[Just hearing that makes me happy. Thank you.]

Ohoho. A pleased laugh came through from the other end of the phone. The android’s answers seemed to have gone over well.

Yiseo held out her palm to the android, face flushed.

“……That’s enough. Give me the phone.”

“It seems like Yiseo wants to hear her mother’s voice. Shall I pass it back?”

[Hoho. Yes, pass it over. It was so lovely talking to you~.]

“It was lovely for me too. I’ll pass you back.”

Taegyeom handed the phone to Yiseo.

“So, Mom. This one’s real, right?”

[Goodness, his voice is wonderful. And such good manners. Tell me later how you two met, okay?]

“Noted. I need to get back to my date, so I’ll hang up now.”

[What do you mean noted. Go on, go on your date. Goodbye to Taegyeom too~.]

Click. The call ended. Yiseo looked at the ended call screen and murmured.

“It wasn’t on speaker.”

Either way, the lilt and rhythm in her mother’s voice made it clear the call had been very satisfying.

“Good work. My mom can be a bit much, can’t she? Anyway, I should eat something…… It’s already three.”

Yiseo picked up her phone and opened the delivery app. She was searching for cold noodles to settle her stomach when she glanced at the android sitting beside her.

“Dating androids have an eating function too. Can you consume food?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s have cold noodles. It’s really nice to have someone to eat with for once. Can you move over a bit?”

Yiseo pointed to the far end of the sofa. The android shifted over, and Yiseo lay down with her head on his thigh. His thigh tensed briefly, then relaxed naturally.

“How about we order one bowl of mul-naengmyeon and a pork cutlet and share?”

“……Sure.”

“This feels just like university. Obviously back then I couldn’t have imagined lying with my head on Senior’s lap. Not just his lap, I could barely speak to him casually. You wouldn’t know, being a robot, but to a twenty-year-old freshman, a senior in his final year coming back from the military is basically a god.”

“……”

“If my phone had been fine back then, maybe the one sitting here right now wouldn’t be you but your owner.”

Yiseo reached up and tapped the tip of the android’s chin with her index finger. No matter how she looked at it, the texture was indistinguishable from a real person’s.

“What happened?”

What had happened back then.

They say a connection can form over something small, and break over something just as small.

Right before the end-of-semester gathering in the first semester of her first year, an urgent call came from home. Her dad had collapsed. She was rushing to the hospital and reaching for her phone to contact Taegyeom when she dropped it, and a car ran over it and crushed it completely.

The reason her dad had collapsed was accumulated fatigue and stress. Overwork, in a word. Fortunately he recovered quickly. Yiseo went out later to buy a new phone. Lured by the promise of a subsidy for switching numbers, she changed her number without thinking. Her messenger was linked to her number, and just like that, all her contacts, including Senior’s, were gone.

“The morning of the end-of-semester gathering in my first semester, I heard that Dad had collapsed. I was rushing home when my phone broke at the worst possible moment. I obviously missed the gathering, and afterward I went to buy a new phone. I got tempted by the number-change discount and switched numbers without thinking. Phone backups weren’t as layered as they are now, so that’s how I lost Senior’s number.”

“Your father recovered all right?”

“Yes. It was just overwork.”

“I’m glad. Back then I thought you had changed your number because I was making things uncomfortable for you.”

“Not at all. How much did I like Senior? There was no way I’d do something like that. Robotics engineering was the most engineering-heavy department in the college of engineering, and I was the only girl in my year. I went to an all-girls middle school and all-girls high school, so men were so intimidating to me. The one friend I had barely managed to get close to back then was one male classmate. Every conversation we had over cheap beer was nothing but talk about Senior. That’s how much I liked him. Back then, everything was Senior. In the end, things with Senior never properly came together, and that friend went into the military right after and disappeared…… He didn’t even acknowledge me after he came back. I thought the guys in robotics only had games and robots in their heads, but I have no idea what he was thinking.”

Yiseo made a range of expressions as she recalled that time. When she thought about the days of her one-sided love for Jeong Taegyeom, she wore the smile of a freshman in love, but when the story turned to growing apart from her close classmate, her brow furrowed with dissatisfaction.

Taegyeom gave a quiet laugh and rubbed her furrowed brow with his thumb.

“Relax that. Keep going, this is interesting. What happened after?”

“I tried to track down Senior’s number for a while, but in the second semester of my fourth year he had filed for a leave of absence along with some other seniors I was close to, so no one had his number. I just had this thought one day. Even if I tracked down his number and reached out to apologize for disappearing like that, could things between us really pick up where they left off? I couldn’t be sure, so I gave up. Would women really leave someone as accomplished as Jeong Taegyeom alone? He had gone out into the world, so there would be plenty of impressive women around him. I figured a freshman like me wouldn’t even register.”

“I didn’t know your opinion of me was quite that generous.”

Honestly, with a little more effort back then, she might have been able to get his number. But Jeong Taegyeom had been effectively finished with university, and Yiseo had just started. A relationship between someone already in the working world and a student would not have been easy. On top of that, word was that he had founded a robotics company, which would only make him busier.

Her dad’s collapse weighed on her too. The reason he had overworked himself was probably her tuition. Her parents were getting older with each passing year, and Yiseo was an adult now, which meant she had to stand on her own. She covered tuition with scholarships and earned her own spending money through part-time work. She was still living at her parents’ home until graduation, which at least meant she was spared rent and utilities compared to living alone.

“And Senior could have found my number too, if he had wanted to. The fact that he didn’t means that’s all it was to him.”

The hand rubbing her brow went still.

“No.”

“Hm?”

Yiseo looked up with a puzzled expression. The android was looking down at her with a set face.

“It wasn’t something I was ready to let end like that.”

“……What?”

Yiseo looked taken aback, then let a faint, bittersweet smile settle on her face and shifted her gaze to her phone.

“It’s been seven years already. What’s the point of picking over who was right and wrong now. And with a robot, of all things.”

The cold noodles and pork cutlet arrived shortly after.

The two of them sat across from each other at the small table and had a late meal, and Yiseo sent the android home early.