A week passed.
In all that time, Muerte kept silent, as though the whole thing had been a lie. No new emails. No texts.
Iheon checked the alley where the photo had been taken, and the area around the house, over and over. He found nothing he could point to as a trace of the man.
He had CCTV installed at the front gate and the entrance.
He considered going to the police too, but he had far too little to go on. Next to nothing.
A hunch that someone might have killed someone, plus a single email from an unknown source, was never going to get the police moving.
They couldn’t even be sure a murder had actually happened. With no scene and no victim to point to, the case wouldn’t so much as get filed.
And so, while that week slipped away, Iheon and Jei slept in the same bed.
Jei would go into the bedroom first and lie down on the very edge, and a while later Iheon would stretch out beside her.
There was no such thing as a goodnight.
Even after the light went out, he lay with his eyes open, taking the measure of the dark. When the quiet had stretched on a while, he heard her breathing settle into a rhythm.
She’s asleep. So at least for now she won’t disappear.
The absurdity of being soothed by nothing more than the sound of her peaceful breathing made him swallow a bitter laugh.
In the small hours he would reach out half-asleep and jerk awake, startled.
The woman’s body lying a hand’s span away felt familiar and foreign at the same time.
The third night.
Unable to stand the awkwardness any longer, Jei spoke first.
“Good night.”
She already had her back to him, her eyes closed. It didn’t sound like something she’d said expecting an answer.
The next morning, waking up, Iheon noticed the distance between them had changed.
Jei had moved further in than the day before. By about the width of a hand. There was still empty space left between them, but at least she wasn’t clinging precariously to the edge the way she had that first night.
After that, the first thing Iheon did every morning when he opened his eyes was check the place beside him. As if it were a habit he’d had for years.
On the seventh morning, he woke up facing her.
He couldn’t remember when he’d turned over. The first thing he saw when his eyes opened was his wife’s sleeping face in the pale wash of sunlight.
Her cheek was slightly squashed against the pillow, her lips loosely parted. Defenceless.
Once upon a time, she’d have looked so lovely sleeping that deeply that his hand would have moved before anything else.
He’d have brushed the hair off her forehead and kissed it, hauled her into his chest and soaked in the sheer peace of it.
And his wife, drunk on sleep, would have burrowed into the familiar chest of her husband, scattering warm, heated breath below his collarbone, whining that she wanted to sleep just a little longer.
Iheon hesitated, and in the end he reached out. He drew his fingertips slowly down past her temple and lifted the loose strands stuck to her cheek away.
The instant they barely grazed that skin, soft with fine down, his fingers twitched.
She stirred a little, as if chasing the warmth flickering against her cheek, and leaned into his palm.
He thought she’d woken, but her eyes were still closed.
Her sleeping face was serene.
Like someone who could get on just fine alone, whether he was beside her or not.
Shameless of her.
Before he met Lee Jei, Iheon had been the same way.
Nothing had been lacking. Being on his own was far more familiar, far more comfortable, than living pressed up against another person.
To Iheon, quiet was rest, and solitude was as good as a friend.
And then Jei had gone and changed him, entirely as she pleased.
Using love as a weapon, she’d turned his solitude into loneliness, and made a man who had been whole on his own into something incomplete.
It wasn’t that having her had filled him.
It was that only once he had her did the fear of losing her come into being.
Worst of all was that he seemed to be the only one who’d changed.
She looked like she could go back to being alone at any moment, while he already couldn’t stand a life without her in it.
He wanted to carve the same lack into that serene face.
Deep and vicious enough that without him she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t smile.
He hadn’t known love was such a low-grade, nasty thing to feel.
I still don’t know how I’m supposed to treat you.
Whether I hate you. Or miss you.
The truth was that every nerve in him stood on end at the thought that she might vanish again, enough to make him resent her for coming back at all.
It would have been easier if he’d been the one to get sick of it and leave.
If she’d said the love had gone cold, that she wanted someone else, then he could have made some kind of choice: cling to her in a miserable heap, or let her go like it was nothing.
Instead he’d been left hanging, helpless, for half a year. And all that time, Jei said, she’d been hurting alone.
Leaving him no room to even hate her in peace.
“Whether I’m supposed to treat you like nothing ever happened, or push you away as hard as you hurt me.”
Gazing at Jei’s sleeping face, Iheon muttered it to himself.
“You’re too difficult, Jei.”
Lee Jei
[An email came from Muerte.]
Iheon had been on his way out of his office; his hand stopped dead on the handle of his briefcase.
He’d just finished putting his jacket on. At the top of his phone screen sat Jei’s message, arrived mere seconds ago.
Iheon hit the call button at once.
Jei picked up before it had even rung twice.
—Hello?
“When did the email come?”
—Just now. I got a notification and checked, and it was him.
“What does it say this time?”
—I haven’t opened it yet. I wanted to look at it together, once you’re home.
“Got it. I’ll be there soon, so wait for me.”
He was about to hang up, then spoke again.
“Has anything been off? Anyone loitering outside the house, anything strange?”
—Not really? Oh, one piece of mail came, but it was from an insurance company.
“I’ll be there within the hour. Keep everything locked up.”
—You be careful on the way too.
He walked out of his office faster than usual.
Iheon took the elevator down to the underground car park, got into his car and started the engine.
Right up until he cleared the campus, the roads were fairly packed. Unable to get any real speed out of the car, he found the red tail lights of the queue ahead unusually grating.
Every time he got caught at a light he checked the clock on the centre console, but he didn’t go forcing his way between lanes over it.
If he rushed and got into an accident, all it would do was make him later getting home.
Once he turned into Seorae Village he didn’t drive straight to the house, but took a loop around the back lanes first. No one who stood out, no unfamiliar cars.
Iheon parked, got out, and stopped in front of the gate.
He tipped his head back slightly toward the wall where the trumpet creeper hung in a riot of blossom, and there was the CCTV camera he’d installed a week ago. Positioned so that you wouldn’t notice it unless you looked closely.
So far it hadn’t caught anyone suspicious. Still, just in case, he’d set it to push an alert to his phone whenever it detected movement.
In a week, all the screen had picked up was delivery drivers, residents passing through the lane, and a stray cat that liked to walk the top of the wall.
Iheon opened the CCTV app and checked it one more time.
Three forty in the afternoon. A man in a navy cap had been caught on camera. He’d stayed about ten seconds. The postman who’d delivered the mail Jei had mentioned, most likely.
After that, nothing of note had been detected.
Iheon slipped the phone into his pocket and stepped through the gate. In the silent garden, the only sound was the rustle of leaves in the hot wind.
He punched in the door code and the lock released with a short electronic chirp. He was toeing off his shoes beside a pair of black sneakers when Jei came out of the living room to the inner door.
“Welcome home.”
Iheon stepped inside, accepting her greeting.
On the kitchen island sat a laptop and a torn-open envelope.
“It was a car insurance renewal notice.”
Iheon shrugged off his jacket, hung it over the back of a chair and rolled up his shirtsleeves. While he did, Jei opened the laptop.
He washed his hands at the sink, then came to stand beside her. Her inbox was already up on the screen.
At the very top of it sat a single unread message.
Sender: Santa_muerte.
But the subject line wasn’t Who am I? this time. It was something else.
Subject: The First Devil.
In his earlier email, Muerte had said he’d killed three devils. And today, it seemed, he meant to reveal one of them.
She opened the message and black letters came up on the screen.
「The devil builds his house upon someone’s misfortune, drinks someone’s tears as wine, and grows fat selling someone’s shame.
While no one called him to account, the devil must have believed his sins were buried for good.
But sins hidden beneath the earth do not rot away. They take root, and one day they break through to the surface.
Every sin has a price that must be paid.
“For the wages of sin is death.”
—Romans 6:23
7XX-XX Yeoksam-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Basement level one.」
