It has been exactly eight hours since she began staring at the text, ignoring the stiffness creeping up her spine. With her hair tied up messily, thick glasses on, and fatigue reaching her chin, she stares at the monitor as if to pierce it, but in truth, not a single line of the thesis is entering her head.

It's a terrible slump. No, perhaps even the word 'slump' is a luxury for her right now. Her parents' health is deteriorating by the day, and hospital bills and invoices tighten their grip every month. The fact that she is the sole pillar of this precarious household, which would collapse if she fell, feels exceptionally harsh and suffocating today. A sense of helplessness, a desire to run away, weighs down her entire body.

Vrrr- vrrr. A short vibration rings out from the desk.

The moment she checks the message from her mother on the chat app, the string of her sanity, which had been pulled taut, snaps. It wasn't because of late-night sentimentality. The limit she had been suppressing simply burst. Even though she bites her lip hard enough to tear it for fear the sound might leak out, tears drip down onto the lenses of her glasses.

Even as her vision blurs into a mess, she instinctively scans her surroundings. In this vast reading room, there is only her and the man sitting at the far end.

A man she encounters without fail every night when it hits 2 AM. A man who wears a perfectly tailored suit without a single crease and exudes a heavy, mature atmosphere that suggests a significant age gap. Normally, she might have nursed a secret crush, thinking he was exactly her type, but things are different now. She doesn't want to look like a woman with a pathetic sob story to a nameless stranger.

Fleeing to the restroom, she washes her face with cold water and goes up to the rooftop to face the night breeze, forcing her emotions back into place. By the time the redness around her eyes finally subsides and she returns to her seat, she can't help but freeze in her tracks.

There, sitting alone on her desk next to her laptop, is a single bottle of banana-flavored milk. And a yellow sticky note with a few words scribbled in a blunt handwriting.

She hurriedly lifts her head to look at the spot where the man had been, but he has already vanished without a trace while she was away.

And today.

The second hand of the clock points to 2 AM again. She swallows hard and turns her gaze.

He is in that spot today as well. From the slightly loosened tie and the faintly wrinkled sleeves of his dress shirt to the way his hand turns the pages with an indifferent expression.

She doesn't intend to avoid him today. She is determined to ask. Why he has been watching her in this silent space every night. Who he really is, the man who shook her dawn—which had been standing on the edge of a cliff—with a single, silent bottle of milk.

She sets down her pen, her tightly closed lips parting slightly as she slowly begins to walk toward the far end where he sits.