Second Overtime | JENSOO & CHAELISA

Chapter XLI

The car ride home smelled like leather, cold air-conditioned oxygen, and the lavender sachet Chaerin kept in the glove compartment, a cloying, artificial sweetness that was supposed to be calming and was instead suffocating.

Jennie sat in the back seat with her bag on her lap and her phone hidden beneath one hand, the screen pressed flat against her thigh. Her mother had sent the driver. That was not unusual. Chaerin often sent the driver when she was too busy to pick Jennie up herself. That was what made it worse, the ordinariness of it, the way normal things could become weapons so easily if you knew how to wield them.

The driver hummed along to an old ballad on the radio, tapping two fingers against the steering wheel whenever traffic stalled. Outside, the city passed in gray and silver pieces: wet sidewalks reflecting the overcast sky, glowing pharmacy signs buzzing with fluorescent life, school uniforms clustered at crosswalks, a delivery man balancing too many plastic bags on one wrist. The world kept moving, ordinary and indifferent, while Jennie sat in the back seat and felt the walls of her life closing in.

She typed with her thumb under the edge of her bag, the motion hidden from the rearview mirror. Home soon.

Nayeon replied before the car cleared the next intersection. Chat as soon as you're inside. In fact, the second you're inside.

Lisa: And if you need extraction I have watched 3 spy movies this week

Rosé: She means we are here. We're all here.

Seulgi: I can fake being a lost child at your gate as distraction. I am very convincing.

Jeongyeon: No.

Moonbyul: Keep answers short. Don't volunteer details. Let her ask the questions.

Tzuyu: I'm sorry. Let us know if you're safe.

Jisoo: Breathe first. Answer second. We love you.

Jennie stared at the last message until the letters blurred together into an unreadable smear of blue light. Breathe first. Answer second. She locked her phone when the car turned onto her street, the familiar black gate sliding open with a mechanical hum that she'd heard a thousand times and had never learned not to dread.

The house waited behind its gate like something patient and enormous. Pale stone. Dark glass. Too clean to look lived in, too perfect to feel like home. The front steps had been washed after the morning's rain; they shone faintly under the gray afternoon light, slick and gleaming. The garden smelled of wet soil and trimmed leaves and the faint, bitter tang of the pesticide the groundskeeper used on the roses.

Inside, the air was cool and dry, the kind of air that made every footstep sound deliberate, that swallowed sound and gave nothing back.

"Miss Jennie." Mrs. Choi, the housekeeper, appeared in the hallway with a stack of folded linens in her arms. "Dinner is at seven. Your mother asked me to tell you she'll be joining."

"Thank you, Mrs. Choi."

Jennie went upstairs. Her room looked exactly as she had left it that morning: bed made too neatly because Mrs. Choi had remade it after she'd gone, curtains half-open to let in the gray light, desk arranged with surgical precision. Nini lay near her pillow, one soft paw folded under his body, his glass eyes catching the faint glow from the window.

Jennie picked him up and pressed her face against his fur. He smelled like laundry detergent and the faint, floral sweetness of the fabric spray Chaerin insisted on, a scent that had been part of Jennie's childhood and had never once brought her comfort. Her phone buzzed against her thigh.