And yet.
She dragged the file into her editing suite. For a project called "Forgotten Stages," she was restoring old, broken fancams. She cleaned the audio. Stabilized the shake. Enhanced the shadows. And yet
Below the video, she typed the new title: She cleaned the audio
Hana, now twenty-eight, stared at the same file on a dusty external hard drive. She was a video editor for a major music show. Every day, she smoothed out imperfections, auto-tuned breaths, and cut away the "bad angles." Below the video, she typed the new title:
May 3, 2013. She had been nineteen, sitting in the stuffy gymnasium of the Gangwon Provincial Selection Competition. She wasn't a fan of EXID then; she was just a trainee who had failed her own audition that morning, too embarrassed to go back to the dorms. So she stayed. She watched the "B-team" acts—the ones not from Seoul, the ones with frayed costumes and too much hope.
The file name was a time capsule in itself.
Hana never told anyone she filmed it.