Clack. Iheon set the glass down and faced Jei across the island counter.
“Did you mean that?”
“I meant it.”
“Is that so?”
“I’m the one who did wrong. How could I cling to you after that?”
“Or is it just that you don’t want it badly enough to cling?”
“You know that isn’t what I meant.”
“It sounds exactly the same to me.”
“And you’re the one who never goes back on a decision once you’ve made it.”
“...”
“I was giving you the choice. The way I chose to run back then, you can leave too, if living with me like this is too much to bear—”
“Don’t play the saint. I never asked for that kind of consideration.”
Jei looked at him steadily, then let out a small sigh.
“And if I cling to you and say I don’t want a divorce? Would you even be willing to take me back?”
“Let me ask you one thing.”
“What is it?”
“In those six months without you, did it even once cross your mind to wonder how I was living?”
Jei dropped her eyes to the floor for a moment, her lips moving a few times around nothing, and then she met his gaze again.
“At first, no. Carrying myself was already more than I could manage. I had no room to think.”
“...”
“But as time went on, I started worrying about you, left alone in an empty house I’d walked out of. I wondered about you, I missed you, I wanted to see you.”
“You didn’t answer a single one of dozens of calls and texts, and you call that...”
Iheon let the words trail off and clenched his jaw. His temples throbbed with the effort of swallowing the anger that had surged up again.
“If you were me, would you believe that?”
“You’re right... Even to me, I sound shameless.”
“...”
“I was so blinded by my own wound that I never realized you could be hurt too. No, the truth is, I looked away from it.”
Jei bent her lips faintly, as if mocking herself.
“Do you hate a shameless woman like me?”
“What?”
“I know I have no right to open my mouth at all, but...”
Jei swallowed a breath with difficulty and went on. Her two hands, clasped in front of her belly, were laced together hard enough to drain the knuckles white.
“I’d like it if you, at least, didn’t look away from me.”
Three hours had passed since the study door closed.
The papers he was supposed to be reviewing lay spread across the desk in disarray.
It took Iheon reading the same paragraph a fourth time to admit he hadn’t understood a single line.
He pulled off his glasses, all but tossed them onto the desk, and rubbed hard at the space between his brows.
It was a shameless thing to ask.
She had looked away from him utterly for half a year, and now she was telling him that he, of all people, shouldn’t do that to her.
If it had been anyone but Jei, he’d have laughed in her face the instant he heard it.
Iheon sank deep into the back of his chair. His eyes went to the firmly shut study door. Not a sound carried from beyond it.
He still couldn’t believe his wife had come back, and yet the first thought to reach him was that she might already be gone again.
His gaze hardened.
In the end he got up out of the chair when it was coming on two in the morning.
The living room lights were off.
Don’t tell me...
His steps toward the bedroom turned restless.
He didn’t want to check. The moment he checked, he’d be admitting that Jei’s absence still had him by the throat.
But whatever his will had to say about it, his hand threw the bedroom door wide open, and his eyes went straight to the bed.
Fuck.
Iheon confirmed that the bed was empty and muttered the curse under his breath.
Again. She’d clearly vanished without a word, again.
“Ha. Haha.”
An empty laugh broke out of him on its own. The hollow breath that escaped his mouth turned into a blade and gouged at his heart.
With no way to hide how gutted he felt, he pressed one large hand to his forehead.
If he’d known he would lose her again this pointlessly, he should have told her to beg his forgiveness and cling to him instead. Should have screamed at her that maybe, just maybe, he’d have taken her back. He regretted not doing it.
Just then, a rustling sound came from the silent living room.
He turned his head toward it and didn’t move for a while. Then he strode out of the bedroom.
The living room, drowned in dark, was still. Only the faint glow leaking from the appliances in the kitchen traced the outlines of things in a dim blur.
Again came the sound of fabric shifting.
It was the sofa.
Iheon felt along the wall and flicked the switch. The instant the room brightened, a hollow, deflated look surfaced on his rigid face.
Jei, the one he’d thought had disappeared, was asleep, curled up at one end of the sofa.
She lay on her side in an uncomfortable knot, both hands gathered and clasped at her chest. The thin summer blanket had slid down below her knees and hung half off onto the floor.
“...Lee Jei.”
At the low call, Jei’s eyelids trembled faintly. But she couldn’t have surfaced all the way out of sleep, because all she did was shift a little.
Only then did he take in the slippers set below the sofa and the phone on the table. There wasn’t a trace anywhere of someone getting ready to leave.
The breath that had been crushing his lungs finally let go.
Relieved. How absurd of me.
Iheon bit down hard on the inside of his lip.
That he couldn’t endure even that short stretch, that he’d behaved like a man whose floor had dropped out from under him, was more galling than anything.
“You really do find all kinds of ways to make an idiot out of a man.”
Murmuring to himself, he picked up the hem of the blanket trailing on the floor.
He looked down at his sleeping wife’s face with displeasure, and then, in the end, drew the blanket up over her curled shoulders.
Back in the study, he dragged a hand down his face.
And he admitted it. That a moment ago, he’d behaved exactly like a dog abandoned by its owner.
He could read the minds of criminals so well, and yet faced with anything to do with his wife, the person who should have been closest to him, he collapsed this helplessly.
What on earth had the man he used to be believed he knew, to be so certain about his own wife?
Lee Jei.
Spent her childhood in America, returned to Korea at twenty, graduated from Hanguk University with a degree in Media and Communications.
Former PD on the investigative reporting team, Current Affairs and Culture Division, HJBC broadcasting station.
Both parents currently residing in Chicago.
That was the résumé he could recite if he were introducing the person called Lee Jei to someone.
So then. What kind of person was the person called Lee Jei?
For breakfast she preferred something simpler than rice — a salad, or cereal — and she drank orange juice instead of coffee.
She couldn’t stand not knowing a thing; reading a book, she’d flip to the back pages before the front ones, and even in the middle of a movie she’d open a search window and only relax once she’d confirmed the ending.
She was a light sleeper who often shifted and turned in the night, and she liked to fall asleep gathered into a broad chest.
On rainy days she left the windows open for no reason at all, and though she felt the cold badly, she insisted on thin clothes.
When she was in a good mood her toes bobbed; when her head got crowded with thoughts she’d chew and chew at the inside of her lip.
When she was angry she didn’t raise her voice — she simply spoke less. And when she was truly furious, she smiled instead.
Of course, Iheon knew that smile wasn’t real.
On the eighteenth of every month she stopped by the flower shop near the house and came home with an armful of flowers, filling every corner of the place with their scent.
It wasn’t that she had a favorite flower; she simply bought whatever was freshest that day.
Those were the things Iheon knew about his wife, Lee Jei.
He knew so many of them that he’d vaguely prided himself on knowing her inside out.
And yet the wife who had come back didn’t seem to be the Lee Jei he knew.
No. Had he ever actually known a single thing about her properly in the first place?
He couldn’t say why, but the unease rose in him hard: he couldn’t leave things as they were.
Iheon had no intention of remaining the useless bastard who didn’t even know why his own wife had left.
What his wife was hiding. What she was enduring. What she was afraid of.
Before it got any later — even now — he had to know.
And to do that, he’d start by hearing out the favor she had come all the way to his lecture hall to ask.
The next evening, when Iheon came home from work and opened the front door, he heard someone stirring in the living room. A moment later, Jei appeared.
She must have jumped up from the sofa in a hurry — the hair she’d swept over to one side was a mess.
Having gone to the trouble of coming out to the entryway to meet him, she apparently hadn’t decided what she was actually going to say. She hesitated, then offered the most colorless greeting imaginable.
“You’re back?”
Iheon bent to take off his shoes and glanced up at her once. When their eyes met, the corners of her mouth lifted awkwardly.
As he stepped up out of the entryway, Jei twisted her body aside to clear a path. Iheon passed her without a word.
The first thing he noticed when he walked into the living room was the laptop sitting on the table in front of the sofa.
Document files and several internet windows were stacked up on the screen, and beside it, notepaper covered edge to edge in writing lay scattered about along with a ballpoint pen.
