“You speak as if you experienced it yourself, Mr. Seol-won.”

Heo Yeonseo smiled, her expression much softer than before.

“I think I’ve said everything I needed to. I’m not curious about anything else. As long as this broken engagement is wrapped up cleanly, I don’t think there will be any consequences for me. Just… please be careful for now. If rumors of a love triangle start flying and my name gets dragged into it, things will explode at home. Didn’t you say that SW isn’t exactly on your side either? If my parents get involved and start demanding accountability, you won’t be able to handle the fallout.”

It was advice thinly veiled as a warning.

Knowing the kind of family she came from, it wasn’t something to be taken lightly.

Lee Seol-won accepted it calmly, without protest.

“Understood.

“We probably won’t see each other again, but still… I was glad to see you again, Seo-hae Sunbae. I also enjoyed our conversation. Don’t you agree?”

Heo Yeonseo looked at me for agreement.

It felt like her way of making sure this meeting didn’t end on a sour note, so I nodded as well.

“Yes, it was good to see you again, Yeonseo.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Well, I’ll leave now. No need to see me out.”

Heo Yeonseo kept the promise she had made at the beginning – not to take up too much of our time.

She left without looking back, leaving the two of us in the room.

Click.

The sound of the door closing was followed by silence.

Even that silence felt dizzying – like the silence after a violent storm had passed.

“…Mr. Seol-won.”

The man, who had obviously rushed over the moment he was informed of Heo Yeonseo’s visit at the reception desk, remained standing even after the visitor left – showing no sign of moving.

I slowly turned to face him.

“It is said that some people see sound. That what should be heard is seen, and what should be seen is heard.”

I replayed Heo Yeonseo’s secret in my mind.

If I had never known, it might not have mattered, but now that I knew, I couldn’t help but see him differently.

Even now, was this man seeing a world different from mine, hearing sounds that I could never hear?

How much time and effort had it taken him to maintain this calm, to hide the chaos of a world no one else could understand?

I took a step closer.

A crunch. The sound of my footsteps echoed.

A long breath escaped me, circling my ears.

Even though I wasn’t the type to move noisily, when I really concentrated and listened, small, constant noises crept in from all around me.

Once I became aware of them, I was struck by how chaotic and noisy this world actually was.

I had thought we were standing in silence – but we weren’t.

Perfect silence, it seemed, was impossible.

And now I felt that I could finally understand.

Why the space he occupied always felt so empty.

Why that emptiness was necessary.

Wasn’t it true that his family found out that he was adopted after he was hospitalized for an accident?

Meeting Heo Yeonseo had brought many new facts about him to light.

I stared at the man in front of me in silence, where familiarity and strangeness seemed to coexist.

At that time, a friend who had come to visit me had warned me to be careful – she said there were some shady-looking men loitering outside a hospital room.

It turned out that he was the one in the room.

And just like that, the questions I’d been carrying around with me all this time began to make sense.

I didn’t even know his name at that time, but I distinctly remembered the nurse clucking her tongue and muttering in concern:

—”Sigh, if people keep raising their voices like that in front of the patient, how is he supposed to get any rest?”

I slowly opened my mouth.

“Mr. Lee Seol-won…Is your world still full of noise?”

—”That man’s story.”

This world is filled with a hundred and one kinds of resonances.

The very first memory starts with the number 4.

A preschool teacher came to visit me at home. She pointed to a card with the number 4 on it and asked, “Seol-won, look. What’s this?”

“Green.”

“Huh? Seol-won, can you read numbers yet?”

The teacher started pointing at each card in turn and reading them aloud.

“This is one. Then two, three, four…”

The child looked at the cards.

Skinny number 1, pouty number 2, mischievous number 3, shy number 4.

Each number stood in a row like toy soldiers, each with its own color and personality.

The child picked up the number 3 card and placed it next to number 1.

“He shouldn’t be here. He plays too many mean tricks, and the other kids get upset.”

Some time later, the child heard his parents sigh.

“Honey, what if we brought home a retarded child?”

“That’s why I told you to take him abroad for a few years. His face is already too well known, so we can’t even secretly exchange him for another child.”

“As he grows up, he’ll look less and less like us. That’s why we had to show his face to people regularly from the time he was a baby, so that they would get used to it and not become suspicious.”

At that time, the child was too young to understand what those words meant.

But it wasn’t long before he learned what it meant to be a child brought in from the outside.

“You are adopted. So you have to listen to us and behave. Be good and do what you’re told. If it weren’t for us, where would a parentless child like you ever have the chance to live in a house like this? You should consider yourself very lucky.”

His adoptive mother’s voice was always laced with sharp, prickly sea urchin spines.

“The second son in your uncle’s family just got called in to the school violence committee again. Those kids are all hopeless. It’s a relief for us, really. You make sure he doesn’t get into trouble, and you hire tutors for each subject to keep his grades up. Study habits must be established in elementary school, no exceptions. Don’t let him sleep before midnight. I’ve already told the staff to wake him up if he dozes off.”

In contrast, his adoptive father’s voice was like a dull rubber mallet-heavy and echoing with a thud.

Adopted into a chaebol family, the boy was exposed to an extraordinary range of experiences from an early age.

Not only was he pushed through advanced academic courses, but he also received private lessons in second and third foreign languages. In between horseback riding, golf and tennis lessons, he was taken to art museums and various performances.

The constant bombardment of stimuli was overwhelming.

It felt like his senses were being assaulted from all directions.

Sometimes he couldn’t tell the difference between reality and illusion fast enough – he was either overwhelmed by his senses or stumbling over nothing but empty air.

But stumbling alone or bumping into doors and walls due to visual confusion didn’t even count as real trouble.

The real problem came when he expressed the thoughts and impressions in his mind.

For a boy whose sense of reality wasn’t fully developed, it wasn’t easy to know which parts of himself people would find odd – and which they wouldn’t.

In the boy’s reality, 4 was the yellowing green of grass fading into autumn, and 8 was the bright, cheerful red of a Santa Claus hat.

The sound of a violin resembled the soft hue of sunlight streaming through a window at three in the afternoon.

Caravaggio’s paintings echoed with the gray tones of a tuba’s melody, and when solving equations, some numbers floated while others sank, making it difficult to keep the rows aligned.

But whenever he talked about such things, the boy was met with embarrassed looks from the house staff and tutors employed at the mansion.

And even these reactions were relatively mild compared to his adoptive parents, who were extremely upset by what they considered the boy’s “abnormal” behavior.

“What are we going to do with him? He seems fine when he keeps his mouth shut, but the moment he talks, he sounds like a lunatic.”

“Lee Seol-won. Just don’t say anything in front of the chairman. If he tells us to send you to a mental hospital, all the money and effort we’ve spent on you will be wasted.”

It took him a long time to understand that other people’s worlds weren’t as noisy as his own.

Since he could never pinpoint exactly what made his perception different, the boy had to learn everything by closely observing others’ reactions over the course of several years.

Afraid of making a mistake, he kept his mouth shut – and his words gradually dwindled to almost nothing.

In this way, the boy tried desperately to act normal.

His adoptive parents, relieved not to hear what they called his “nonsense,” sighed with satisfaction.

But there were some among the housekeepers who felt sorry for the boy – who, under the constant pressure of his adoptive parents, seemed to be slowly losing not only his voice but also his expression, becoming more and more isolated, like an inanimate object.

“Maybe it’s because they gave you such a cold name… People say your name shapes your destiny, and your young life already feels so cold, little master. But you know, no one lives in winter forever. Just hang on a little longer. A warm spring will come soon.”

Among the servants, Jeonju-daek, who had worked as a housekeeper the longest, often patted the boy’s back with her hands, damp and softened by the water, when she saw him.

Curled up in his room in the cold, lonely mansion, solving the day’s assigned problems, the boy slowly lifted his head and asked her sleepily.

“When will spring come?”

“Do you see the cherry tree in the garden? When pink petals start to flutter down from that tree…that’s when spring has come.”

I hope a gentle spring will come soon.

A spring that isn’t lonely or cold.

As he did his best to live up to his adoptive parents’ expectations, the boy often looked at the cherry tree in the garden.

And deep inside, he always carried a quiet question in his heart.

‘Why do people think I’m strange? My adoptive parents say there’s something wrong with me, but I don’t feel sick at all.’

‘Then what kind of illness is it?’

It wasn’t until he became an adult and began reading scientific papers that he finally discovered the exact name of the condition that had been with him since his earliest memories.

Synaesthesia.

That was it – synaesthesia.