Jaehee was also not one to waste time, and she managed to find a boyfriend in her corporate cohort who was three years older than her. I thought she would play around with him for a while and dump him, but I realized she was serious about him when, around the three-month mark, she officially invited me to have dinner with them.

—Since it would be weird if you were a third wheel at the dinner, bring your boyfriend.

—He’s not my boyfriend.

—Fine. The K3 guy.

—No. That’s even weirder. What am I going to introduce him to your boyfriend as?

—Would you quit snapping back at me for a second and just come? It’ll be my treat.

—What’s the treat?

The first part of the evening was at a fancy Korean restaurant in Hannam-dong. Jaehee’s boyfriend was told that we were friends who had met at a board game club. Her boyfriend was different from the previous ones. He did not style himself an artist or regularly slap on a bunch of new tattoos (that he would only be embarrassed about in a year), nor did he have a cunning look in his eye, nor, according to my sixth sense, did he seem to have a big dick. But he had a kind of stability that Jaehee and I didn’t have, a fundamental optimism toward life. When I heard he had graduated from Seoul National University Engineering and was working as a researcher in semiconductors, my thumbs tapped out a text to Jaehee from under the table.

I thought you said you were never dealing with shits from SNU.

Do you think our lives would look like this if our plans always worked out?

She was so right that I kept saying things to her boyfriend like “Damn, hyungnim,” “You are so right,” “You are so amazingly clever”—inane compliments like that. K3, being an engineer, had lots in common with this semiconductor specialist, and they seemed to get along, going on and on about the different cultures of their companies and technical jargon about their research. Bored with their conversation, I regaled them with tales of Jaehee’s life in college, bowdlerized for this mainstream audience, of course. The dinner remains in my mind a memory of perfect propriety and respectability.

3.

Then last summer, Jaehee’s boyfriend began thinking something was funny about Jieun.

—Hey Jaehee, is your roommate Jieun a cat?

—What? What are you talking about, oppa?

—She seems a little strange. Why is she always at home? Why haven’t you ever introduced us? Why have I never heard her voice? And there are no photos of you together. Even a cat meows on occasion. Why haven’t I ever heard her make a sound?

Thank God the relationships Jaehee had in the past were short-lived, because anyone with half a brain would’ve had the same suspicion. He had suggested inviting Jieun to dinner many times, but Jaehee kept saying she was shy or making up some other excuse, so of course, at some point, he would realize it was strange.