“Why are you smiling? I haven’t even given you your cone.”

I look up from my phone to see Jules handing me a paper-wrapped ice cream treat. “Nothing much.” It’d be like rubbing salt in her open sore.

“Okay, keep your boyfriend secrets to yourself.” She slumps in her plastic chair across from me.

“He says he’s working tomorrow morning.”

“That’s probably accurate. Koreans are workaholics.”

“You were going to tell me about the ex,” I remind her. The ice cream treat is one of those chocolate-dipped cones with a nut topping. I guess some desserts are universal. I mean, who doesn’t love ice cream and chocolate?

“Lee Bowon teaches math at a private boys’ school. Teaching is considered a very honorable profession here. It’s not like back home where no one gives a shit about a teacher. Here they’re like revered. Seonsaengnim is one of the most respectful titles you can call a person, and it literally means ‘teacher.’ So, anyway, he’s considered good husband material and his mom was always sending him blind date candidates. This girl is a med student at SNU—that’s Seoul National University. This other girl is studying law at Yonsei. This one is getting an engineering degree at Korea University. They call it SKY. He graduated from Seoul, of course.” Jules chomps down on her cone and chews the ice cream angrily. “He ignored all of the summons, or so I thought. I mean, we were like you and Choi Yujun. We were together every night. We went to Seokcho and kissed on the beach, held hands by the lake in Ilsan, did other stuff in other places.”

She picks up her beer and takes a deep gulp. “And then one day he announces that he can’t see me anymore because he is getting engaged.”

Geez, he could have stuck a knife in her heart and it would’ve been kinder. “Was it the Korea Uni girl?”

Jules’s brows furrow together. “How’d you know?”

“Math and engineering. Sounded like they went together, unlike this ice cream and beer.”

“You just haven’t had enough,” Jules declares, her mouth full of ice cream again. “What’s your boyfriend do anyway?”

I stop denying that Yujun and I are dating because we sort of are, but he’s not really my boyfriend. He’s a . . . vacation romance. A voyfriend? A vayfriend? Is there a word for this? I toy with the paper wrapping around the base of the cone. “Logistics—although I don’t know what all that means. He has meetings. He wears dress pants to work.” I recall his evening plans. “He takes employees out to dinner.”

“And has a driver and a big-ass black car, so I’d bet my salary he’s in one of the chaebols.”

“Chaebol means what again?”

“Chaebols are those superconglomerates that basically own everything from the ice cream you’re eating to the cooler that it’s kept in to the land that the store sits on.” Jules drinks more of her beer before returning to the ice cream cone. She screws up her face. “You’re right. This is a foul concoction—beer and ice cream. Maybe you can never drink enough to make this taste good.”