The Glass Veranda

CHAPTER 12: PROXIMITY ACROSS THE STUDIO

Darkness is the safest refuge for those who are planning something dangerous.

For Nisa, however, the darkness inside her newly rented studio in Mapo gu had become something else entirely. It was no longer shelter. It was an altar.

The room was small and smelled faintly of damp wood and old dust, the kind that clung to the back of the throat if one stayed too long. The floorboards creaked under the slightest shift of weight. Paint peeled in thin curls near the window frame. It was imperfect, almost forgotten.

But its position was flawless.

From the wide third floor window, Nisa had an unobstructed view of Min hee’s studio across the narrow street. The distance between them was laughably small. A strip of asphalt. A few tangled electrical wires sagging overhead. Nothing more.

And yet to Nisa, that space felt like a sheet of fragile glass separating two realities. On one side, the watcher. On the other, the unwitting subject.

She never turned on the lights.

She preferred to dissolve into shadow, seated in an old wooden chair near the window, a glass of whiskey warming slowly in her hand. The ice had long since melted, but she did not drink it. She simply held it, as if the weight anchored her.

Across the street, Min hee’s studio glowed like a luminous box suspended in the gray body of Seoul’s night.

Through Min hee’s large window, Nisa could see everything.

She saw her paint for hours without pause, moving in front of towering canvases as if possessed. Her body swayed with urgency. Her strokes were violent one moment, delicate the next. She did not check her phone. She did not look at the time. She existed only in relation to the canvas.

Gradually, Min hee’s rhythm began imprinting itself into Nisa’s memory like surveillance footage replayed obsessively.

At two in the morning, without fail, frustration would set in. Min hee would hurl her brush to the floor, rake her fingers through her short hair until it stood in wild disarray, then pace the cramped studio with a cigarette trembling between her fingers. She would inhale sharply, exhale toward the ceiling, as if attempting to expel something lodged inside her lungs.

And then there were the moments of transformation.

When a painting was finally complete, Min hee would pause, staring at it in disbelief. Slowly, almost ceremonially, she would cross the room and switch on an old record player in the corner. Music would begin to spin softly. She would tilt back the last of a cold beer and then she would dance.

It was not the refined elegance taught in London ballet academies. It was raw. Unfiltered. Her body twisted and spun between splashes of paint, feet sliding dangerously close to chaos. She laughed at her own creation as if she had just birthed an entire universe from her fingertips.

Nisa watched all of it without blinking.

Something inside her chest shifted.

The hatred she once directed toward Thomsen began to dissolve, thinning into irrelevance. He became a blurred background figure in her mind. A pawn who no longer fascinated her.

Min hee, however, consumed her thoughts.

The obsession crept in quietly at first, like a draft slipping under a closed door. Then it settled deeper.

It was no longer about the woman who had stolen her husband. It was about what Min hee possessed that Nisa never had. The courage to fracture openly. The honesty to remain messy. The kind of passion that could set a room on fire without asking permission from anyone.

“You are beautiful when you fall apart, Min hee,” Nisa murmured once, her breath fogging faintly against the cold glass.

Her fingers traced the windowpane unconsciously, hovering over the outline of Min hee’s moving silhouette.

The obsession began altering her habits.

She purchased the same brand of cigarettes Min hee smoked, coughing through the first few attempts but forcing herself to persist, as if inhaling the same smoke would grant her entry into Min hee’s interior world. She ordered food from the same small restaurant below, chewing slowly, trying to decode the flavors Min hee seemed to crave.

She was not studying Min hee anymore.

She was attempting to consume her.

Layer by layer.

Her investigation shifted from calculated detective work to psychological excavation. Nisa began to understand that Min hee did not paint for money. She painted to exorcise something ancient and feral. Each aggressive stroke of red felt like a muted scream embedded in canvas.

Sometimes Nisa imagined she could hear those screams through the glass.

A connection formed in the silence of those nights. Not romantic. Not tender. Something stranger. A bond between observer and observed that transcended betrayal.

The line between reality and delusion thinned.

Nisa started to believe she knew Min hee better than Thomsen ever could.

Thomsen saw her body. Her marketable talent.

Nisa saw the fractures in her spirit. The fear that flickered in her eyes when she stopped painting and had to confront the stillness of her studio. That brief, naked hesitation before she reached for another cigarette.

One night, rain fell heavily over Seoul. Mapo gu transformed into a network of reflective rivers, neon lights shattering across puddles like broken jewels.

Min hee looked exhausted.

She slid down the wall and sat on the studio floor, leaning against a still wet canvas. Her face disappeared between her knees. Her shoulders shook violently.

She was crying.

The sight hit Nisa with unexpected force.

She rose from her chair and pressed both palms flat against the window. The glass was cold. Her breath came shallow.

An impulse surged through her. She wanted to cross the street, to enter that glowing room and wrap her arms around Min hee. Not to comfort her. Not to offer kindness.

She wanted to feel the tremor of that sorrow directly against her own skin.

She wanted to be the only witness to Min hee’s collapse.

The desire made her stomach churn.

Then, abruptly, the lights in Min hee’s studio went out.

Nisa flinched.

Min hee never turned off the lights before dawn.

Darkness swallowed the opposite building. Nisa leaned closer to the window, straining her vision.

A shadow moved inside.

Not Min hee’s lithe figure.

Taller. Broader.

The silhouette approached the window. Nisa’s heart slammed against her ribs so violently she pressed a hand to her chest as if to quiet it.

The shadow cracked the window open slightly. A slice of streetlight cut across his face.

Not Thomsen.

The man in the gray coat.

The one who had called himself a collector of truth.

He stood there, staring directly toward Nisa’s darkened studio as though he knew precisely where she sat hidden.

Slowly, deliberately, he lifted his hand.

In it glinted a small object.

A key.

Attached to a blue butterfly keychain.

The same key that should have been in Thomsen’s possession.

The man turned toward Min hee, who was still seated on the floor. He bent down, whispering something into her ear. Nisa could not hear the words, but she saw the reaction. Min hee’s hands trembled as she accepted the key.

She stared at it as though it represented both salvation and ruin.

Nisa’s breath caught.

All her theories about Thomsen and Min hee working together faltered. The chessboard was larger than she had imagined. Another player stood behind the curtain, manipulating them all.

And Min hee.

Was she truly a conspirator?

Or another victim entangled in the dark history of the Sterling family?

The door behind Nisa burst open with a violent jolt.

She did not have time to turn.

A strong hand clamped over her mouth. A sharp chemical scent flooded her senses. Chloroform perhaps. Her lungs resisted instinctively, but the fumes invaded anyway.

The room tilted.

The neon reflections outside the window fractured into scattered points of light.

Her limbs weakened.

Before consciousness slipped entirely away, she heard a whisper close to her ear. Soft. Intimate.

It sounded disturbingly like her father.

“You have flown too close to the sun, Nisa. Now it is time to see what waits behind the shadows.”

Her knees buckled. She collapsed onto the dusty studio floor, the impact distant and muted.

With the last fragments of awareness, she turned her gaze toward the window one final time.

Across the street, Min hee was no longer seated.

She stood upright, illuminated in pale light.

Her eyes were fixed directly on Nisa’s window. No longer the gaze of an artist wrestling with her canvas.

It was the gaze of an executioner awaiting her signal.

Somewhere within the darkness of Nisa’s own studio, a long range camera lens blinked once, quietly capturing her pale, fading face.

Then everything went black.