Unless he was seeing things, the person who had just walked in through the rear door was Lee Jei.
She wore a floaty apricot blouse and pale blue trousers, with a silk scarf wound around her neck.
Iheon knew exactly what she was hiding under that scarf.
The marks he’d bitten into her all night. And yet Jei’s face was perfectly calm, as though none of last night’s mess had ever happened.
Only once every last student had cleared out did Jei pull the door shut and start down the steps.
As if what had gone on until dawn, too brutal to be called affection, hadn’t left a single wound on her.
Her full lips had a sheen to them from a pale tinted balm, and her eyes creased softly, the way they always did.
He hadn’t expected to already miss the face that had come apart and wept beneath him...
That innocent face was so merciless it set his teeth on edge.
“What are you doing here?”
Iheon tossed the blue marker in his hand onto the desk with a soft clack as he asked.
“We need to talk.”
Reaching the bottom of the steps, Jei stopped in front of the podium where he stood. At the word talk, he let out a scoff.
“About what?”
“About us.”
Us. The feelings he’d barely managed to settle tilted sideways again. Had they ever once been an us?
“Ah. Hearing you say ‘us’ is so unfamiliar I nearly forgot. We’re still ‘married,’ aren’t we.”
He’d received the divorce papers, but he hadn’t filed them with the court, so legally they were still husband and wife.
And since a divorce required both of them to appear in court, he couldn’t end it alone either.
A sneer escaped him as Iheon leaned back against the lecturer’s table, propping himself at an angle.
“I didn’t come yesterday hoping to be forgiven.”
After a staring match with silence stretched between them, Jei was the first to speak.
“Hate me as much as you want. Blame me all you like.”
She looked up at him with an expression calmer than he’d ever seen on her.
“But there’s something I have to ask of you.”
“Ha!”
Apparently there was no end to the ways she could treat him like a fool.
No one could behave like this unless they were toying with him. She really was something.
Iheon unfolded his arms and pushed himself upright off the table. His lowered gaze dropped onto Jei’s face at a steeper, harder angle.
“What exactly are we?”
His black eyes, filmed over with contempt, could not have been harder.
“Iheon.”
“I can’t even begin to fathom how little you must think of me, to act like this.”
“Don’t start with the anger, just listen to what I have to-”
“You vanish when you feel like vanishing, come back when you feel like coming back. And when you want a divorce, you mail me a single sheet of paper.”
“That was...”
“And now you’re asking me for a favour?”
At that jab, Jei gently released the lip she’d rolled between her teeth.
“...I know how it must sound to you. I know it looks shameless.”
“Shameless? Shameless, you say? Lee Jei. You think this is merely a question of shame?”
Iheon raked his hair back off his forehead, rough about it. That she would dare put the word shame in her mouth.
Fine. Then what on earth had he been to her?
“What am I to you? Forget being your husband, did you ever think of me as a person, the same as you? A person with feelings. With a self.”
Jei couldn’t answer right away. That silence alone felt like answer enough to Iheon. He wet his dry, cracked lips with his tongue and laughed, hollow.
“What. You’ve never once thought about that either?”
Professor Gong Iheon, who had lectured with a cool, clinical face in front of several dozen students, was gone.
All that was left was an idiot propping up his pathetic pride in front of the wife who had walked out on him.
Yesterday, and now today again.
Iheon simply could not swallow his anger. And the way she acted as if she understood him drove him just as mad.
Better not to look at her at all. He shut his eyes tight, and then, belatedly, Jei spoke.
“The one person on my side. The only one who’d ever understand me.”
Her voice was surprisingly careful.
“That hasn’t changed. Not even now.”
Iheon’s head dropped. Haha. He made a faint sound that could have been laughing or crying, and when he lifted his head again his brows and his eyes were twisted up tight, his face a wounded thing.
“Fuck. Jei.”
The curse slipped out before he could chew it down, and he went on.
“What kind of person in this world treats their one and only like that?”
She should have just kept her mouth shut to the end. Every time she opens it, it’s a deceit.
I want to stop. All of it. It’s time I let the woman called Lee Jei go.
He had no idea how much power a flimsy sheet of paper could possibly hold, but it struck him that now, finally, the time had come to end this properly.
With that, Iheon took his eyes off Jei. He’d been holding that gaze on her with something close to pitiful stubbornness.
“I’ll sign the divorce agreement today, so let’s just be done with it.”
Turning away, Iheon gathered the papers scattered across the table. He tapped the stack against the desk to square the edges, and when he turned back there was nothing on his face that qualified as an expression.
“Set a date for the court and let me know. Until then, stay at the house or don’t. Do as you like.”
I’ll be the one to move out.
Leaving the neatly cleared table behind him, he walked past Jei. Even at that brushing distance, he didn’t look at her again.
“I’m pregnant.”
The low words, barely loud enough to catch, stopped him where he stood.
“...What?”
What did she just say...
He’d heard her clearly. But he couldn’t tell whether the words that had come in through his ears meant what he thought they meant. It felt like being struck hard across the back of the head.
“Though to be precise, I should say I had been pregnant.”
Iheon turned around like a robot grinding on rusted joints.
“My period stopped and I kept getting these chills, so I went to the hospital, and...”
Jei’s lips moved, her voice unsteady.
“I was already seven weeks along.”
What in the world was she talking about? His mind went blank, as if his brain had thrown up a wall of cognitive dissonance.
They were three years into their marriage. Until Jei left without a word, they’d been reasonably devoted to each other. They hadn’t been distant in bed, either.
They weren’t the sort of lovebirds who couldn’t survive a day apart, but as partners in life they’d been faithful to their roles.
It had been the same with children. They’d never laid out any concrete plan, but they weren’t a childfree couple either.
A child would come when nature saw fit to give them one, that was all, and so neither of them had ever been in a rush.
“The sac was there, but there was no heartbeat.”
“What... what are you saying to me right now?”
“It was a missed miscarriage. They told me it’s a natural thing in early pregnancy, but I hadn’t even known I was pregnant... And then to be told I’d lost it... I couldn’t tell up from down. My head was a mess.”
Iheon couldn’t think at all.
No. He was thinking far too much. So much that nothing would hold still long enough to be grasped.
Pregnant. Seven weeks. The sac. A heartbeat. A missed miscarriage.
Every word out of Jei’s mouth drove itself into his head, one after another. They weren’t words whose meanings escaped him, and yet understanding came agonisingly slow.
“Every single day I waited for that heart to start beating. It never did. I prayed every day for a week. I went to a church, I went to a cathedral.”
Her wide eyes were brimming, but she wouldn’t let the tears fall. As though she were someone with no right to cry, she swiped them away with her palm before they could drop.
“How does a woman become a mother and not even notice there’s a child inside her?”
“...”
“My head hurt, so I took painkillers. My stomach kept turning, so I lived on antacids. What if that’s what killed the baby? I couldn’t get the thought out of my head.”
As if she meant to close the book on everything with this one confession, she held nothing back.
Iheon was another matter.
Only today, at last, was he hearing the truth. The sheaf of papers crumpled in his fist. The corners bit into his palm, and he felt none of it.
“What did you just say?”
“...”
“...you were pregnant?”
“...”
“Why..., why didn’t you tell me?”
What reached him before anything else was guilt over an absence nothing could undo.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I couldn’t work out what I was supposed to say.”
It was a truth he should by every right have known, as her husband, as the child’s father. It had come far too late.
“Is that why you went to America? Without so much as discussing it with me?”
“I’m sorry. Back then I hated myself so much, and I was frightened, and everything felt hopeless. All I could think about was running away. I knew I had to tell you, but I couldn’t make myself open my mouth.”
The day Jei vanished was the day Iheon came home from a seminar on Jeju Island, three days and two nights.
