A Love More Than Lovely
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 5
Soo Yi had been dreading Thanksgiving for two weeks before it arrived, not because of Brad — she was long past dreading anything about Brad — but because of what her parents would make of him. Ji-an had opinions about everything, and Jung Woo, for all his warmth, had a surgeon’s habit of sizing people up in silence before he ever said a word.
She needn’t have worried, though it took her most of the drive down from campus to admit that to herself.
Jung Woo answered the door before Brad even finished knocking, and the two of them shook hands on the porch like men closing a business deal, Jung Woo’s grip firm and searching, Brad’s steady and unbothered by the scrutiny. “So you’re the one,” Jung Woo said, not unkindly.
“I’m the one,” Brad agreed, and something in his easy confidence — no flinching, no overexplaining — seemed to settle whatever test Jung Woo had been running.
Ji-an came around the corner from the kitchen wiping her hands on an apron, took one look at Brad, and turned to Soo Yi with an expression that was somewhere between approval and disbelief. “You didn’t tell me he looked like that,” she said in Korean, loud enough that Soo Yi went red.
“Mom.”
“I’m just saying.” Ji-an switched to English without missing a beat, extending a hand to Brad. “Welcome. I hope you’re hungry, because I never learned how to cook for less than fifteen people.”
Dinner that evening ran long, in the good way — the kind of long where nobody’s checking a clock. Sixteen-year-old Soo Ah, who Soo Yi hadn’t been sure would even bother coming out of her room, spent most of the meal alternately interrogating Brad about Texas A&M and complaining she wouldn’t get to go to a real college for two more years. Somewhere around dessert she set her fork down, looked between Brad and her sister with theatrical solemnity, and asked, “So if you two break up, can I have him?”
“Soo Ah.” Ji-an didn’t even look up from cutting the pie.
“What? I’m just planning ahead.”
Brad laughed — a real laugh, not a polite one — and reached over to steal a bite off Soo Yi’s plate before she could stop him. “I don’t think that’s how this works, but I appreciate the vote of confidence.”
It was Jung Woo who brought the table quiet, later, after the plates had mostly emptied and the conversation had drifted somewhere softer. He set his glass down and looked at Brad directly, the same searching look from the porch, except this time it had already resolved into something warmer.
“I know what happened this fall,” he said. “Soo Yi told us everything — the girls, the photo, the hearing.” He paused, and for a second something moved behind his eyes that Soo Yi recognized as the helplessness of a father who hadn’t been there to fix it himself. “I’ve spent nineteen years worrying someone would treat my daughter the way the world sometimes treats people who don’t fit its boxes. I never expected the person who’d finally stand between her and that would be a boy I hadn’t even met yet.”
“She didn’t need saving,” Brad said quietly. “She’s stronger than anyone gives her credit for. I just wasn’t going to let her carry it by herself.”
Jung Woo nodded slowly, the kind of nod that meant more than words would have. “That is exactly the answer I was hoping you’d give,” he said, and raised his glass an inch off the table — not quite a toast, just an acknowledgment. “You’re welcome in this house. Anytime.”
Ji-an, across the table, was already dabbing at her eyes with her napkin, muttering something in Korean about grandchildren that made Soo Yi choke on her water and Soo Ah dissolve into laughter.
Later, after the dishes had been cleared and Soo Ah had disappeared upstairs, Jung Woo found Soo Yi alone in the kitchen for a moment, wiping down the counter more slowly than the job required, the way she always did when she wanted an excuse to linger somewhere quiet with him.
“You’re happy,” he said. Not a question.
“I am.” She glanced up, a little surprised at how easily the word came out, how little she had to search for it. “I didn’t think I would be, not really — not after everything. I thought maybe I’d just get through it. I didn’t think I’d get this too.”
“You’ve always deserved this,” Jung Woo said. “I want you to know I mean that plainly, not as something a father is supposed to say.” He was quiet a moment, watching her. “Your mother pushed you hard growing up — about the way you looked, about what you should change. I let her, more than I should have. I told myself it was just her way of loving you, and maybe it was, but it wasn’t the way you needed.”
“Dad—”
“Let me finish.” He said it gently, and she did. “I’m proud of who you’ve become in spite of that, not because of it. And I’m glad, more than I can easily say, that you found someone who never once asked you to be anything other than exactly what you already are.”
Soo Yi set down the dish towel and hugged him, and he held on longer than either of them usually allowed themselves, and neither of them said anything else about it, because nothing else needed saying.
Later, walking Brad out to his car in the cold, Soo Yi tucked herself into his side. “They loved you,” she said. “I mean — really loved you. My dad doesn’t say things like that to people.”
“Your whole family’s easy to love,” Brad said. “Guess it runs on both sides.”
She didn’t answer that, just kissed him goodnight in the driveway, the porch light throwing both their shadows long across the frost-stiff grass, and went back inside warmer than the house itself.
Christmas, three weeks later, went almost exactly the opposite direction Soo Yi had braced for — she’d spent the whole drive to Houston rehearsing how to seem confident in front of a socialite mother she was sure would take one look at her and see everything Soo Yi already saw when she looked in the mirror.
Catherine McIntyre opened the door in a cashmere sweater that probably cost more than Soo Yi’s whole wardrobe, took one look at her, and pulled her into a hug before she’d even said hello. “Oh, you’re darling,” she said, holding Soo Yi out at arm’s length to look at her properly. “Brad undersold you completely. He kept saying ‘she’s really pretty’ like that was supposed to prepare me.”
Kristen, nineteen and unmistakably Brad’s sister — same dark hair, same easy way of taking up space in a room — appeared behind her mother with a grin that told Soo Yi exactly where Brad had learned to disarm people. “Okay, I already like her,” Kristen announced, mostly to the ceiling. “Come on, you’re stuck with us in the kitchen, that’s tradition.”
The kitchen, it turned out, doubled as a confession booth. Somewhere between rolling out pie crust and arguing with Kristen over how much cinnamon belonged in it, Catherine mentioned — casually, like it was nothing — that she’d worn a 32A her entire adult life, and that Kristen hadn’t fared much better. “It runs in this family,” Catherine said, glancing at Soo Yi with something like solidarity. “I used to think it was the end of the world when I was your age. It isn’t.”
“Brad told me,” Soo Yi admitted quietly. “That you and Kristen were both — smaller. It’s part of why I believed him, honestly. When he said it didn’t matter to him.”
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