Chapter Text
Her mom is by her bedside when she wakes up, lucid for the first time in nearly a week.
It feels like the worst type of dejavu. For a moment, she’s 9 years old, waking up from the most traumatic event of her life only for her mother to scream at her and cover her mouth. She doesn’t wake up in peace. Her entire body fights the medication keeping her comfortable, her mind reeling from a dream that she can’t quite remember. It’s confusing, foggy, her body aches and all she needs—is one person.
“Heejoo-yah,” her mom cries, tears falling from her eyes. Heejoo looks past her as if she’s not even there.
She’s in the hospital, she realizes right away. The bright lights and the smell of disinfectant are familiar after the past few weeks of so many brushes with death. She tries to sit up, tries to untangle her tongue enough to speak.
“Take it easy,” her mom says. “Should I get the doctor?”
Heejoo turns her head left and right.
“Where’s Saeon?” she croaks out. Her throat is parched. Her mother pats her head, still crying, and Heejoo doesn’t have the strength to shake her off.
She looks around the room, expecting him to be there. It’s not her mother’s hand on her head she needs.
“Where is he?” she asks again, her dream—her nightmare—coming back. Saeon getting shot after getting out of the car. The police officers milling about around them without paying attention to her screams. Watching the life bleed out of him.
She looks up at her mom, and the way her lips are pressed together makes her heart speed up. Her mom looks at her with pity. If she’d been 9 years old, or 15 years old, or 21…she would have been glad to see pity in her eyes, would have found it adjacent enough to love that she would have been pleased. So you do care about me, at least a little.
But she’s not young and vulnerable anymore. She’s 28 years old and she wants her husband.
Her mother doesn’t answer her, but she realizes it soon enough, as the minutes and then the hours tick by.
Baek Saeon is nowhere to be found.
☼
Heejoo waits for him.
The doctor comes to check on her, nurses poke and prod at her. She gets to drink some water finally, but it does nothing to quench her thirst. She feels adrift, lost.
Her mom fills her in on everything that happened during the past week. Saeon’s father is dead, and so is the real Baek Saeon. His mother is in police custody. None of it matters to her. Her mom tells her the nightmare is over. But every time she asks her where Saeon is, she says she’s not sure, and that’s the only nightmare Heejoo cares about.
She remembers more, with every waking hour. It comes to her in pieces. She remembers jumping in front of the car, hoping to get help from anyone, and seeing him get out of it and come to her through the blinding shine of the headlights. She remembers him sitting at her bedside, wiping the sweat from her forehead, patting her shoulder to lull her to sleep, holding her hand.
Ina visits her, and she has the same answer. She asks everyone who comes, asks the nurses if they’ve seen her guardian. Everyone’s answers are the same. Something twists inside her chest.
She’s discharged 4 days later. Her body is alright, but she’s choking with the fear of never seeing him again.
☼
She doesn’t want her mom around.
She took over as her guardian at the hospital, pestering the nurses and helping her into her wheelchair. Heejoo had been reeling from it all, the weakness of her body after those days without food, the barrage of journalists trying to get a glimpse at her, his absence most of all…she’d felt as though inside a dream. She’d gone through the motions, accepted it meekly as she waited and waited for him to come back.
But now, as she’s settled back home, clear headed at last, she finds her voice again, the strength she’d discovered starting the night she first had a knife to hear throat. She speaks up at last.
“Nothing has changed,” she tells her mom. “I’m fine now, I’m back home. I don’t need you here,” she says. “I don’t want you here,” she adds, because that’s more important.
Her mom freezes where she is, milling about in the kitchen. She walks over to her, and Heejoo meets her gaze head on, in a way she hadn’t in years, maybe since she was a child. She has no power over her anymore.
“Heejoo, I—I did it for your own good. I thought it was the right thing to do, I wasn’t—”
She doesn’t care. She doesn’t want to hear it. It’s not even an apology.
“What I mean is that I’m sorry,” she finally says, and Heejoo finds that it doesn’t matter. “I’m sorry for everything. When I heard about the accident, we all rushed to the site of the crash. I was sick with worry. If I’d lost you—”
“Okay,” she tells her, cutting her off. “I’m fine now, so can you go?”
Her mom swallows.
“Alright,” she says finally, the first show of respect Heejoo remembers from her mother. “I’ll come visit you tomorrow.”
“Don’t.”
Her mom nods. There’s a shine of tears in her eyes, and it doesn’t move her as it once would have. It prickles, somewhere in her chest, but it’s not enough to put her comfort above her own.
Her mom leaves, and Heejoo is left alone.
☼
There’s still hope, for the first two weeks.
Every noise could be a key in the door, every gust of wind the sound of his footsteps. She feels like she’s holding her breath the entire time, hoping and hoping that today will be the day he’ll walk through the door.
Ina tries to disabuse her of the notion whenever she visits, but Heejoo plays deaf as well as she played mute for the last 20 years. She doesn’t understand it. She tries reporting him as a missing person to the police, only to hear from the detective he worked with to find her that he’d informed him of his intent to leave the country.
She feels empty, lost. No meal is filling enough, no amount of sleep makes her feel well rested. The days pass. She stays inside, mindful of the attention she will receive because of the scandal. She watches the news, sees her own face often.
There’s a video of a press conference he held while she was missing during the evening news one day, and she goes on social media to watch the entire thing. She’s been weeping often, her eyes wet and teary, but after watching it is the first time she really cries, mouth open, saliva thick as she wails.
His tears as he stood in front of her photo and her basic information break what’s left of her heart. If I’d known I wouldn’t get the chance, I would have given her everything.
“Where are you?!” she cries. “You said you hadn’t made me happy yet…”
She clutches at her chest as she breaks down, tries to press the pain back inside, but it doesn’t work. She’s breaking apart.
“You said you would have given me everything, so where are you?!”
Silence rings out.
☼
She sleeps in his bed and wears his clothes, chasing a scent that’s fading.
She sprays his cologne on her own wrists one night, and it only makes the pain worse. It smells like him, and yet it doesn’t. It’s missing something. Maybe it’s the combination with his aftershave, or his shampoo. Maybe it’s just the heat of him, his breath, his sweat; things that she can’t replicate.
She breaks down crying in his bathroom, and there’s no one there to help her out later, to rub her aching knees. Hope begins to fade.
She avoids the side of the couch they hugged on the night she proposed, and he declined, saying he would propose to her instead when all of it was over. She avoids her bed, but it doesn’t keep her from remembering the night they had spent together, the only time he’d been inside her in 3 years of marriage. She remembers the weight of him on top of her, pressing her into the mattress and making her feel more solid than ever. She’d spent so many years floating through her own life, like a living ghost, and he’d made her feel so alive.
She remembers his kisses, his hands, the pain and the pleasure, their gasps and moans. The moment after, when he’d been so gentle, so tender as he cleaned her up and then held her until her eyes became heavy. How are you feeling? He’d asked. There had been no embarrassment from her, no self-consciousness. Good , she’d answered, because she had no way to verbalize what she felt in a way that would make sense: she’d bled, and it had felt like the first time a hurt had any meaning. What was the point of her silence all those years? For what reason was she slapped for daring to have dreams growing up, why was she forced to live a painful lie? There had been no point to any of it. But every shiver and trembling sigh between his arms had meant something.
Heejoo had imagined what it would be like to be with him, endlessly through the first weeks of their marriage, betraying herself through the cold years that followed, ashamed of herself as she used the fantasy while she touched herself under the sheets. But she hadn’t gotten it right, she’d never expected what it was actually like to give herself to him completely.
At her weakest, she almost wishes they hadn’t found each other, that she’d kept hating him for his coldness and he’d kept pretending not to care about her. Because she’d been hungry for love her entire life, and now she feels like she’ll never be able to fill her stomach again. Heejoo is terrified that she’ll always feel this empty, this abandoned .
Why did you leave me? she asks the perfect darkness of his bedroom. Why did you leave me here alone?
☼
His father’s funeral. His mother’s trial. It all happens like scenes from a tv show she’s not paying attention to.
Han Jin and her former coworkers from the sign language interpretation center visit. Heejoo speaks the moment she opens the door, and the shame she feels at their surprise, at the knowledge that she lied to them for so long, is the first emotion other than misery that she feels in weeks. She goes through the same with the members of the spokesperson’s office a few days later. When Manager Kang makes an ill-timed joke about her and Saeon hiding their marriage, she excuses herself to the bathroom to pull herself together.
She gives him her resignation letter before he leaves.
Saeon’s mother’s trial continues. She gives her testimony, goes to the police station escorted by police officers and new bodyguards that Saeon must have arranged before he left. She goes through the motions, does what is required of her.
“This hell is over,” the detective says, “you can rest easy now.” Heejoo nods and keeps her lips closed tight, because otherwise she’ll break and say what she really feels, that the real hell began 3 weeks ago, and she’s still living in it. That every second he’s gone feels like her worst dream come true.
Heejoo’s days pass by in a confusing blur. An hour feels like a day, and yet she blinks and Monday has bled into Thursday. She eats because she must, and sleeps when exhaustion claims her. She reads their entire text message history multiple times, and it never takes more than an hour—they’d spent so long not talking to each other, only exchanging perfunctory texts like the coldest of roommates. She realizes she doesn’t have a single photo of them together apart from the ones they took at the retreat.
Heejoo feels frozen in time, but it marches on relentlessly. Her brain feels empty, and at the same time, full of nothing but him. All she can think about is where he has gone, if he’s still in Korea or traveled abroad. Her thoughts sharpen slowly, and she begins to search online for the flights leaving the country on the days after she last remembers him at her side. She call Ina and demands any information she can give, begins to compile a list of people to talk to, of banks to call and accounts to check.
Without any effort, she becomes consumed with her new mission of finding him instead of waiting and wishing for him to come back.
(She doesn’t notice it when her period is late.)