Chapter Text
….
The piano sat in the corner of the living room like a monument to everything Go Eunhyuk despised.
Its black surface gleamed under the soft lighting, immaculate and untouched—except for the faint dust that had begun to settle on its keys over the past three weeks. His fingers hadn't touched them since the last time his father had brought her home.
Her. The blonde music teacher from school. The one who smiled too brightly at faculty meetings and always found excuses to linger near the practice rooms when Eunhyuk was playing. The one who now stood in his mother's kitchen, pouring herself a glass of wine like she belonged there.
Eunhyuk stood in the doorway of the living room, watching the scene unfold with the detached precision of a nature documentary narrator.
His father—Go Taeho, renowned concert pianist, beloved by critics and students alike—laughed at something the woman said, his hand resting casually on her lower back. The gesture was intimate, practiced. Familiar.
How many times has she been here? Eunhyuk wondered. How many times did I pretend not to notice?
His mother was on another business trip. Seoul to Tokyo to Singapore, a circuit she ran every three months like clockwork. She was a good lawyer, a better wife, and—in Eunhyuk's increasingly bitter estimation—a complete fool when it came to her marriage.
Why doesn't she just leave him?
The question gnawed at him every time he saw his father's infidelity paraded through their home like some perverse performance art. His mother had to know. She was too intelligent not to. And yet she stayed, smiling through family dinners, pretending the expensive gifts his father bought her were tokens of affection rather than guilt offerings.
And now she was standing not far away from them, behind his father also shaking and with fear in her eyes.
“She is crying” Eunhyuk thought for a moment.
His right ear throbbed with a phantom ache—the same dull, persistent pain that had never quite faded since that night in middle school. The night his father threw a flower pot at him with all his might and it hit him square in the right ear.
"You think you can embarrass me like this?" His father's voice had been a snarl, his eyes wild with a rage Eunhyuk had never seen before. "You think you can go around telling people about my personal affairs? Who do you think you are?"
"I didn't—"
"Liar!" The blow had come again, this time with a closed fist. "You're just like your mother. Spineless. Useless. Can't even play a simple Chopin étude without making mistakes."
Eunhyuk had crumpled to the ground, his right ear ringing with a sound like shattered glass. The ringing had never stopped.
The doctors said there was nothing they could do—the damage was permanent. He would never hear properly from that ear again.
His father had told everyone it was an accident. A fall. Eunhyuk had nodded along, his face carefully blank, because what else was he supposed to do? His father was Go Taeho, the beloved concert pianist and intelligent professor. His father was the one who could make or break his future. His father was the one who expected Eunhyuk to follow in his footsteps, to become a prodigy, to be perfect.
And Eunhyuk had tried. Hours upon hours at the piano, his fingers bleeding, his eyes burning, all for his father's cold nod of approval that never quite came.
"Not good enough."
"Your phrasing is sloppy."
"Your mother's family produced no talent, and apparently neither have you."
The words had become a litany, a catechism of inadequacy that Eunhyuk had internalized so deeply he could no longer tell where his father's voice ended and his own began. He turned away from the doorway, his jaw tight.
The unwelcome and unwanted memories of the past and present kept reminding him that this house wasn’t home. And probably never will be.
He grabbed his black hoodie from the back of a chair and slipped out the front door without a word. Neither his father nor the mistress noticed. They never did.
….