Chapter Text
Then came the darker sooner,
came the later lower.
We were no longer a sweeter-here
happily-ever-after. We were after ever.
- Catherine Wing
Chapter I
Tenderness and rot
share a border.
And rot is an
aggressive neighbor
whose iridescence
keeps creeping over.
No lessons
can be drawn
from this however.
- Kay Ryan
i.
The same day Gil-young hears of the lawsuit, she finds a headless cat on her doorstep.
The two, she is quite certain, are related.
Gil-young shovels the cat into a garbage bin and locks her door behind her. It’s time, she thinks, that she got a new place. The trips to the seaside village—nearly every weekend—are a long commute. She can find somewhere that splits the distance between there and the department more evenly, at least until something changes.
She sits at her kitchen table, legs skated forward and shoulders slumped. She does not eat supper. The cat ruined her appetite, she’ll give it that. She drinks a cup of hot coffee and twists the ends of her hair around her knuckles. As a girl, she let her hair swing freely; now she keeps it pulled back and practical.
Gil-young is not a girl.
The news came that morning, via service papers dropped unceremoniously on her desk.
“Aish,” the deputy chief groaned, “What now, Officer Kang?”
Detective Goh leaned over as Gil-young read through, her lower lip tucked firmly between her teeth.
“Who is Han Ji-woo?”
“We arrested her last year.” Gil-young confirmed this by searching the name in the records database with one hand; the other stayed splayed across the stack of paper. “Well, I arrested her. She was shop-lifting.”
Detective Goh’s brow crinkled. “And she’s suing for you? Why? People are crazy.”
“No.” Gil-young stopped biting her lip. It hurts. “Her family is. She killed herself.”
Her partner blew out his breath. “Jinjja?”
“They say that her arrest record plunged her into depression,” Gil-young rapped out, calm and ordinary. This was police procedure. “They want general damages for their emotional harm.”
“That is—nonsense! They’ll never prove it.”
“Eoh.” She folded the papers up. It might be a frivolous suit, but that didn’t mean the family couldn’t bring a good deal of bad press to the department. To Gil-young’s career. “I’ll deal with it.”
Detective Goh’s eyes narrowed and he tapped the stamped red notice on the back of the envelope. “But what…”
Gil-young hadn’t seen it. She saw it now. A handful of words, like pebbles thrown.
More will come.
“Aish,” she murmurs now, into her coffee cup. “Why me?”
(But better her than them.)
Her phone rings; it’s Yoon. He has a retreat this weekend.
“You don’t mind going alone?”
She cradles her phone against her shoulder and stares at the ceiling. She has left the table and is standing by her window; the blinds are pulled closed. “To see Hwa Pyung? Yes. We’ll miss your jokes,” she teases. Of course, he doesn’t laugh, but in the pause she imagines him smiling. Yoon’s smiles are easily missed, but well-worth catching. “And don’t worry. I’ll ask him again.”
“We shouldn’t press him.”
She’s gotten used to Yoon being the wisest of all of them. “A-la. I wouldn’t ask him if I didn’t believe he wanted to.”
Come back, she means. She wouldn’t ask him to come back if it wasn’t what his heart wanted.
Careful, Gil-young. Careful of thinking about hearts.
When Yoon says goodbye, she finishes her coffee. It swirls uneasily in her stomach. If she turns on the television, she’ll see some news about the induction ceremony, some gleeful report of the landslide election. And then she’ll be sick, sicker than she was made by the sight of the cat’s snapped spine poking through damp fur.
Gil-young goes to bed.
The next day she locks her door behind her and thinks of getting another deadbolt. She books three delinquents for indecent exposure. College pranks. They seem ashamed; Gil-young lets them wallow in it.
Detective Goh pulls her aside at lunch.
“I spoke to my brother.”
“The one with the different name?”
“I’ve told you a thousand times,” he says, which is wholly untrue. He never speaks about his brother—his twin—unless he has to. “I took our step-father’s name. Seung-bum never forgave me.” He shakes his gray head. “Well, anyway, I called him.”
“Called him about what?” Chun Seung-bum is a prosecutor in Seoul. Gil-young is instantly suspicious.
Goh looks about him cautiously, as if even the walls have ears. “Enough is enough,” he says. “She’s threatening you.”
Hwa Pyung was the one who chased her down with a knife. Yoon was the one who pressed a rosary into her hand. But Gil-young dogged her steps with the law, and law, after the shadows have fled, is all that remains.
“You don’t have to,” Gil-young says soberly. “You don’t have to do things for me.”
“Wae?” Detective Goh’s dark brows half-disappear beneath his fringe. “Why can I not do things for my partner?”
He doesn’t know, of course, that sometimes Gil-young looks at him and has to remember to keep breathing. Detective Goh doesn’t know—and shouldn’t know—that Gil-young never really came back from the war.
“I would not have told you,” she says. “If I knew that you were going to be foolish.” She didn’t tell him everything—there are only three people who know everything—but Goh knows that Gil-young believes Park Hong Joo is dirty. Unlike the rest of the world, he believes it too. “Seriously.”
“Seriously,” he pushes back. “My brother can take down anyone. Didn’t you hear about that judge?”
“Cha Moon Sook?” Gil-young has gone through hell, not under a rock. She watched snippets of the trial on TV. Apparently a cocky lawyer really can do anything. “What does she have to do with…” She gestures. She tries not to say Park Hong Joo aloud, not unless she has to.
Names have power.
“I never ask for favors,” Detective Goh says stolidly. “So he’ll agree. He’ll put someone on it. Floor leader! Jen-jang, is nothing sacred?”
“Not politics.” Gil-young smiles thinly. She crumples her drink carton in her hand. “Will you ever listen, when I tell you to stay out of it?”
“Ani.”
“That’s what I thought. Well, let me know when your twin laughs in your face.” It is nastier than she means to be, but the inside of her chest feels like it’s slowly filling with water.
She packs her weekend bag and drives out of town with the breeze grazing her cheek. She’s driving towards the seashore, but it doesn’t hurt like it used to. This part hasn’t hurt since the day she walked that winding road up to the front of a ramshackle house and smiled through her tears.
This part hasn’t hurt, but sometimes, everything else still does.
ii.
A wide-brimmed straw hat covers Jae-yi’s face. From the rise and fall of her chest, she seems to be sleeping.
They’ve been here two weeks. Snowy sand, blue-ribboned skies, and warm golden air. Sang Pil leans back lazily, lays his arm across his eyes, and does not even think.
Then his phone rings.
He sits up and reaches under the lounge chair where his phone lies in repose on a towel, protecting it (somewhat) from death by sand.
It’s Prosecutor Chun.
He scoffs under his breath and tosses it down.
In another moment, Jae-yi’s phone starts ringing.
She lifts the hat from her face and sits up. “Ya! Sang Pil. Give me my phone.”
“It’s work,” he complains, holding it out of her reach. “We’re not here to work.”
Jae-yi glowers and kneels on the edge of the lounge chair, snatching for her phone. With his free arm, Sang Pil pulls her flat against him, skin and sand and all. “We’re on our honeymoon,” he teases, smirking at her narrowed eyes.
She leans forward and kisses him, full on the mouth. Clever girl; this distracts him and he lowers his arm.
She plucks her phone out of his hand and answers it.
Sang Pil picks up her discarded sunhat and drops it over his own face.
“Yeoboseyo, Prosecutor Chun.” She’s quiet for a while, listening. Then—“Yes, I’ll tell him. Yes. Thank you.”
She hangs up and Sang Pil can feel her looking at him through the straw.
“We are not leaving,” he says, muffled by the hat. Whines, really, if he’s being honest, which he rarely is. “We are not leaving for Prosecutor Chun.”
“Sang Pil.”
She can cut him down with just his name.
“Jae-ya.” He lifts the hat, pouts dramatically. She hasn’t tanned in the sun, his Jae-ya. Her cheeks are pinker than usual and there is a blush along her shoulders, too, but otherwise, she’s been religious about applying sunscreen.
(He helps.)
“Let’s go back to the hotel,” she says, scooping up her hat and towel and the novel she was reading before she fell asleep. She leads, and he follows, because she has him wrapped around her finger and she knows it.
Inside their room, Jae-yi hunts through her suitcase for fresh clothes. “Prosecutor Chun has a new case.”
“And we have another two weeks here.”
“This isn’t…it’s a favor to someone.”
Sang Pil raises his eyebrows. “A favor? From that seogsang?”
His wife rolls her eyes. “I know you like him. It’s—his twin brother—stop interrupting me, Sang Pil. Aish. His twin brother is a detective in Yeongju. One of his coworkers had some kind of tangle with a high-ranking official and is now receiving threats.”
Sang Pil’s interest is piqued despite himself. He reaches for a shirt. “Who’s the official?”
“His brother wouldn’t say.”
“Ah.”
“Prosecutor Chun thinks it could be nothing. But he seems to think that if it is something, it could be…” She bites her lip and widens her impossibly dark eyes. “Huge. Another Judge Cha.”
And there it is, the little flicker of pain across her features, quickly tamped down into steely resolve. (This is why Sang Pil would follow her anywhere.)
“Go and shower off all that sand,” Sang Pil says, reaching for his phone. “I’ll call him back and hear everything for myself.”
She nods, she smiles, and carries her things into the bathroom. He waits until he hears the water running and then buries his face in his hands.
Because this is the truth of it: Sang Pil needs another two weeks of nothing just as much as he wants them. He’s almost certain that time away is the only thing that will keep him from going wild.
He needs to do nothing, and think of nothing, except for holding Jae-yi and staring into water and sunlight.
They’ve been in Seoul a year. At the wedding two weeks ago he thought of nothing else, then, too. Nothing but Kwang Su and the Geums and their other compatriots, and Jae-yi in angelic white most of all.
Work has kept them busy in Seoul. It has kept Jae-yi, at least, happy.
In the light of day, Sang Pil keeps his suits fitted close and the love of his life closer. He has won every case he’s taken point on. Prosecutor Chun gave them a month of time off as a reward: quite a concession, from him.
Sang Pil would never admit it, but sometimes he looks at Chun Seung-bum and sees prison bars.
Sometimes he looks in the mirror and longs to see blood.
He needs a fight and he can’t have one. He hasn’t put his fist through anything, to anyone, for over a year. He hasn’t broken a bone, hasn’t bruised his face.
He should not miss these things.
Cut him open, An Oh Ju said, when he was a boy. And there is nothing stopping him, really, from re-carving the scar along his ribs until the pain almost makes him believe his uncle is alive again.
His hands shake and he knows he won’t do it. Jae-yi will see it all.
He rests his fingertips against his eyes and presses hard, like he can push aside the mask.
The water in the room beyond shuts off. Hastily, he dials the prosecutor’s number.
“Bong Sang Pil. Now you’re interested, aren’t you?”
“Maybe. You seem very interested in ruining my vacation, Chun-geomsa-nim.”
“You’re an impatient man.”
“So are you. What did your brother—your twin brother—want?” Sang Pil expects that this will irritate him.
It does. “Detective Goh believes that a high-ranking, recently elected official is covering a history of criminal acts and is retaliating against his partner for her efforts to investigate. That is all I know.”
“And you want us to leave Aruba to find out?”
“Nae. I want you to go to Yeongju.”
“And if we don’t?”
Prosecutor Chun laughs. “I’m afraid your wife already agreed.”
Sang Pil does not allow himself to sigh.