He hadn’t even known his wife had left. He’d waited for her like a fool.
When he finally picked up his phone, worried that she was home late without a word, the call wouldn’t connect.
She had already been on a plane to America by then. He only found that out two whole days later.
“PD Lee Jei handed in her resignation a little while ago. She said something about going to see her parents in America...”
He’d gone to the broadcasting station hunting for the wife he couldn’t reach. It took running into one of her colleagues there before he knew a thing.
His wife had quit her job and made plans for after, and her husband — the person who should have been closest to her — didn’t know. How was he supposed to take that?
He called his mother-in-law right then and there, but he never got to hear his wife’s voice. All he got was a message passed along: she’s doing fine.
That was the last of Jei that Iheon remembered.
And now, after all of it, she’d been pregnant. She’d lost the baby.
He’d found the answer to the question that had been carving up his head all this time, and in its place new questions grew, and those hurt him all over again.
Why did you go to the hospital alone?
Why wasn’t I there?
Why did I know nothing about it, when the child was ours?
Why are you cruel right down to the very end?
“If something like that happened, that’s all the more reason you should have given me some warning. You should have stayed with me, not run away!”
“I know that. But the person I was then didn’t have the strength to carry your blame.”
Iheon ground his teeth at how selfish her choice had been.
“Is that all I was worth to you? Some bastard who’d turn around and blame his wife for losing their child, something lower than a damn dog—”
“It wasn’t you, it was me! I was the problem! I couldn’t... I couldn’t stand myself.”
“...”
“I didn’t even know I’d been a mother. I didn’t know, and they told me I’d already lost it. The words sounded so strange to me. Being told I’d lost something I never even had.”
“Ha...”
Iheon tipped his chin up toward the ceiling and let out a long, heavy breath. Jei said she’d been desperate enough to run without a single word, and he couldn’t read one inch of a lie in her.
He couldn’t get another word out after that.
He’d been angry enough to want to break her, and it turned out she’d been broken for a long time already.
“I regretted it. Leaving you like that. I mean it. After walking away like that, when I actually tried to come back, I didn’t know how I could face you...”
For someone who regretted it, she’d been shameless enough to rake her nails through his insides however she liked. And now she was playing the fragile one.
“It’s late, but I’m sorry. What happened to our baby, leaving you on your own, all of it. It was my fault.”
“...”
“I know how selfish I was. I won’t ask you to forgive me. If you want the divorce, you can have it.”
That goddamn divorce. Fuck.
Iheon swallowed a bitter smile.
Barely thirty minutes ago he’d been the one offering her a divorce, and now that he knew the truth, hearing the word out of her mouth grated on him.
It wasn’t that the anger was gone.
Not for the half a year she’d left him shut up in an empty house. Not for trying to end it all with a single sheet of divorce paperwork. Not for taking the fact that there’d been a child, and the fact that she’d lost it, and carrying both of them off alone when she ran.
Not one bit of it had become all right.
But now he knew.
Knew it in a way that left him no room to push her any harder.
No room to be any crueler.
No room, in the end, even to hate her.
Fuck.
In front of Lee Jei and nobody else, Iheon turned into a pathetic joke.
In the car on the way home, Iheon kept his mouth clamped shut and his hands on the wheel. Jei, in the passenger seat, stayed just as silent, staring out past the window.
Why did every single light have to catch them today, of all days? The silence turned suddenly unbearable, and Iheon switched on the radio.
The host was in the middle of reading out a listener’s story, beaming away at whatever he found so funny about it.
It was nothing much: someone had gone back to their parents’ place for the first time in ages and come home loaded down with side dishes their mother had packed for them.
Mothers are all like that, the host laughed — terrified their grown child might go hungry, so they’ll shove a whole tub of kimchi and a whole tub of braised beef into your hands before they let you leave. That’s a mother’s love.
A mother’s love.
The fingers tapping at the steering wheel went abruptly still.
Of all the things. Iheon glanced sideways at Jei. Her profile gave him nothing, her eyes on the far side of the glass.
What is she thinking about right now?
A child. They’d had a child. It wasn’t that he doubted what she’d told him, but it was also true that none of it felt real yet.
A daughter, maybe? Or a son?
They say a first daughter takes after her father, and a son after his mother...
While those pointless thoughts ran on, the light ahead refused to change. The radio kept rolling out one cheerful story after another.
Iheon shut the radio off.
His throat had gone bone-dry. Still, neither of them spoke first.
By the time they got home, the sun had nearly set.
The moment the front door opened, an unfamiliar scent found his nose first. A fragrance that had been gone from this house for a long while.
Iheon stepped inside and looked around the living room he’d fled past that morning.
The table that had been shoved crooked was back where it belonged, and the books that had been scattered across the floor were stacked neatly off to one side.
The vase that had been knocked over was standing upright again. And there were new flowers in it.
Lisianthus.
The woman who’d dropped into sleep like she’d fainted — when had she woken up and cleaned all this away? With what sort of face had she gathered up the evidence scattered over the floor? With what going through her head had she gone out and bought those flowers and arranged them?
Jei noticed where his eyes had settled, and she spoke first.
“It felt strange leaving it empty.”
Iheon didn’t answer. Whatever he said, in front of her it would only make him ridiculous.
“The lady at the flower shop hasn’t changed a bit. She asked why I hadn’t come in for so long, and I just said I’d been traveling.”
“...”
“Though once I was actually back, I couldn’t work out what to do first.”
Jei scrunched the tip of her nose, as if trying hard to hide the bitterness underneath.
“So I started with flowers.”
Jei lifted her gaze from the vase and turned to look at him. She watched him quietly for a moment with still, calm eyes, then gave him the rest of what she had to say.
“I figured if I filled in the empty places first, maybe we could start something over.”
He had no idea what it was she wanted to start over.
Still, the spot where shrivelled, half-year-dead stems had been standing was filled with fresh flowers now. And just like that, the bleak mood of the house turned over far too easily.
Over a few flowers. Laughable.
But the thing between two people wasn’t as simple as the flowers in that vase.
Tired of them, swap them out. Wilted, throw them away.
A relationship isn’t a flower. If it’s anything, it’s that porcelain vase.
The kind of thing that, once it breaks, can never go back to what it was.
Iheon’s dry gaze slid from Jei to the flowers, and from the flowers back to Jei.
The bright living room, where even the air had changed, grated on him; at the same time, it made the thing real. That his wife had come back.
Is this really all right?
He couldn’t answer that easily.
Knowing why his wife had left changed nothing.
His head said he understood. But if anyone asked whether he held nothing against her, no, that wasn’t true either.
It wasn’t about losing the child.
It’s that she took what was ours and settled it alone.
There was no way a man like him could know what it felt like for a woman to carry the seed of a life in her belly and lose it before it ever bloomed.
To put it crudely, men were a species that only ever got the pleasant part.
Iheon’s position hadn’t changed.
If we’re husband and wife, at the very least. She should have given him, her husband, some word of it.
Stay with me.
Carry this hurt with me.
If he’d known, seminar be damned, he’d have dropped everything and been on a plane that same hour.
But his wife hadn’t done that.
For all her talk about him being the only one on her side, the one person who’d ever understand her, when she needed someone most she’d treated him like he was on the other side, not the slightest bit of use to her.
He was angry.
Angry enough that even admitting he was angry stung his pride.
The man he normally was wasn’t someone who got handled this way. At least, not as far as anyone outside could see.
He had made his place in academia young, and standing at the lectern he was cooler and clearer than anyone alive.
His voice never rose. He never leaned on feeling and let it blur the heart of a thing.
People trusted his judgement precisely because it was rational and cold-eyed.
So why did it come to this every single time, the moment it was about his wife? He felt clawed raw, left in rags.
Saying he’d go through with the divorce had been impulsive, but half of it was the truth.
He didn’t want to let himself be ruined any further.
And yet.
Facing his wife as she confessed her wrongs in that unsteady voice, what he’d wanted was to hold the very woman he had every right to hate.
Smooth a hand down that thin back, get drunk on the scent of her that seems ready to disappear any second, live on like an idiot who knows nothing. Would that really be so bad?
Even if living like that meant one of the two of them was bound to break.
“What are you thinking about?”
Jei was the one to break the long silence, and Iheon turned his back on her and crossed to the kitchen on the other side of the living room.
He pulled a glass down from the shelf above the sink, filled it at the water purifier and drank it off in one go, soothing the churning in him first.
While the water went down in gulps without a breath between them, scraping at his throat on the way, Iheon worked out in his head what to ask first.
“You said you’d divorce me if that’s what I wanted?”
The Korean plays on 내 편 (“on my side”) against 남의 편 (“on someone else’s side”), which also puns on 남편, “husband.”
