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Tae Su Mi had spent most of her life pretending she wasn't haunted.
She walked through her childhood as if unseen hands weren't clinging to her shoulders, curling around her throat—steering her, shaping her, pressing down with every step.
She moved through her days with practiced ease, as if her parents' expectations weren't always trailing her like shadows, whispering through every choice she made.
She grew up with her head held high, as if she wasn't constantly looking over her shoulder, hoping for their approval.
And when she finally succeeded—when she stood at the top of the world she had bled to reach—the hands dulled, loosened their grip. The shadows faded.
Only to be replaced by new ones.
The rough, calloused fingers of a man she had turned her back on.
The wailing of an infant she had left in his arms, echoing in the hollow spaces of her chest.
Their shadows lingered at the altar as her husband slid a ring onto her finger. Their presence stirred whenever she cradled her son, whenever she held her husband, whenever she silently promised herself that this time, she would be better.
Tae Su Mi tried to ignore it, telling herself that ghosts could only follow you if you turned around and looked at them.
So she never looked.
She lived as if none of it had ever happened.
And if her eyes ever happened to stray to the little girl she passed, to every toy on display, to every tiny dress in a store window, to every mother and daughter laughing on the street, she would turn her gaze away, and let the moment pass like a shadow across her face.
She buried that part so thoroughly she sometimes forgot they existed.
It almost worked.
But ghosts don't vanish just because you refuse to see them.
Her father had once warned her, bitter and cold, that her mistake would come back to ruin everything she worked for.
And he was right.
Because one day, the ghost she had spent a lifetime running from sat before her. Not angry. Not vengeful.
Just... tentative. Scanning her face for something familiar. Speaking politely. Stuttering over the word mother, as if unsure whether she was allowed to claim her at all.
It was unbearable.
So Tae Su Mi asked the one question that had haunted her the most.
"Hey," she called, because she didn't know how else to address her. "Do you resent me?"
The silence that followed was suffocating.
She steeled herself. She didn't know what she was hoping for. A part of her believed she already knew the answer. She simply needed confirmation. To finally hear it spoken aloud. To have her guilt reflected back in words she could no longer ignore.
But instead.
"It was nice when we looked at the tree on top of the hill in Sodeok-dong," Woo Young Woo said softly, her red-tinged eyes lowered. "I wanted to meet you at least once. It was nice to meet you."
Tae Su Mi could have endured hatred. She had braced herself for it. A condemnation would have been a kind of absolution—a punishment she could accept and carry quietly for the rest of her life.
It would have been easier to act cruel if the child had mirrored her cruelty. If she'd hurled back all the things Su Mi expected but feared hearing. If she had been resentful, accusatory, as Su Mi expected her to be. As Su Mi knew she herself would have been, in her place.
But this? She didn't know what to do with it.
With the child who mirrored not her guilt, but her longing.
People say that ghosts couldn't hurt you.
But there she was, frozen, as sharp pain twisted in her chest.
Her mouth trembled. Tears slipped free, betraying the wounds she had fought so hard to conceal. She forced herself to swallow the sobs, to close her eyes and will the weakness away, just as she had taught herself to do long ago.
Because she believed she had no right to weep.
No right to mourn what she had willingly given up.
She had made a decision, and now she had to stand by it.
Move forward.
And yet, the haunting didn't end just because she finally faced it.
If anything, it worsened.
Sleep eluded her.
Work, once her refuge, became a blur of restless hours. Again and again, her fingers hovered over search bars, typing and retyping Woo Young Woo, looking for glimpses of a life she had no part in.
Soon, it became too much to carry alone.
So she told her mother, desperate for instruction.
But for the first time, her mother didn't dictate her what she should do. She simply asked what she was going to do.
She knew everything she had worked her whole life to achieve was at stake. Her reputation. Her position. Her family. Everything.
So Tae Su Mi made a decision.
She would confront her past directly.
Sever it cleanly, so it could never touch her again.
She walked into the small gimbap store as if unshaken, unaffected by the photographs lining the shelves and walls—the very ones she hadn't found online but had quietly hoped to see.
She spoke with ice in her voice, and delivered words like knives, as if the man before her had never mattered. As if he hadn't once been someone she knew. Trusted.
A part of her resented him—for showing up again, for not hiding well enough, for letting the child go to Hanbada.
She wasn't naive. She knew Gwang Ho had to be aware of what Han Seon Yeong was planning. Why else would Young Woo speak of wanting to free herself from her father's grasp by leaving Hanbada? Young Woo was brilliant, but Su Mi didn't believe Seon Yeong had brought her in solely because of that.
There was something more. And Su Mi hated Gwang Ho for playing along.
She wished ghosts could be banished with anger or denial.
But that's not how they worked.
You couldn't drive them away by spitting venom or pretending they never existed.
They only clung tighter.
And the only way to quiet them was to make peace.
Su Mi realized that just before her confirmation hearing—when she met with Young Woo again.
She nearly turned her away, but some part of her—the part that spent restless nights looking up stuff about her—couldn't.
Afterward, Tae Su Mi walked to her confirmation hearing like a ghost herself. She felt like she was floating, yet each step weighed heavier than the last.
She had spent her whole life putting herself first.
Her desires. Her interests. Her ambitions.
She had always walked toward her future with her eyes fixed forward, choosing what would take her farther.
But in that moment, standing on the cusp of everything she had ever worked for, she looked back.
She thought of her son, who once looked at her with shining, trusting eyes.
And of Young Woo. Who kept shattering her walls and breaking her heart.
Who had given her a chance to do right, not for the past, but for the boy Su Mi still had.
"Let's allow Sang Hyeon to testify," she told her husband quietly over dinner that night.
He looked up, surprised. "Are you sure?"
"Yes," she said, her voice even, eyes on her food. "If we refuse, Hanbada will leak it. This way, at least, we can keep our dignity. It won't cost us much."
She could feel her husband still watching her. Searching her face. As if he knew there was more she wasn't saying.
After a moment, he exhaled. "Okay. You don't need to be Minister anyway."
She looked up. Her husband offered a small smile.
"Go talk to Sang Hyeon," he said. "I'm sure he's waiting for you."
She smiled and nodded.
It was not an apology.
It was not redemption.
But it was something.
A beginning.
A small, painful step toward making peace with the ghosts that would follow her always. Because some decisions, once made, cannot be undone.
You can only live with them.
Walk with them.
And even if she had forfeited the right to mourn, to regret, to be forgiven—
She could still choose, in the ruins, to be better than she had been—for Sang Hyeon who still had her.
Then maybe, she could still be a mother to the child she lost in some way.