not. She'd applied for it the way a person applies for something they don't actually expect to get — sent her portfolio into the void at two in the morning during finals week, mostly styling shoots from her university's fashion program, one lookbook she'd art-directed herself with a friend who did makeup, and a summer internship on a Korean drama set that had mostly involved carrying hangers back and forth across a parking lot in July. She hadn't expected an answer. She certainly hadn't expected an answer that meant packing up her apartment in six days flat, breaking a lease she couldn't really afford to break, and moving to a country she'd only ever visited as a kid on two summer trips to see her mother's family — to work for a company whose single biggest asset was a five-member boy group so enormous she'd seen their faces on a billboard in Times Square a full year before she ever touched a single piece of clothing she'd have to steam for them. VANTA. Everyone in the world seemed to know that name before she did, the way certain things exist just outside your attention until the moment they don't — and then, once you start paying attention, you can't go a single day without hearing it. Her college roommate had kept a poster of the lead vocalist, Jaewon, taped to the inside of her closet door for two straight years, and Mia had walked past it probably a thousand times without ever really looking at it. Just a handsome, unbothered face doing what handsome, unbothered faces do in posters, which is nothing at all — exist for you to look at, then look away from, then forget you looked. She did not think, on the plane, or in the taxi from Incheon, or standing outside her new one-room apartment in Mapo trying to figure out the door code her landlord had texted her in a string of numbers with no spaces, that she would ever have a reason to look at that face and actually see it. The Wave building was bigger than she'd expected and colder, in the specific way that buildings belonging to companies with a great deal of money tend to be cold — glass and polished steel and a lobby with an entire wall dedicated to gold and platinum records under museum lighting, each one engraved with an album title she half-recognized from headlines she'd skimmed without absorbing. She made the mistake of stopping to actually read them on her first morning, standing there in the blazer she'd ironed twice the night before out of sheer nervous energy, until a security guard cleared his throat in a way that made it extremely clear she was already running eleven minutes late for a start time that had not left room for eleven minutes of anything. Soo-min found her before she found the elevator, which in hindsight told Mia everything she needed to know about Soo-min. She'd been hired the same week — PR division, one floor up from Styling — and she had the exact energy of someone who read every industry blog, every scandal thread, every fan forum post that ever got screenshotted and passed around, and had a fully formed opinion about all of it before her first coffee. "You're the American," she said, not unkindly, falling into step beside Mia down the hall like she'd been standing there waiting for her specifically, which, it turned out, she basically had — new hires got flagged to each other, she explained later, so nobody had to eat lunch alone their first week out of sheer bureaucratic mercy. "Half," Mia said. "The eyes throw people off. Everyone assumes the whole package." "They're going to throw off more than people," Soo-min said, in a tone Mia filed away and didn't understand yet, not really, not until months later when she'd learn exactly how much a face like hers could complicate a place like this. "Styling Two's upstairs. I'll walk you. Also — rule one, before literally anyone else tells you rule one, because they will and it'll sound like a threat when I mean it as a mercy: don't stare at the artists in the elevator. Everybody does it their first week. Everybody regrets it. You'll feel like you're looking at a magazine cover come to life and then you'll remember magazine covers can see you looking back." Mia promised she wouldn't. She meant it when she said it. The elevator doors opened on the ninth floor onto a hallway lined floor to ceiling with framed magazine covers — five familiar faces repeated across a dozen different lightings, a dozen different hair colors and jacket colors and expressions, the same underlying thing holding steady beneath all of it: practiced, protected, built for exactly this kind of hallway and no other kind of light. Mia recognized Jaewon's face from her old roommate's closet door a full half-second before she recognized any of the other four, which embarrassed her slightly, like she'd already broken some rule of fairness among five people she'd never met. For one entirely unguarded second, walking that hallway with her new badge still warm from the printer in her hand, she did exactly what Soo-min had just told her, thirty seconds earlier, not to do. She stared. It was just a photograph, she told herself. Paper and ink and better lighting than any human face gets to keep in real life. It couldn't stare back. It couldn't do anything at all except hang there, five faces deep, watching several hundred employees walk past it every single day without ever once being seen by the person it belonged to. "Yeji-unnie's this way," Soo-min said, already three steps ahead, and Mia made herself stop looking and start walking again, because whatever this job was actually going to turn out to be, she needed it too badly — needed the visa, needed the paycheck, needed to prove to her mother crying at that gate that this had been worth the leap — to lose it in the first five minutes over a poster with better lighting than the real thing could possibly have. She didn't know yet how wrong she was going to turn out to be about that last part. She didn't know that in six days she'd be standing four feet from that same face with a set of black snaps in her hand and ninety seconds on a countdown clock, close enough to notice that no lighting in any hallway had ever done him justice at all. She just followed Soo-min down a hall that smelled like fresh paint and printer toner, badge still warm in her palm, and let the doors close behind them on a version of her life that had exactly one week left to run.