_RelleLebby_
She was placed in his path on purpose. The photograph was not an accident. What Eclipse Entertainment called damage control-fifty pages of contract clauses and manufactured milestones-was supposed to be a product. Two careers. One fabricated intimacy. A bargain neither of them agreed to.
What no one planned was that the lie would crack open.
Faith Monroe was a biracial Black-and-Korean solo artist trying to hold her identity together within an industry that wanted a manageable portion of it. Kang Jaehun was a veteran idol leader who had been performing dependability for so long that he had forgotten where the performance ended. They were forced into a fake relationship, then a staged proposal, then a real marriage neither of them had chosen, and somewhere inside all of that, something real began. But the real thing was the most dangerous thing either of them had ever touched.
This was a slow burn across sixteen years. It included a decade of industry machinery, a love that took years to become honest, a postpartum crisis that nearly ended everything, a divorce, and the brutal, slow work of two people becoming worth a second chance. It included an anti-fan who poisoned a drink, a group of five boys who became men and lost each other along the way, a grandmother who died refusing to name her own great-grandchildren, and a rooftop where a man sat for three hours, wondering if the city would notice if he never came down.
It did not fade to black. It did not look away. It told the whole truth.
Mature themes throughout. Explicit content. Mental health. Medical realism. Racism depicted in full. This is a story about the cost of being seen when the world would rather look away, and about the specific miracle of two people who learned to see each other clearly.
©️ _RelleLebby_//R.L.