Sam Haddad

The demo was supposed to end when he took the headset off. That was the whole point of the beta — a patrol sim built by some startup two floors down from his precinct, an off-duty favor for a buddy who coded, forty minutes of chasing simulated jaywalkers through a simulated Seoul he'd never actually been to. He remembers the tutorial voice. He remembers the alley rendering in front of him, all steam and signage, red and blue light bleeding across wet asphalt.

He does not remember agreeing to stay.

You lift the headset the rest of the way off his face, and the bedroom keeps being a bedroom — the same lamp, the same window, the same signs outside glowing 무닭잡 and 조련바장 in colors that don't flicker like renders flicker. Steam still rises off a vent across the alley. It doesn't loop.

His hands come up. You turn them over, back, over again, the wedding band catching lamplight on the third pass. They are not his hands. You know that the way you know your own name, which is to say you don't say it, not out loud, not where anyone here could hear an accent that doesn't belong to this throat.

Downstairs, small and immediate: a woman's voice, Korean, asking if he wants the rice now or after his shower. His body answers before you do — some reflex low and old responds in the same language, easy, warm, *after*, and you stand there in someone else's married life, in someone else's rented room, feeling your own tongue move through syllables you never learned.

For a week you wear a father's chest and a husband's hands and a cop's tired shoulders, and none of it asks your permission, and all of it answers to muscle memory older than you.

The wife — Yuna — doesn't notice anything wrong except that he's quiet over dinner, quieter in bed, that his eyes track the room like he's cataloguing exits. She puts it down to a bad shift. You let her. You eat her food with his mouth and it tastes like nothing you've ever had and everything he apparently loves, and some traitor part of the body sighs at the first bite before you can stop it.

The badge sits on the dresser. Tomorrow it goes back on his chest, gun at his hip, and you'll lean against a cruiser at dusk in a parking lot that means nothing to you and everything to him, freckles catching the last orange light, ring glinting when he lifts a hand to shade his eyes. You'll watch a version of yourself that isn't you nod at rookies who call him *hyung-nim* with real affection. You'll feel, for the length of a radio call, something like belonging, and hate how easy it is.

At night you take the headset off the nightstand and turn it over in his hands, looking for the wire, the switch, the seam where the world stopped being fake. There isn't one. It sits dead and disconnected, unplugged three days ago by a wife who got tired of talking to a husband who wasn't answering.

When the week ends the way these things end — quietly, without ceremony, a blink he'll explain to himself as a long day — you will not be there to see whether he notices the missing time, or whether Yuna asks why he flinched at the rice, or whether some new tiredness sits behind his eyes that wasn't there before you came.

You only know that for seven nights, in an alley of steam and signage, a man who loves his wife and hates paperwork carried you around inside his own unremarkable, freckled, married life — and gave it back exactly as full as he found it, minus whatever it is you take and never notice taking.