Just A Few Numbers Away

Chapter 101

The Reflection in the Glass

​The luxury of the hotel suite in Gangnam felt cold, the air conditioning humming with a sterile, mechanical precision that did nothing to soothe the roar in Andrei's head.

​His wife, Camille, had retreated to the far corner of the suite the moment they returned.

She was distraught, her eyes red-rimmed and her hand resting protectively over the swell of her pregnant stomach.

She hadn't said a word since the mall, but the way she looked at their son, Andrew, was different now.

Camille was pregnant with their second child, and they both understood the cruel  biological reality of their "System" match.

As Andrew grew older, Andrei and Camille's features were being pushed aside by the uncanny, dominant resemblance of the woman they had just run into.

Camille wasn't just crying for the awkward encounter; she was mourning the fact that her children's faces would always belong to Aen, her husband's ex-lover.

In a world of perfect biological matches, her own womb was betraying her for a ghost.

​Andrei stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, staring out at the Seoul skyline, but all he could see was the mall.

All he could see was her.

​He'd spent years trying to bury the memory of that small room in the Philippines-the tears he'd ignored and the weight of the choice he'd made when the numbers on his wrist had finally pulsed with a different name.

He had convinced himself it was "The System's" fault, not his.

​But seeing her today... everything he had built for himself felt like a house of cards.

​He glanced over at the bed where Andrew was napping, his heart twisting.

As his son grew older, his resemblance to Aen was a constant, living accusation.

The shape of the boy's eyes, the curve of his mouth when he smiled-they were all hers.

Andrei was raising a child who looked more like the woman he had abandoned than the woman he had eventually married.

​"She looked so different," he whispered to the empty room.

​The Aen he remembered was a girl in a cheap sundress, fragile and yielding.

The woman in the mall was... formidable.

She was draped in lavender and high-end elegance, standing in the heart of the most expensive district in Korea.

​And then there was him.

​Andrei's jaw tightened as he recalled the man's arrival.

The way the crowd had seemed to part for him, the lethal stillness in his posture, and the way he had claimed her.

'My wife.'

​The words had hit Andrei like a physical blow.

He hadn't known she had married.

He hadn't expected her to thrive.

Part of his guilt had always relied on the idea that she was a tragedy he'd left behind, but seeing her as the wife of a man who looked like he could dismantle the world with a glance changed everything.

​"Who is he?" Andrei wondered, his grip tightening on the edge of the windowsill.

"And how did she get here?"