15:00 — When Time Stopped | 15:00 — 시간이 멈춘 순간

The hour between lunch and evening belongs to no one, which is why Clara has claimed it. Three o’clock is a held breath, a small pocket of time that doesn’t ask questions. She uses it the way some people use spare change—quietly, without telling anyone—spending it at the corner café with the pale wood counter and the little fern that drinks more sunlight than water.

The bell over the door gives a gentle clink when she enters. The sound is familiar now, a small punctuation that tells her she’s arrived. Outside, late-autumn Seoul is burnished and slow: gingko leaves like coins underfoot, coats opening and closing with the wind, a bus sighing at the curb. Inside, the café is warm and humming. Not loud—just the soft machinery of afternoon. Milk steaming. Cups set down. Someone laughing under their breath at something on a screen.

She knows, before she looks up, that he’s there. He’s always there at this hour: sleeves rolled neatly to the forearms, hair pushed back in a way that looks unintentional and isn’t. She has learned the outline of him without meaning to. She doesn’t know his name. She doesn’t ask. The not-knowing feels delicate, like a snow globe she shouldn’t shake.

“Hello,” she says, and the word crosses the counter like a paper boat on shallow water.

His eyes lift. They are kind in the way of people who watch for details. “Hi.” A small smile. Not practiced. “The usual?”

She means to vary it today, to prove to herself that she isn’t only an accumulation of habits—but the mouth answers before she can: “Yes, please.” Iced latte, oat milk, less ice. The first few weeks she reordered the request each time, careful with her vowels, practicing the way they round in Korean. Then he started nodding before she finished, and the relief was pure and a little foolish. To be known in this tiny way. To be remembered for something as simple as “less ice.”

She pays, steps aside, and takes her post by the window. The table is two-seater small, the kind that asks you to tuck your elbows in. A ficus leaf drags a soft arc across the glass as the heat kicks on. She opens her bag and sets her notebook on the table, then her pen, then the bottle of hand lotion that makes her think of vanilla cookies and bookstores. The ritual orders her. She will write for thirty minutes, or she will pretend to. She will stir the drink three times and then try it. She will leave at 3:40, because 3:45 feels like a cliff edge she’d tumble over.

Her apartment is almost empty now. The suitcase is open on the floor like a mouth. Inside are pairs of socks rolled together like planets, a sweater her mother knit, a photograph of her and her sister on a pier in Michigan, laughing at something the camera didn’t catch. She has two days left. When she thinks of that number, something behind her sternum tightens, then releases. The feeling isn’t sadness exactly. It’s more like a hand hovering above a switch, not yet flipping the room to dark.

He sets the latte down in front of her, the condensation already forming. She notices the way he tips the glass so it won’t smack the table. She notices too much, she thinks. That, or not enough of the right things.

“Less ice,” he says, almost playful. It’s a small joke they’ve built: the fact that he always gets it right, the fact that she keeps being surprised. She thanks him, and he nods once like the thanks belongs to both of them.

When he walks away, she writes the date in the top corner of the page. The numbers look obedient, squared off. She considers adding where she is—Seoul, Mapo-gu—but she has written that word so many times in the last year that it feels unnecessary now, the way you stop labeling a drawing when everyone can see the shape of it.

What she wants to write about is the hour. The way 15:00 has become a room inside the day. A door she opens and closes. This café the hallway to that room; this man the clock on the wall. She doesn’t write that. It sounds sentimental even inside her head. Instead she writes about the light. How, at this time, it forgets to be bright. How it smooths everything out, edges and voices and impatience. The pen scratches faintly. She pauses, listens to the scrape of tamped coffee. The hiss.

She thinks of the first week she came. It was raining then, her second month in the city. She had been looking for a bakery she saw on Instagram and found this place instead, the sign a little crooked, a patch of moss growing stubbornly by the door. She remembers sitting down with her wet hair and her not-yet-useful umbrella, and how the barista didn’t look surprised at the mess she made, how he placed a folded napkin by her elbow like a bridge. She had written for an hour that day. The words were bad. She came back anyway.

On the sidewalk, a dog in a yellow sweater passes with a woman speaking on the phone, her voice lilting up in a laugh, then down. A taxi idles. Clara stirs the drink three times, listening to the clink of ice that isn’t there. She likes the way the cold slips over her tongue, the way the first sip is always a small, crisp yes.

She thinks of the conversations she didn’t have this year. How she learned to choose when to be understood and when to float. Some days, the silence felt like a coat that fit. Other days, it was a hallway with all the doors closed.

He moves through the space with a rhythm that says he’s memorized the corners. She watches him fill a pitcher of water and thinks of questions that would be simple if she let them be. What time do you get off? Do you live nearby? Have you ever been out of Seoul? Do you have a favorite season? He would answer, and the world would not break. But she holds the questions like smooth stones in her pocket and does not throw them. The not-throwing feels like control and also like a loss.

The old couple arrives—the ones who come after her most days. He holds the door for her, then she holds it for him, a choreography you’d think they rehearsed at home. The barista greets them with a different tone, a little louder for the man who is going deaf. “Ahjussi, long time,” he says, and the man waves him off with a smile that means I was here yesterday; stop teasing me. The familiarity warms the room a degree.

Clara flips to the back of her notebook. The last page is nearly blank. She should buy a new one, though she tells herself she doesn’t believe in symbolic last pages. It will simply be the last because the paper is ending. Nothing else. Still, the emptiness waits, white as possibility.

If she were a different person, she might ask his name today. There’s a world where she does, a world where he says it and it fits, and she carries it out into the afternoon like a charm in her pocket. There’s also a world where she never comes back and never knows and nothing is different except the shape of her afternoons. Both are real, which feels unfair. She writes that down: both are real. Then she crosses it out because the line looks like someone trying to be wise.

She glances at the wall clock—three exactly. No, a little after. The minute hand is a degree past the mark. Time hasn’t stopped. It never does. And yet this hour arranges itself around her as if she wears it. She thinks of home and how the clocks there will be wrong—backward or forward. She thinks of her mother asking what time it is over there and how she will always answer with the hour and never with the feeling.

The bell rings again as someone leaves. A gust presses the gingko scent through the door, dusty-sweet. She closes her eyes for a second and stores it. She wants to keep the particulars: the precise tint of the tabletops, the way the light forgets itself on cloudy days and remembers on clear ones, the barista’s careful hands, the napkin folded like a small square promise.

When she opens her eyes, her gaze meets his across the counter. Not a collision—more like two trains slowing at the same station, the windows briefly aligned. He looks away first. Or she does. It doesn’t matter. She writes another sentence that won’t make the final draft. She drinks. She looks at the clock again as if it owes her something.

She doesn’t realize it yet, not here, not in this first scene of an ending, but she has already started to say goodbye in the gentlest way she knows how: by showing up on time, by writing the date, by drinking the usual, by letting the hour be itself. By wanting, and not asking. By noticing, and not naming. By being one more person in a city taught to carry its soft things carefully.

At 3:20, the old couple shares a slice of chestnut cake. At 3:27, a bar of sunlight falls across her hand, and she moves it to feel the difference between warm and warm-through-glass. At 3:33, she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and decides she will not cry when she leaves, not here in this place where she has challenged herself to be tender without breaking. At 3:36, she writes one clean, simple line on the bottom corner of the page and underlines it once:

thank you for every 3pm.

She doesn’t know yet where to put it—on paper, on a wall, on a heart—but she likes the way the e looks in “every,” the small roundness of it, how it keeps the rest of the word from falling forward. She caps her pen. She rests her hand on the notebook a moment longer, as if blessing it. Then she breathes in, and the café does too, and the hour leans toward 3:40 like a curtain lifting.

Siwoo never decided to memorize her. It happened the way light slips across a counter—by repetition, by habit, by accident. Every day at three, she arrives like a rhythm he didn’t know his life had learned.

He used to think afternoons were the dullest part of the day, the long pause between rushes. The hours after lunch drag; office workers fade into their phones; deliveries come late. The clock always seems to stick around 15:00, mocking him. But then she started coming, and the hour began to move differently—slow, yes, but warm, like sunlight filtered through linen.

He first noticed her because she looked lost. Not in the dramatic way tourists look—no wide eyes or spinning in circles—but in the quiet way people look when they don’t know what to do with their own thoughts. She’d walked in with rain in her hair, ordered her drink carefully, repeating the word “ice” twice like she wasn’t sure if she’d said it right the first time. He’d understood immediately, though. He’d smiled, slid a napkin toward her, and said, 괜찮아요—it’s okay.

That was eleven months ago.

Now, she’s a fixture of the café, even if no one else seems to notice. The regulars have their routines, the playlist never changes, and yet, when she’s here, the space feels arranged around her. He finds himself cleaning the table by the window before she arrives, adjusting the chair angle slightly to face the light better, wiping away fingerprints that no one else would ever see. He doesn’t think about what that means; he just does it.

“Another iced latte, oat milk, less ice,” he says softly as he preps her drink, mostly to himself. His coworker—Minho, a college kid working part-time—grins.

“Hyung, you say that like a prayer.”

Siwoo doesn’t answer. He adds the espresso shots slowly, watching the swirl of milk like it holds an answer.

He knows she’ll stir it three times. He knows she always pauses before the first sip, as if she’s waiting for permission. He knows that at exactly 3:33, she’ll glance toward the clock on the wall. It’s become a secret kind of choreography between them—unrehearsed, unspoken, but familiar.

She doesn’t talk much, but she smiles in a way that lingers, like she’s saving half of it for later. Sometimes, she writes without looking down. Sometimes, she stares out the window with her pen still in hand. He wonders what she writes about. Maybe she keeps track of the little things foreigners notice here—the way delivery scooters cut between cars, the stray cats sleeping on parked bikes, the clusters of old men who feed pigeons but pretend they’re not. Maybe she writes about how this café smells faintly of citrus in the morning, of roasted beans in the afternoon. Maybe she writes about him, though that thought makes his throat tighten. He doesn’t want to assume that much space in someone else’s story.

Still, he notices everything about her. The soft fray on her sweater’s sleeve. The tiny scar on her left thumb, white against her skin. The way she sometimes bites the inside of her cheek when thinking. The quiet sigh she gives when she finishes a sentence.

He doesn’t know if noticing someone this much is supposed to mean something. But he can’t help it.

When she came in today, something was different. He caught it before she even spoke—some shift in the air around her. Maybe it’s her eyes; they look the way the city does right before it rains.

“Hello,” she said, in that calm voice that still carries an accent he likes hearing.

He almost asked, You’re leaving soon, aren’t you? The words reached his tongue and stopped there. Instead, he smiled. “The usual?”

“Yes, please.”

There was a small hitch before she said it, like she’d hesitated. That’s how he knows. People hesitate before goodbyes, even when they don’t say them.

He wants to ask where she’s going. Whether she’ll come back. He imagines her at an airport, surrounded by people who speak her language but don’t know her rhythms. He imagines the empty window seat tomorrow, the way the light will fall without her there to catch it. He imagines the hour without its anchor.

He finishes her drink and sets it on the counter. She takes it with both hands like it’s something precious. “Less ice,” he jokes quietly, and the way she smiles makes the joke feel brand new again.

She thanks him. He nods. It’s their script.

He wonders what would happen if he said something unscripted—something reckless. Something like, Stay a little longer. Or even just, Tell me your name. But the words feel too loud for this soft hour, too sharp for her gentleness.

He watches her walk back to the window seat. She opens that small brown notebook again—the one with frayed edges and a pen tucked into the spine. He’s seen her carry it every day. He imagines it filled with sketches of moments: the smell of roasted beans, the hum of the espresso machine, maybe even the sound of his voice saying less ice. He’s never seen the pages, but he likes thinking the café exists inside them somehow. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s the way you get remembered in someone else’s language.

He wipes the counter even though it’s already clean. Minho glances at him again.

“She’s leaving, isn’t she?” the younger boy asks quietly, eyes still on his phone.

Siwoo pauses. “…How do you know?”

“Everyone leaves around this time of year,” Minho shrugs. “The exchange students, the teachers. It’s just the season.”

The season. As if there’s a predictable time for people to disappear.

Siwoo doesn’t respond. He just goes back to polishing the steel pitcher until he can see his reflection. His expression looks steady, but his chest feels off-balance. It’s not sadness, not exactly. It’s the realization that routine has betrayed him—he built his comfort on something that isn’t permanent.

He looks up again. She’s writing. The way she moves her pen—slow, deliberate, like she’s tracing her own thoughts—makes him ache a little. He wants to ask what language she thinks in when she writes. Whether she dreams in English or Korean now. Whether she’s ever written about this café. About him.

When the old couple comes in, he greets them louder, maybe too loudly, as if sound can distract from feeling. He makes their drinks, takes their cash, and lets their chatter fill the room. Behind them, Clara is still at her table, the light on her hair turning it the color of honey.

She doesn’t see him watching, but that’s okay. He’s gotten used to watching quietly.

He remembers when his father used to tell him, Love isn’t always loud, Siwoo-ah. Sometimes it’s just noticing things and letting them be. He was a boy then, too young to understand that “letting them be” can sometimes feel like loss. Now he does. He finally does.

The clock ticks—barely audible, but he feels it. 15:27. The light angles lower. He knows she’ll leave soon. He wishes he could stop time, just enough to stretch the moment, to press it between pages like a flower. But time never listens.

At 15:33, she glances up at the clock, right on cue. He smiles without meaning to. She doesn’t notice. She’s writing something down—one line, small, quick. Then she closes her notebook, caps her pen, and sits still for a moment as if memorizing the air itself.

He watches her gather her things, stand, adjust her bag strap. He feels something move inside him—urgent, unsteady, like a wave about to break—but he stays behind the counter. Always behind the counter.

When she leaves, the bell gives its small, familiar chime. The sound hits him differently this time. It doesn’t feel like punctuation. It feels like an ending.

He tells himself he’ll just clean the table in a minute. That he won’t look at the chair she sat in. That he won’t notice the tiny curl of steam still rising from her glass.

But he will. He always does.

And when he finally walks over, cloth in hand, he’ll find something she left behind.

He doesn’t know it yet. Not here.

Right now, he only knows the hour feels heavier than usual—like even time is waiting for him to do something about it.

The café is quieter now. The old couple hasn’t come in today, and the delivery guy dropped off beans an hour early, so it’s just Siwoo and the hum of the espresso machine. He stands at the counter, polishing the same cup for the fifth time, trying not to glance at the door even though he knows she’s already gone.

He feels her absence like an echo. The space where she sat is too still, too clean. Her cup still rests there — half a ring of condensation marking the table, faint but perfect.

Minho peeks out from the back, headphones slung around his neck. “You good, hyung?”

Siwoo nods without looking up. “Yeah.”

Minho shrugs, grabs his jacket, and leaves for class, the bell over the door giving that same soft chime. Siwoo listens until it stops ringing, then finally sets the cup down. The café is his again — or maybe it’s emptier than it’s ever been.

He makes his rounds like always: wiping tables, straightening chairs, emptying the trash. Routine saves him from thinking too much. But when he reaches her table, he hesitates.

Her straw wrapper lies curled on the surface, a small paper spiral. Beside it, the receipt folded in half beneath the empty glass. He almost tosses it away — another automatic motion — but something about the way it’s placed feels deliberate.

He unfolds it carefully.

thank you for every 3pm.

— Clara

He reads it twice, the words swimming slightly, as if his eyes have forgotten how to stay still.

Clara.

So that’s her name.

He says it under his breath, tasting the syllables, the soft r in the middle. Cla-ra. It feels foreign but gentle, like a name that belongs to sunlight. He imagines how it would sound if he’d asked earlier. He imagines her turning her head when he said it, the corner of her mouth lifting.

Too late.

He looks toward the window. The light has shifted — sharper now, more gold than before — and the reflection in the glass catches the clock above the counter. 15:00. Still. He wonders if it’s broken or if the hands are just stubborn.

His gaze drops back to the table, and that’s when he sees it.

A small, brown notebook resting on the chair.

He freezes.

For a moment, he just stares at it, unsure whether to touch it. It feels personal, sacred even — like she’s left a piece of herself behind. But the thought of her realizing it’s missing makes his stomach twist.

He reaches for it, careful not to smudge the cover. The leather is warm from where she held it. When he opens it, he sees neat handwriting, English letters looping across the page, some Korean words sprinkled in the margins. The ink is dark, recent. The last page is torn out.

He knows what that means.

She left him the note — but forgot the rest.

A quiet panic stirs under his ribs. He doesn’t think. He just grabs his jacket from the hook and runs.

Outside, the street is drenched in that golden, forgiving light that only exists for ten minutes before dusk. He scans the block, heart hammering. She’s already halfway down the street — her brown hair catching the sun, her scarf trailing behind like punctuation.

“Clara!”

The name feels strange and right all at once. It cuts through the sound of traffic, sharp and bright. She stops. Turns.

Her eyes widen when she sees him, and for a moment neither of them moves.

He jogs the rest of the way to her, the notebook in hand. “You left this,” he says, a little breathless.

She blinks, then looks at the notebook. “Oh—” She laughs softly, almost embarrassed. “I didn’t even notice.”

He holds it out to her. Their fingers brush as she takes it, and something in that touch roots itself deep, quick as a heartbeat.

“Thank you,” she says, and her voice trembles just slightly.

He wants to say, Don’t thank me. Just stay. But he only nods.

Behind them, the café’s window reflects the moment like a photograph. The clock inside, frozen at 15:00, glows faintly above the counter.

Neither of them sees it, but the hour has stopped again — right where it always belonged.

For a long second, they just stand there. The city moves around them — a bus pulls up, a couple passes by, someone’s phone rings — but none of it matters. The only real sound is the faint thrum of their unspoken words.

Finally, she smiles. “For every 3 p.m., right?”

He exhales a quiet laugh, one that feels both like relief and ache. “Yeah.”

She clutches the notebook close to her chest. “Goodbye, Siwoo.”

It’s the first time she’s said his name. He realizes she must’ve read it on his apron, small and stitched near the pocket. Hearing it in her voice undoes him just a little.

He watches her turn, watches her walk away.

He doesn’t follow.

Not yet.

He stands there until she disappears around the corner, until the sound of her steps fades into the hum of the city. Then he looks down at his hands — empty now — and lets out a slow breath that feels like both ending and beginning.

When he finally walks back into the café, the light has softened, slipping toward evening. The air smells of ground beans and quiet.

The clock above the counter still reads 15:00.

He leaves it that way.

He doesn’t notice the faint indentation left on the table where her cup once sat, or the tiny trace of ink smudged into the wood where she rested her pen. He’ll find those tomorrow, when he’s wiping down the counter again, when he’s wondering whether some things are meant to end or just pause.

For now, it’s enough that her name still lingers in his mouth — soft, like a prayer.

The End.

ALTERNATE ENDING

The flight leaves Incheon just after sunset.

The sky outside Clara’s window is layered in gold and gray, a watercolor horizon that looks almost like the one she watched fade through the café window every afternoon. The seatbelt light blinks. The air is cool, recirculated, humming softly around her.

She leans back, resting her head against the seat. Her hands still smell faintly of roasted coffee beans. She can’t shake the image of him standing outside the café door, breathless, the late light pooling behind him. The way he said her name — how it landed softly, like it had always belonged to his voice.

Clara.

She doesn’t remember what she said in return, only that her throat had felt too tight to say much at all. Just thank you and goodbye. Words that never quite hold enough.

The seat beside her is empty, the kind of small mercy long flights sometimes give. She opens the tray table, sets down a bottle of water, and pulls her brown notebook from her bag. It’s scuffed from travel, the corners curling slightly. She runs her thumb over the cover, over the faint mark where his fingers touched it when he handed it back.

The first few pages are filled with things she wrote when she first arrived in Korea — messy, uncertain handwriting, small Korean phrases she wanted to remember:

괜찮아요. (gwaenchana)

조심히 가요. (joshimhigayo)

안녕. (annyeong)

Hello. Be careful. Goodbye.

She flips through until she reaches the back. That’s when she notices it — something new tucked between the pages.

A folded slip of paper.

Her heart stutters. She didn’t put that there.

She opens it carefully, flattening it against her knee. The handwriting is neat but slightly uneven, like someone who doesn’t often write in English but wanted to get every letter right.

You left this behind twice.

Maybe that means you’ll come back.

— Siwoo

☕ 010-XXXX-XXXX

For a moment, she just stares. The hum of the plane fades, replaced by the slow thud of her heartbeat.

He must’ve slipped it in when he found the notebook — before he ran after her. Or maybe after, in that second when she was turning away. She imagines him standing there, the paper in hand, deciding whether to leave a piece of himself behind.

Her eyes sting before she can stop them. She presses the note between her fingers, smiling in spite of herself.

Outside, the clouds open like quiet waves beneath the wing. Somewhere far below, Seoul glows — a scatter of streetlights, a single city among millions, holding the small café where time stopped at 15:00.

She takes out her pen, flips the paper over, and writes beneath his message in tiny, looping script:

Maybe I will.

She folds it again, tucks it back inside the notebook, and presses it shut like sealing a promise.

The flight attendant walks by, offering water, and Clara shakes her head with a soft smile. She looks out the window once more. The plane cuts through the last sliver of sunlight, and for a fleeting second, the sky burns the same shade of amber as the café at 3 p.m.

She whispers his name under her breath, just to hear it.

“Siwoo.”

It sounds almost like home.

And when she closes her eyes, it’s still 15:00 — somewhere, in a little café on a quiet street, where a clock has forgotten to move.

The End.

Author’s Note

“15:00” was written as a quiet reflection on time, connection, and the spaces we occupy in between — those fleeting hours that never quite belong to anyone but somehow end up belonging to someone anyway.

When I first listened to Junhee’s “too bad (15:00)”, what struck me wasn’t just the melancholy, but the stillness — the feeling of an emotion held just before it breaks. That’s what I wanted to capture here: the ache of a routine turned memory, the beauty of something almost but not quite said.

Clara and Siwoo’s story isn’t grand or dramatic. It’s about the small things that make us human — repetition, ritual, timing, and the ways we say “I cared” without ever saying it aloud. Every 3 p.m. visit was its own love letter, written not through words, but through showing up. And I think that’s one of the most tender forms of love there is.

The frozen clock at 15:00 became my quiet metaphor for suspended time — that sacred space between knowing and letting go. For Siwoo, it’s where memory lives. For Clara, it’s where courage begins. And for both of them, it’s proof that connection, even brief, can leave something lasting behind.

The hopeful ending exists because I wanted to remind myself (and maybe you, too) that timing isn’t always kind — but sometimes, it waits. Sometimes, it gives us another chance.

Thank you for spending 3 p.m. with them.

If you enjoyed this story, you can read my ongoing series Dawon Apartments — a quiet slice of life about the people who share one villa and all the small moments in between.

Read with: Junhee – “too bad (15:00)“

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