Chapter Text
The tomatoes aren’t growing.
Every morning, Vincenzo waters them with deliberate care, thumb pressed against the lip of the metal can to slow the pour. The pot is small, terracotta, and stubborn. Two frail stalks stretch upwards - all stem, no fruit. Sun-bleached. Indifferent.
“Maybe they’re just… refusing,” Cha-young says behind him. “Sensitive little things.”
“Refusing?”
“To grow. To participate in capitalism. To contribute to society. You know. Tomato protest.”
He stares at the plant. “So they’re anarchists.”
“Exactly.”
She hands him his mug - too much milk, too much sugar - and leans on the railing, blinking into the morning sun. Her profile cuts sharp against the glow, smile casual and studied.
A pigeon lands nearby - fat, gray, entitled - and begins pecking at invisible crumbs.
“Your friends are back,” he says, nudging the watering can toward the bird.
“Don’t be rude. They have names. That one’s Myung-hee. The greedy one stealing from her is Jun-woo.”
Vincenzo frowns. “Why do those names sound familiar?”
She smiles, tight-lipped. “Old neighbors.”
He watches the birds strut like landlords across the rooftop. “We didn’t get along, did we?”
She tucks a delicate strand of hair behind her ear. “Not exactly.”
A beat passes. He tilts his head.
“Do they come every day?”
She nods. “Like clockwork. Creatures of habit.”
He considers that. “Even if they don’t know why.”
She glances at him. “Most creatures don’t.”
Some mornings, he catches her watching him. Like she’s waiting to see if anything returns. If she loves him now, he can’t tell. If she had once, it no longer seemed like the question. On the worst days, he tortures himself with the possibility that he had loved her in some way that couldn’t be undone. He never asks.
Somewhere on the street below, a car backfires. His hand twitches toward his pocket, fingers closing around nothing.
Cha-young glances over. Says nothing. This isn’t about memory at all. It’s about living with what survived it.
Later, she burns the eggs.
The smell doesn’t feel wrong. Maybe he had burned things too. Perhaps often.
“Do you think I cooked?” he asks.
She glances over her shoulder, pan still in hand. “You mean before?”
He nods.
She tilts her head, pretending to think. “You were more of a... set-things-on-fire kind of guy.”
He waits for the punchline. It doesn’t come.
She plates the eggs. Charred on one side, underdone on the other. He takes a bite.
“Well?” she asked.
He chews. Swallows. “Tastes like arson.”
She laughs, a real one this time. Not the bright, rehearsed laugh she gave strangers or judges, but the other one. The soft one. The one that slips out when she forgets herself.
Only if the tomatoes could her her laugh.
They don’t talk much over breakfast. The TV plays in the background - some daytime legal drama with a makjang case she’s probably defended clients against in real life.
11:00, she leaves for the firm.
11:05, he does the dishes.
11:15, he can’t remember if she’d kissed him goodbye. Or if forgetting means it didn’t happen.
By noon, the pigeons have returned to the rooftop. Wings, sound, habit.
He brings out the lighter he hasn’t dared touch all morning and tests its weight across his palm. Cold and familiar. The rhythm returns easily on muscles that no longer serve a need, fitting around a man who no longer exists.
Cha-young says he was lucky to survive. That forgetting is a mercy.
But mercy, he thinks, is what you get offered when they don’t trust you to survive the truth.