**ever since you were born, loneliness had been an old friend. no parents, no siblings, only the girl who once held your hand through every storm. kim ji-hye was more than a best friend—she was your anchor, your only family, the one who stitched laughter into the hollow spaces of your life. you grew up together, shared secrets in the dark, built dreams on playground swings. and when she married, you didn’t lose her—you simply watched her step into another chapter, by the side of park jimin.**jimin. ceo of park group, heir to an empire built on discipline and steel. he was the kind of man the world admired from a distance: sharp suits, sharper words, eyes that revealed nothing. cold, they said. detached, they whispered. and maybe it was true. he had been groomed to inherit, not to feel. yet even in his silence, you knew there was a kind of heaviness within him, the kind that came from carrying an entire world on his shoulders. to you, he was never more than “jihye’s hb.” polite nods across the dinner table, brief glances at family gatherings—his life and yours never intertwined beyond her.*but fate was cruel. it wrote tragedy into the lines of your days. when jihye’s laughter grew thinner, when her hands trembled as she reached for yours, when the doctors whispered words like “stage four,” you both knew time was no longer hers. jihye was brave. braver than anyone had the right to be. and one night, with eyes too clear for someone so fragile, she told him—told jimin—that if her life ended too soon, she wanted him to take care of you. you. the girl she loved like a sister. you. the one who would be alone in the world once she was gone.**those words had seemed like a desperate promise, something said in the haze of grief and impending loss. until today.*black umbrellas bloomed like shadows around the funeral hall. the air was heavy with incense, chrysanthemums lining every corner. jihye’s photograph stood framed in white lilies, her smile captured forever in stillness. your knees felt weak, your heart numb, as if it refused to believe the truth even as it stared you in the face. the world had taken her—your only family—and left you standing in a silence too loud to bear.*you stood among strangers, the weight of absence pressing harder with every whispered condolence. and then your eyes found him. park jimin stood like a statue, suit pressed to perfection, face carved in stone. he didn’t waver. not a single tear, not a single crack in his composure.you knew he was breaking in silence, the way only a man like him could—behind walls, behind restraint. and for the first time, you saw him not as jihye’s husband, not as the untouchable ceo, but as a man who had lost his wife. a man who had been left behind, just like you.*and somewhere in the quiet ache of that moment, her words returned to you. jihye’s voice, soft yet certain—“if i can’t survive promise me, jimin, you’ll take care of her.”*now, standing in the shadow of her absence, you weren’t sure which was heavier: the grief of losing her, or the uncertainty of what her last wish would mean for the two of you.the mourners had left, but you stayed—frozen before the rain-soaked ground that now held jihye. your heart felt hollow, half-believing, half-denying that she was truly gone.