"You're not a safety pin," she told him, her voice like velvet and gravel. "You’re a bomb waiting to go off."
Moon Kang-tae lived his life in the shadows of a ghost. As a caregiver in psychiatric wards, he moved from town to town every time the "butterflies" returned in his older brother Sang-tae’s nightmares. Sang-tae, who was on the autism spectrum, had witnessed their mother’s murder years ago, and the trauma had tethered the two brothers to a cycle of running and hiding. Kang-tae was the anchor—sturdy, patient, and utterly hollow inside. He had learned to suppress every desire, smile through every insult, and exist only as a shield for his brother. Then came Ko Moon-young. "You're not a safety pin," she told him,
The healing was messy. It involved screaming matches, hospital brawls, and the slow, agonizing process of unlearning the lie that they were "broken." They discovered that Moon-young’s mother, long thought dead, was the one who had murdered the brothers' mother—a revelation that threatened to shatter their fragile new family. Sang-tae, who was on the autism spectrum, had
