Second to None

chapter 18: Doorstep

Sora gave birth alone.

Dr. Han had arranged a private clinic in Busan under the name Lee Sora. No records, no press, no one who knew Eun Rin’s face. The labor was fast and brutal. She screamed into a towel so no one would hear. When the baby finally came, red-faced and furious, the first thing Sora noticed was the hair. Thick, dark, just like Rael’s. Then the eyes, when they opened for a second before scrunching shut: dark, sharp, already assessing the world.

A girl.

The nurse tried to hand her the baby. Sora took her, pressed her forehead to the baby’s, and cried until she couldn’t breathe.

For three weeks, she stayed in the clinic’s recovery room. She named the baby in her head: Hana. One. The start of something new. She breastfed, she learned how to change diapers, she sang lullabies in a voice that didn’t sound like her own anymore.

Hana was mischievous from day one. At two weeks old, she figured out how to yank off her mittens and immediately shoved her fist in her mouth. At three weeks, she grabbed Sora’s finger and wouldn’t let go, staring up with Rael’s eyes like she was daring Sora to try and pull away.

She acted like him. The stubbornness. The way she’d purse her lips when she didn’t get what she wanted. The way she’d grab at anything shiny and refuse to drop it. Sora would laugh through tears, because it was like Rael had been shrunk down and placed in her arms.

“I can’t do this to you,” Sora whispered one night, rocking Hana to sleep. “I can’t give you a life where you have to hide. Where I have to hide.”

She wanted to build something. Not for herself. For Hana. A career in data analytics, in a big company where no one asked about her past. Money. Stability. A name that wasn’t tied to Rin Tech or death or scandal. So that one day, when Hana was older, Sora could come back without being a liability.

So she wrote the letter.

Two lines, in her new handwriting:

_Our daughter.

Take care of her, please.

- S_

At 4 AM, with Hana asleep in the carrier, Sora took a train to Seoul. She stood outside Rael’s apartment for twenty minutes, heart pounding, before she finally set the carrier on his doorstep. She rang the bell once. Then she melted back into the shadows of the stairwell.

The door opened.

Rael looked like he hadn’t slept in days. T-shirt, sweatpants, hair a mess. He froze when he saw the carrier. Then he saw the letter.

He didn’t look up. Didn’t call out. He just knelt, picked up Hana, and whispered something Sora couldn’t hear. Hana, half-awake, grabbed his finger with both hands and scowled, already annoyed at being moved.

Sora left before he could turn around.

---

*Two months later*

Rael disappeared.

No posts. No press releases. No appearances at Hanwu HQ. The media tore itself apart. _“Where is Rael Han?”_ _“Did Hanwu collapse?”_ _“Is he dead too?”_

He wasn’t dead. He was in Switzerland.

Two weeks after Hana landed on his doorstep, Rael had flown out with her and a skeleton team of trusted engineers. He opened a new Hanwu branch in Zurich. Privacy laws, neutral ground, and no one who knew his face. He bought a house with a garden, hired a nanny he could trust, and learned how to make baby formula at 3 AM.

He went completely radio silent online.

But people knew. A staff member leaked one photo: Rael in an airport, holding a baby with his exact dark hair and sharp eyes, her face turned toward his chest. The caption: _“Boss has a kid.”_ The internet exploded. _“Who’s the mother?”_ _“Is it Sora?”_ _“Wait, is it Jihan?!”_

Rael never answered. He just worked. And raised Hana.

Hana was chaos. At four months, she learned how to grab his glasses and throw them. At five months, she figured out how to scream loud enough to make the shareholders on Zoom mute themselves. She acted exactly like Rael: stubborn, sharp, and completely uninterested in authority. When Rael tried to scold her, she’d purse her lips and stare him down, and he’d give up and hand her the toy she wanted.

“You’re your father’s daughter,” he’d mutter, and she’d grin like she knew exactly what that meant.

He spent his time between her and the shareholders. Board meetings in the morning, bottle feedings at noon, investor calls at night while Hana slept on his chest. He didn’t talk to Jihan anymore. Their friendship, fragile as it was, had gone distant. Jihan sent one text after the photo leaked: _She has your eyes._ Rael didn’t reply. There was nothing to say.

---

*Same week, Seoul*

Sora sat in a glass-walled office on the 47th floor of K-Data Analytics, one of the biggest firms in Korea. Her badge read “Lee Sora, Junior Analyst.” No one knew her past. She was just the quiet new hire who was terrifyingly good with numbers.

She looked out at the skyscape, gray and endless, and pulled out the ultrasound photo she’d kept in her wallet. The blurry shape. Hana, before she had a face, before she had Rael’s scowl.

“My baby,” Sora whispered. Her thumb brushed over the image. “I’ll work hard for you.”

She tucked it away and turned back to her screen. Spreadsheets. Forecasts. Predictive models. The kind of work that paid well and asked no questions about who you used to be.

She thought about Hana’s hair, about the way she grabbed Sora’s finger, about the gloves Sora had knit and left in the carrier. She thought about Rael, holding her, whispering to her.

She didn’t know if he’d let her back in. She didn’t know if Hana would remember her.

But she knew this: she wasn’t Eun Rin anymore. And she wasn’t dead.

She was Lee Sora. And she had work to do.

She went back to typing.

---