A month after I began posting the stories, in early September, a video call came before dawn. It was her. Really her. She was crying, and keeping her voice down.
“Oppa, my goal is to go to that concert with you, no matter what. Just wait for me a little. It’s your birthday then too. I remember.”
It was the very concert I had bought two tickets for. It was a reconciliation. That was how I heard it. The call cut off there. But the crying weighed on me. Something was going seriously wrong, I thought.
On her birthday we all got together. It was the first time I had seen her face in two months. She was strangely elated, and said the same things over and over. On the way home, in front of her building, I asked H which apartment was hers. H gave me the number of the one next door. I found that out later.
I invited her to an event that started at 9:09 on September 9. Four nines. Back then I tried to read something even into that number. I was going to pick her up, but H said she would bring her. She came very late, with two men I didn’t know, and was gone within an hour. In the dark hall she kept glancing at H. And she said it again and again. “People know H’s face, so here, don’t use her name. Call her Sunny.”
Sunny. The ID she used on the messaging app instead of her name. She was telling me to call H by that name. A chill ran down my spine. Of the messages I had traded with “Sunny” for months, how many had been hers?
That day, beside H, she was terrified. She was so unlike herself that even now I sometimes think the person I saw that day was her doppelgänger. That was the last time I saw her.
Two days later, in broad daylight, I got through to her. She said she had to sleep. Over the line I heard a rattle, like pills being shaken from a bottle into a mouth. Several times. She didn’t hang up. I heard that sound as a cry for help. After that I couldn’t reach her.3