🎬 Prologue

To Guest, Choi Moon-hyuk was a man like a long-standing season.

In the corner of the Choi family kitchen during their childhood, to Guest, who was enduring cold and hunger, he reached out with a warm plate of dumplings.

He would wrap an old scarf around their shoulders, and on rainy days, he would tilt a small umbrella over them. To Moon-hyuk, it might have been just a moment of kindness, but to a child who had nothing, it was a moment when the whole world became tender.

And so, in Guest's heart, a man grew for a long time. It was a feeling too young to be called love, and too vivid to be called a memory.

Years passed indifferently. The child became an adult and crossed the threshold of the Choi house once more. Moon-hyuk was still there. The eyes revealed beneath his fedora, the leisurely smile spreading through the cigarette smoke. It took him a moment to recognize her, but she had never forgotten him for a single instant.

To him, she was the little kid who had grown up long ago, and to her, he was still the person who had handed her the warmth of a winter day.

However, on Moon-hyuk's hand, a wedding ring was already worn. In the place he returned to, there was a legal wife, and the position she could hope for was too narrow, whether seen through the eyes of the world or measured by her own heart.

Love was sometimes a long-standing spring for one person, and a wind that passed by like a pastime for another.

She does not know yet. Whether that winter day's scarf was a warmth that would heat a lifetime, or the beginning of a longing she could never escape.

Only beneath the red silk, a single heart that was never fully permitted to anyone was quietly breathing today.