The connection from back then was already over. Better to leave it buried and finally let go of any lingering feelings. Cleanly wrapping up her feelings for Jeong Taegyeom before leaving the company, then moving on to a new job. That was the future Yiseo needed to move toward.

“What if I had been like that for seven years?”

“What?”

“Exactly what I said. I had been like that for seven years, and the reason we drifted apart like that was……”

The android lowered his head.

“An accident.”

An accident. What kind of accident? Was he talking about Yiseo rushing home when she heard her dad had collapsed. Or was he talking about Yiseo breaking her phone and impulsively changing her number for the discount.

Or maybe something had happened to Jeong Taegyeom at that time too.

“Come to think of it, I was always curious. Do you happen to know how Senior was doing back then?”

Yiseo asked with a puzzled look, and the android nodded.

He opened his mouth with a subdued expression.

“When you disappeared like that, I kept sending messages and calling but couldn’t reach you, so I went to the end-of-semester gathering as a last resort. I met the classmate who was said to be your closest friend there.”

Jeong Taegyeom was not someone who enjoyed department events. Even at the first opening gathering he had been dragged along by a classmate and sat there like a rare sighting. The idea that he had gone to the end-of-semester gathering on his own was something Yiseo had never known.

“That junior told me you found me intimidating as a much older senior and even felt burdened by me, but couldn’t bring yourself to say it directly, so he was asking me on your behalf to keep my distance. He said the fact that you hadn’t come that day seemed like you were trying to avoid me. He added that you weren’t good at saying no, so on the surface you would have had no choice but to go along with me. I thought it was plausible that a freshman might feel uncomfortable around a returning senior as far ahead as me. Even so, I hadn’t heard it from you directly, so I decided I needed to meet you and talk.”

“……”

“But after that day, you really did disappear. I called every day, but you never picked up, and at some point I got a message saying the number didn’t exist. It was already summer break by then, and I was planning to file for a leave of absence the following semester, so it seemed like there would be no chance of running into you even by accident. I still thought about going to campus to ask for your number directly, or finding it through someone else, but……”

He clenched his fist tightly, as though suppressing a surge of feeling.

“It crossed my mind that maybe I had been so persistent I had worn you out. Because I didn’t know your phone had been broken at the time. Even if you had changed your number, you still had mine, so if you weren’t reaching out to me, there had to be another reason.”

“……”

“On top of that, I wasn’t even your boyfriend at the time. I had been that overbearing with someone in such an undefined relationship. Any reasonable person would have run.”

His expression darkened, and Yiseo shook her head.

“No. Like I said, it wasn’t for that reason. I just…… I’m sorry. I had no idea you were thinking that.”

The android offered a faint, bitter smile and continued.

“In the end I gave up on finding your new number, and from that day on I threw myself into work. I spent years with nothing but robot development. Going through the same days over and over left no room to notice the changing seasons or the passing of time. Making, testing, revising, analyzing, that was all my days were. Then one day there was talk of a new hire recruitment, and you were in it. The division head for that team asked if I knew you, since we had gone to the same school and the same department. You have no idea how glad I was in that moment.”

Yiseo had had absolutely no idea. This was a side of Jeong Taegyeom from those years that she had never even imagined.

“The moment I heard that, the time that had stopped started moving again. That was when I realized. My time had been frozen at that moment, ever since you disappeared.”

She hadn’t known.

Why would Jeong Taegyeom, of all people, have spent all this time thinking only of her. The people around her in their early twenties had changed partners by the week or the month, and men who were even a little appealing always had women around them. So she had naturally assumed the same was true of Jeong Taegyeom. That to him, Yiseo had been just one of many women who had passed through.

“I haven’t changed. I haven’t forgotten you either. So if you don’t dislike who I am, don’t push me away for reasons that make no sense.”

His face as he said it looked angry, but his voice alone was desolate, like a broken robot.

At the same time, Yiseo felt thrown into confusion. His account was shocking enough to overturn every assumption she had made.

“……That can’t be true. There’s no way Senior would have……”

“You know this about me. I can’t lie to you.”

The android that looked exactly like Jeong Taegyeom said that and unclenched the fist he had been holding tight.

He was looking at her with the face of someone telling the truth.

***

She had almost been taken in.

Yiseo spread the finished laundry on the drying rack and stared at the android’s back as it washed dishes in the kitchen.

It really did feel like she and Jeong Taegyeom were newlyweds.

The android, which had seemed to grow emotional during the conversation about the past earlier, had quickly composed itself and apologized to her. Yiseo had pretended nothing was wrong and put it to work all around the apartment under the pretext of doing a thorough clean.

The things about her that had been entered into the android were things Jeong Taegyeom had trained it on himself. She had never instructed the robot to make things up, which meant everything it had said was something Jeong Taegyeom had actually lived through.

Now she understood why her classmate had fled into the military, and why he had never acknowledged her after coming back. Having pulled a stunt like that and then run, how could he have approached her warmly again.

Why had he done that back then?

“……Ha. What a bastard.”

That classmate had used every excuse imaginable to call Yiseo out after dark. On days she worked part-time, he would say he was passing by on his way home and suggest a quick beer. On nice days he used the weather as a reason, and on bad days he called it romantic, pairing all kinds of snacks with drinks.

At the time, Yiseo had received confessions from three different classmates within her first month, across the welcome party, orientation, and opening gathering. Knowing that a tangled romance in university could be socially ruinous, she had no interest in a campus relationship, and she had kept that particular classmate, whose name she could no longer even remember, at arm’s length with playful deflections throughout their conversations.

“Look, even if you were the last woman on earth, I would never see you that way.”

“Nobody said you did.”

She had been unable to make friends because people kept confessing to her the moment they got a little close, and she had been genuinely glad to finally have what felt like a real friend. He had been the one person she could share her campus life with and talk openly to about Jeong Taegyeom, a friend and confidant. Yiseo had gone to an all-girls middle and high school, and as the saying went, birds of a feather, so most of her friends were similarly inexperienced with men. Back then, he had felt like a ray of light. He had given her a lot of genuinely practical advice about her situation with Jeong Taegyeom, in particular. Strangely, the specifics of that advice were hard to recall now.

Could it be that even he had seen her as a woman and sabotaged things out of jealousy? No, that didn’t seem right. He had always said things like “Do you really think someone whose eyes have only ever been on trainees could see you as a woman?” Maybe he had simply felt bitter about losing his close friend to an older returning senior. And having done what he did, he was too ashamed to approach her again.

Yiseo had never been particularly interested in men, and at the time she had half-wondered whether all those confessions from classmates were some kind of coordinated strategy to eliminate the competition. The conclusion she reached later was that campus life was a place for romance, and Yiseo had been the only woman in her year in an engineering department full of men. They had simply spent time together, grown fond of her, and confessed.

“To think he was interfering behind the scenes…… What was his name again?”

She thought about it for a moment but couldn’t come up with it.

She didn’t think of herself this way, but Yiseo had a striking appearance that stood out even without effort. She was a committed homebody, though, and even when drinking she hated sitting with strangers. Anyone who approached her on the street she treated as a cult recruiter and never gave out her number. There had been no natural way for her to meet anyone. At work she was firmly opposed to office romance, so she had naturally stayed single until now. The few introductions that might have had potential she had ruined by thinking of Jeong Taegyeom, and after a few of those she had stopped altogether.