The Willow Photo
The guy craned his neck toward the window, determined to catch a glimpse of whatever had held his attention. Hwi-young, eyebrows raised, gave his shoulder a light shove to push him off.
“It's hot. Back off.”
“I'm asking what you were looking at.”
Watching him bob his head around like a turtle, gawking shamelessly, was more irritating than it had any right to be. Hwi-young slid a cold, level glance at his classmate and said quietly, “Nothing. A tree.”
“A tree? That's it? Kid, you've got the soul of a poet.”
His interest evaporated as quickly as it had come, and the guy gave Hwi-young's shoulder a pat before wandering off into the studio. With the bothersome distraction gone, quiet settled back over the room—and with it, the words he'd just heard began to swirl muddily through Hwi-young's head.
I was smiling?
There was something strange about having a third party point out a version of himself he'd never once been aware of. Hwi-young turned his gaze back to the window.
On the right, outside the glass, stood one of Hankook University's famous landmarks—a massive weeping willow. Its long branches spilled down toward the grass beside the pond, and beneath it was prime real estate, packed with students whenever a free period or lunch hour rolled around.
Hwi-young stared out at it for a long moment, then drew his phone from his pocket. He opened the camera and framed the view through the lens.
Then, for the first time in ages, he opened the Instagram app.
The truth was, he'd never much enjoyed taking photos. Documenting his daily life in meticulous detail and putting it on display for others was even further from his nature. To him, Instagram was nothing more than a messenger he'd signed up for to use DMs.
It had been the same when he had a girlfriend. Lovestagram and all that—none of it had ever concerned him. Why anyone would insist on uploading photos that only they needed to see, throwing them onto the internet for the whole world to judge, was behavior he'd never been able to comprehend in the first place.
Bae Ye-ri, whom he'd broken up with not long ago, had been the type especially obsessed with Instagram. Every single moment had to be captured on camera to satisfy her, and her nagging until she got a shot she liked had honestly worn him down. In a way, these days of peace, free of that noisy relationship, were a relief.
His account had been nothing but a signboard left to gather dust—yet ironically, his follower count had long since blown past several thousand. He himself had posted almost nothing; instead, photos tagged @kwon_hy littered the feeds of everyone he knew. It was how people liked to subtly show off their connection to him.
Hwi-young looked down at the willow on his screen once more, then pressed the upload button at the bottom center.
The loading bar filled, and the photo of the willow he'd just taken dropped unceremoniously into the sparse lineup of his posts.
It was, truly, something he never did.
Sitting on the grass with her knees hugged to her chest, Som-i was soaking the autumn breeze in through every pore. Each time the cool wind brushed past her cheeks, her hair fluttered in the most pleasant way.
She watched the willow's long branches sway in the wind and wrinkled her nose with a soft sniffle.
“God, he's seriously gorgeous, right?”
“Right? I told you he'd blow up. He's all over Instagram these days.”
The chatter of Seo-kyeong and the others, cooing over photos of a handsome rising actor on a phone screen, drifted past her ears like white noise. Even as Som-i sat there daydreaming, the conversation rolled on without pause.
“That movie opens Wednesday—let's all go see it.”
“Wednesday? Professor Yoo Hye-sook's class doesn't let out until after seven.”
“Then we do a late showing. Dinner right after Yoo Hye-sook's class, then straight to the midnight screening.”
Seo-kyeong, in the middle of her excited planning, suddenly froze, and the corners of her mouth drooped.
“Wait… Som-i has a curfew!”
“Oh, right. If we're working around her curfew, a late showing's kind of a stretch.”
At her friends' words, Som-i's lips twitched. The truth was, she'd already moved out of the dorm. A curfew was the least of it—she was living under one roof with Kwon Hwi-young now.
She could hide her marriage to Hwi-young, but there was no hiding her departure from the dorms. And watching her friends bend their schedules around that one constraint made her heart sink. Finally, after a moment's hesitation, Som-i spoke up carefully.
“Um… I actually moved out of the dorm a few days ago.”
Every eye around her went wide.
“Huh? Why? So suddenly?”
“Whoa, so you're living on your own now?”
“Oh? Uh… yeah.”
She nodded along in a daze, then instantly regretted it. The word living on her own had barely left her mouth before the girls' eyes started to sparkle.
“Hey! Why are you only telling us about major news like this?”
“Huh?”
“Housewarming party! We have to do a housewarming!”
Sure enough, at Ye-ji's thunderous declaration, Som-i's pupils wavered.
A housewarming. Where? At Kwon Hwi-young's place? With my friends inside it?
The absurd image flashed through her mind—her friends huddled together in Hwi-young's living room, and Kwon Hwi-young seated right in their midst. She pinched her thigh, barely suppressing the deranged laugh that threatened to burst out of her.
What excuse could she even give? Her hometown was far to the south, and everyone knew it—there was no way a lie about commuting from home would fly.
“It's just… my cousin got a job near our school recently. So I decided to live with her. To save on rent, too.”
Desperate to escape the situation, she fumbled out an excuse.
“Ohhh… with your cousin?”
Only then did the housewarming talk die down. Thankfully, her friends showed not a trace of disappointment—instead they celebrated the loss of Som-i's curfew as if it were their own good fortune.
But watching them gleefully map out their midnight movie plans made her chest grow heavy all over again. They liked her so purely, and here she was, keeping an unspeakable secret and deceiving them. The thought sat uncomfortably in her stomach.
Later. When the day really comes that I can tell them everything, I'll apologize with everything I have.
She was gazing at her friends through a face full of guilt when—
“Hey, Kwon Hwi-young just posted.”
At Ga-yeong's out-of-nowhere announcement, Som-i lifted her chin from where it had been resting on her knees.
“Seriously? What's gotten into him? He never posts.”
“Out of nowhere?”
Everyone crowded toward the phone Ga-yeong was holding, and Som-i too was leaning in on curiosity when—
“Kyaa, wait—what is this!”
Seo-kyeong's sudden shriek made Som-i flinch and hunch her shoulders.
“Hey, that's us! Is this—did he just take this?”
While Seo-kyeong sprang to her feet and noisily scanned the surrounding buildings, Som-i leaned in close to Ga-yeong's phone.
“What? What is it?”
The fresh post on Kwon Hwi-young's feed was none other than a photo of the willow. The very weeping willow by the pond where she and her friends were sitting right now. Not a single line of text—just the photo, alone.
But as Som-i studied the photo closely, her eyes went round in an instant.
It wasn't only the willow in the frame. The tree was such a campus landmark that students passing by and people resting nearby had naturally been caught in the shot. And there, in one corner of the photo, were figures she knew all too well. Seo-kyeong, Ga-yeong, Han-sol, and Ye-ji, seated in a circle.
And beside them, one person sitting with her knees drawn up.
Huh…?
“Som! That's you!”
As Som-i's mouth fell open, Han-sol cackled and slapped her forearm again and again.
“Unbelievable. Our Som-i made it. Immortalized on Kwon Hwi-young's Instagram!”
Amid her friends' uproar, Som-i smiled awkwardly and looked down at the screen.
Of course, she wasn't the only one in the photo. Her friends were sitting there with her. But most of them showed only the backs of their heads or were half-hidden behind someone else, impossible to identify.
Som-i in the photo, on the other hand—the one her friends had gleefully zoomed in on for her—had her profile captured in remarkable clarity. Eyes gently closed, head tilted slightly upward. One look told you it was the exact moment she'd been sitting beneath the willow, savoring the autumn breeze.
“Where was it taken from? Judging by the angle, looks like a window in the Practical Training Building over there?”
Seo-kyeong popped up and looked around again. Som-i couldn't bring herself to move as brazenly, but she too stole a glance toward somewhere along the distant windows of the Practical Training Building.
Still—what could Kwon Hwi-young have been thinking, posting a photo like this out of nowhere? Someone who barely touched Instagram, suddenly posting this.
Som-i bit her lip hard and dropped her gaze back to the phone screen.
…No way.
There was no chance Kwon Hwi-young had known she was in the frame when he posted it. She couldn't pinpoint exactly where the photo had been taken from, but judging by the image quality, it looked like a zoomed shot from quite a distance away.
Right. It was just a coincidence.
Even after settling on that conclusion, she couldn't tear her eyes from the screen. Her own figure, standing out with almost unnatural clarity among all those people.
She knew she was reading meaning into nothing. And yet some corner of her chest kept tingling, refusing to let it go. In the end, Som-i forced her eyes away from the screen. Any longer, and she'd start nursing pointless hope.
“Hey, I screenshotted it to the group chat. Museum-grade keepsake!”
Any other day, she'd have joined the giddy circus with them. Instead, Som-i just kept fanning her flushed cheeks with her hand.
That single photo stayed the talk of the campus far longer than expected.
A photo of the campus willow, posted by a man who never touched Instagram, for the first time in forever. Everyone had a theory, and the theories poured out in every direction. And most of them circled back to his love life.
It's his first post since breaking up with Bae Ye-ri, so it must mark a fresh start. And if it's a new beginning… could the person be Ham Ji-na?
The rumors renewed themselves daily. Some said it was a signal he was laying old feelings to rest; others insisted the post had someone new in mind. The armchair detectives chased their own tails in an endless spiral.
Of course, among all those countless speculations, not a single word connected to Som-i ever surfaced. Which was only natural.
The worlds of Kwon Hwi-young and Kwak Som-i simply had no point of overlap—not even one.