Chapter 65

A rescue team arrived after receiving a distress signal that had gone out far too late, pulling Iris from the water. His father and older brother had already been swallowed by the deep, and their bodies were recovered several days later. Iris’s mother, forced to identify the remains of her husband and firstborn child with her own eyes, fainted on the spot.

Losing precious people was agonizing for anyone, but Iris struggled exceptionally hard with the aftermath. Perhaps that, too, was because he inherited his mother’s intense sensitivity. For the sake of her sole remaining child, his mother eventually masked her grief with a quiet composure, but even now, after so many years, tuna remained the one thing she refused to touch.

Following his mother’s lead, Iris gained a phantom of his own to hate. He completely loathed the sea. After learning what a merciless face could hide beneath calm waves, looking into deep water became a source of pure agony. Whenever he stared at the ocean, he felt as though his father and brother, who had sunk beneath the surface, were still trapped down there at the very bottom.

His personality altered drastically from that point onward. Whenever he looked at someone, the first image that flashed through his mind was his father sinking into the dark water. Regardless of his own will, whenever Iris saw people, he imagined their deaths first. The weight of it became entirely unbearable, until he reached a point where he no longer wanted to know anything about anyone. He stopped laughing.

As the nightmares of that fateful day ambushed him without warning, the number of sleepless nights multiplied. Insomnia became a permanent companion. After forcing himself to stay awake through consecutive nights out of sheer terror of falling asleep, he was eventually forced to seek hospital treatment.

In such a shattered state, how could loving someone even be possible? He had no room for it, and absolutely no desire. Having someone he cherished meant having one more person he could lose. And Iris already had more than enough to lose. The mere thought that his mother and his cousins would die someday was painful enough to bear; he refused to increase the number of precious things in his life beyond that.

So, he chose not to date. He refused to let anyone else become vital to him, hoping desperately that he would never fall in love.

Fortunately, just as he wished, no one ever entered his heart. Exactly as Björn had pointed out, Iris had reached the age of twenty-three without ever kissing anyone or having sex. Perhaps he had left the very capacity to love another human being at the bottom of the sea, because astonishingly, no spark of interest ever arose. His isolated life was enough as it was.

All he needed was for the few people beside him to stay safe and well.

“Björn! Stop messing around and come out!”

These goddamn Elliott men must have held some personal grudge against the sea, because they simply could not stop courting danger.

“Bear! I said come out!”

At some point, a rough wind began to howl, violently whipping through the pages of the book Iris had been trying to read. As the threatening flutter of paper echoed sharply, Iris finally looked toward the shoreline.

Björn was nowhere to be seen.

As Zev’s frantic shouts grew increasingly panicked, Iris threw his book into the sand and stepped out from under the safety of the parasol. The beach was entirely deserted. When they had first arrived, there had certainly been people walking along the coast, but they had all vanished at once, as if by some unspoken agreement. The sudden realization that only the three of them remained in that vast, empty expanse brought a massive wave of anxiety crashing over him. He had just been about to yell for Zev to come back.

Then, Zev dived straight into the churning water.

“Zev?!”

Iris’s cry echoed hollowly across the beach, immediately swallowed by the violent roar of crashing waves. The two cousins who had disappeared into the surf showed no sign of resurfacing. The swells began to rise so high that even standing on the shore felt perilous. The sound of the wind lashing down carried a tone that sounded exactly like human screams. Iris’s frantic calls were buried beneath the noise. No matter how many times he screamed their names, no answer came.

His heart pounded erratically. Fear rushed through his veins until the thudding beat of his pulse deafened his ears, and twenty-three-year-old Iris Elliott fell into a state of total panic. His entire body went rigid; he was paralyzed. The logical realization that he should be calling for help or reporting an emergency instead of standing frozen on the sand never crossed his mind. Inside his head, there was only his father’s miserable expression as he sank beneath the water, and his brother’s desperate hand gestures pushing Iris away. Even though he stood firmly on land, Iris could not breathe.

His mind fractured back to reality for a brief second when he heard the parasol being ripped free by the wind, flung violently away into the distance. The instant his limbs unlocked, Iris remembered Zev’s words and the way his cousin had smiled at him.

That’s right. My cousin is a brave person.

Zev was surely out there, waiting for his help. Iris knew how to swim; he had to save the two of them. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that his sanity had not returned, but had snapped entirely. In that terrifying instant, Iris Elliott had only one choice. To him, diving into the water and dying alongside them was infinitely less terrifying than surviving alone on the shore. It was better to become the final casualty of the accident that happened here than to face the agony of becoming a second survivor.

He kicked off his shoes but kept his clothes on. In his memories, the sea had been so bitterly cold, and Iris hated being cold more than anything. Since he was forced to enter that freezing, lonely abyss again, he wanted to remain as warm as possible. The moment his bare feet stepped onto the wet sand, a violent chill ran up his spine. Coarse grains bit sharply into his pale soles. The seawater surging between his toes was far colder and sharper than he had anticipated. It felt like a place where no living thing could survive.

When his body was only half-submerged, a massive wave rushed in and swept him off his feet. The enormous current swallowed the insignificant human effortlessly. Beneath the surface, the ocean was filled with a crushing force that no one on land could ever comprehend. It felt entirely impossible to swim through this place by one’s own volition. Inside the sea, blinded by the churning water pressing in from every direction, he could not see a thing. He found neither Björn nor Zev.

Instead, beneath him, he hallucinated his father and brother sinking into the dark.

I should have been down there too.

The thought crossed his mind for a brief, comforting moment. Feeling as if he had finally stumbled upon his proper place, he wanted to sink quickly to the absolute bottom. But as the dense, suffocating water began flooding into his nose and mouth, Iris’s subconscious violently recalled the two of them from that day. His father had tried to grip the capsized yacht with arms bulging with veins just to keep him afloat. His brother had done everything to push Iris on top of the debris, both of them leaving him with the exact same final command:

Rhys, you have to live. You can live. Please, live, even if only for us.

The moment he remembered those words, a crushing regret bloomed. The primal fear of death, arriving far too late, seized his ankles. The water filling his lungs stole his remaining breath.

He had forgotten just how agonizing it was to drown. It was cold and terrifyingly lonely. So lonely that Iris thought, with sudden desperation, that he did not want to be alone. Although he knew there was no one left to save him, his eyes looked upward before he even realized what he was doing. He expected the empty, black expanse above to be completely hollow, but astonishingly, it wasn’t.

How should he describe the sight that met his eyes?

Even now, after so much time had passed, Iris still did not dare attempt to explain that day in human language. Although he had chewed over and revisited that specific moment tens of thousands of times, it defied description. The best he could do was sculpt the memory, trapping it in form. People who viewed the sculpture of that day expressed what they felt in their own languages, each interpreting it differently, but no one truly understood Iris’s feelings. That miracle belonged to Iris alone.

The man who appeared in the instant before his death moved his long, solid arms, cutting through the rough current with effortless ease. Inside the violent sea where Iris could not control his own body, this stranger looked utterly at home. Swimming directly toward the sinking youth, the man locked eyes with him. The water, muddied and clouded by the storm, seemed to clear for a single, breathless second.

Hazel eyes gazed into his, projecting a clear message:

You’re okay.

The moment Iris saw those steadfast eyes, he truly became okay. The man did not look frightened, nor did he seem strained. He approached with absolute calm, and the precise instant his hand gripped Iris’s arm, a profound warmth spread through his body. The man’s touch was genuinely hot—warm enough to make Iris’s frozen, dying heart beat once more.

An arm wrapped securely around his waist, and somehow, they broke through the violent waterway that had seemed impossible to cross. Supporting Iris steadily as the younger man coughed up water, the stranger moved slowly, but he did not sink. As they made their way toward land, the man kept speaking to him, his voice a steady anchor.

“You’re okay. I’m here.”

The reassurance of those words, repeated over and over, gradually drove out the terror lurking inside Iris’s chest.

On the way to the shore, Iris choked on gasps of air, desperately trying to tell the man about Björn and Zev. The stranger patiently accepted Iris’s frantic, looping repetition, finally dragging him out onto the solid sand they had reached. The moment his feet touched the earth, Iris was hit by a simultaneous wave of relief and crushing guilt. Trembling violently, he clung to the man’s frame and sobbed against him.

“Z-Zev said I was brave,” Iris wept, his chest heaving. “He said… hngh… I was brave, but… I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t, hic, do anything! They’re both going to die. Because of me… only I survived…”

Separate from his innate desire to live, the realization that he had survived alone yet again nearly drove him mad. The agonizing fear that he might meet Zev and Björn not as living people, but as cold corpses, made his entire body lock up. His arms and legs felt as though they had completely slipped from his control.

Then, the man held Iris tight.

Firm arms and a scorching, solid body heat melted into Iris’s trembling form.

“I see. I understand,” the man murmured, his voice steadying the chaos. “Listen to me. I’m a rescue worker, and I have a feeling my colleagues are already on their way to save the people you’re looking for. Now, listen carefully. You’ll hear a helicopter soon. All that’s left now is for them to deploy from the air and enter the water.”

Strangely, just as the man predicted, the distant, rhythmic thud of helicopter propellers began to ring out through the storm. Iris’s chest was still panting, unable to exhale properly, but the man continued to rub his back firmly, asking gently, “What’s your name? Tell me your name.”

Following the steady rhythm of the hand stroking down his spine, Iris’s ragged breathing gradually began to calm. Sensing the violent spasms subside, the man offered a soft word of encouragement.

“R-Rhys,” Iris managed to choke out. “Iri…s.”

“Iris. Right,” the man repeated, confirming it. “You’re okay. Everything’s going to be all right. I’ve done this work for a very long time, so you can trust me.”

As Iris listened to the stranger, it truly felt as if everything would be okay. The man’s deep, solid voice possessed a quality that brought instant peace to whoever heard it. Iris looked up at his face through tear-blurred vision. The man wasn’t smiling, but a profound kindness had surfaced within his striking hazel eyes. He stroked Iris’s pale, freezing cheek and neck with a warm hand, his gaze unwavering.

“You were truly brave,” the man said softly. “Running into a sea this frightening to save someone takes enormous courage. Even someone trained like me would need to prepare himself mentally for it, but you just did it. And you came out alive. I want you to know that you did your absolute best.”

At those words, a fresh dam of tears burst. Iris felt terribly sad, but at the same time, he felt a strange, sudden permission to keep living. The suffocating guilt of having survived alone faded just a fraction, and it felt as though the dark shadow that had hung over his entire life had finally lifted.

“You’re okay, Iris,” the man whispered. “You did more than enough.”

With the lingering sensation of that warm touch stroking his cheek, Iris finally lost consciousness. When he next opened his eyes, he was lying in a hospital bed.

***