Chapter 7

Unless he was seeing things, the person who entered through the back door of the lecture hall was Jei.

She wore a light apricot blouse, pale blue trousers, and a silk scarf wrapped around her neck.

What was hidden beneath the scarf, Iheon knew.

They were the marks he had bitten into her all night. But Jei’s face was calm, as if the chaotic events of the previous night had never happened.

Only after all the students had left the lecture hall did Jei close the back door and come down the steps.

As if the acts that had continued until dawn—acts too violent to call affection—had left no wound on her at all.

Her plump lips were glossy with a faintly tinted lip balm, and her eyes were softly folded as usual.

He had not known he would already miss the face that had been ruined and weeping beneath him……

That innocent face was so infuriating it made his teeth chatter.

“What are you doing here?”

Iheon tossed the blue marker in his hand onto the desk with a thud and asked.

“Let’s talk.”

Jei, having come all the way down the steps, stopped before the podium where he stood. At her words about talking, he let out a scoff.

“Talk about what.”

“About us.”

Us. The heart he had barely calmed tilted crooked again. Had there ever been an “us” between them?

“Ah—. Hearing ‘us’ is so unfamiliar I almost forgot. We’re still ‘husband and wife,’ aren’t we.”

He had received the divorce papers, but he had not submitted them to the court, so they were still legally married.

To divorce, both of them had to appear at the court together, so he could not finish it alone either.

Iheon spat out a sneer and leaned sideways against the professor’s desk.

“I didn’t come yesterday to ask for forgiveness.”

After a staring contest separated by silence, Jei spoke first.

“Hate me and resent me as much as you want.”

She looked up at him with a calmer expression than ever and said.

“But there’s something I need to ask of you.”

“Ha!”

He was being treated like a fool in every possible way.

If she was not playing with him, she could not possibly act like this. She truly was an incredible woman.

Iheon uncrossed his arms and straightened from where he had been leaning. His lowered gaze fell more steeply over Jei’s face.

“Who the hell do you think we are?”

His black pupils, filled with contempt, were utterly hard.

“Iheon.”

“Just how fucking pathetic must I have looked to you, for you to think you can act like this?”

“Don’t get angry first. Just listen to what I have to say—”

“You disappear when you want to disappear, come back when you want to come back. Send a single sheet of divorce papers when you want a divorce.”

“That’s……”

“And now you have a favor to ask?”

At his sharp rebuke, Jei parted her lips, which she had gently pressed together.

“……I know how my request will sound to you. I know it looks shameless.”

“Shameless? Shameless? Jei. Do you think this is just a matter of being shameless?”

Iheon roughly swept back his forelocks. That she dared bring up the word shameless at all.

Yes. Then what on earth had he been to her?

“What am I to you? Before being your husband—did you ever think of me as a person like you? A person with feelings and a self?”

Jei could not answer right away. From that silence alone, Iheon already felt he had heard the answer. He wet his dry lips with his tongue and laughed hollowly.

“What. Have you never even thought about that?”

Professor Gong Iheon, who lectured before dozens of students with a cool face, had vanished.

All that remained was a fool standing before the wife who had left him, clinging to his wretched pride.

Following yesterday, today too.

Iheon simply could not hold back his anger. Her attitude, as if she understood him, drove him mad as well.

Better not to look at her at all. He shut his eyes tightly, and Jei belatedly opened her mouth.

“The only person on my side who would understand me.”

It was a rather careful voice.

“That thought still hasn’t changed.”

Iheon dropped his head. Haha. He made a faint sound that was neither laughing nor crying, and when he raised his head again, his face was deeply distorted at the brow and around the eyes—a wounded face.

“Fuck. Jei.”

Having spat out a curse he could not swallow in time, he continued.

“What person in the world treats the only one on their side like that?”

She should have just kept her mouth shut to the end. Every time she opened it, it was deception.

He wanted to end it. All of it. He supposed he had to let go of this woman now.

He did not know how much power that single sheet of paper had held, but now he felt the time had truly come to part properly.

With those words, Iheon withdrew his eyes from Jei. It had been a gaze he had clung to with foolish stubbornness.

“I’ll sign the divorce agreement by the end of today, so let’s just end this.”

Turning away, Iheon gathered the materials scattered on the table. He struck the bundled papers on the desk to align the edges, and when he turned back, his face held no expression at all.

“Set a date for the court and contact me. Until then, stay in that house or not, do as you like.”

Because I’ll be the one to leave.

Leaving the neatly organized table behind, he passed Jei. Even at the distance that brought them close enough to brush against each other, he did not look at her anymore.

“I’m pregnant.”

The low words, barely audible, stopped him in his tracks.

“……What?”

What did she just say……

He had definitely heard it. He could not tell whether the words that had flowed in through his ears meant what he thought they meant. It felt as if he had been struck hard on the back of the head.

“To be precise, it’s more accurate to say I was pregnant.”

Iheon turned around like a creaking robot.

“My period stopped and my body kept feeling cold, so I went to the hospital, and……”

Jei’s lips stirred with a trembling voice.

“I was already seven weeks along.”

What on earth was she saying? His brain felt blank, as if it were suffering from cognitive dissonance.

They had been a married couple of three years. Until Jei left without a word, they had been fairly faithful to each other. Neither had been reluctant about marital relations.

They were not a lovebird couple who would die without each other, but as life companions, they had been faithful to their roles.

The same went for a child. They had never made concrete plans, but they were not a DINK couple either.

A child was simply something that would come naturally when it came, so they had never felt urgency about it.

“The gestational sac was visible, but there was no heartbeat.”

“What, are you, saying right now?”

“It was a missed miscarriage. They say it’s natural in early pregnancy, but I didn’t even know I was pregnant……. And then when they told me I had miscarried……. I didn’t know what was what, and my head was a mess.”

Iheon could not think at all.

No. He was thinking too much. So much that he could not properly grasp anything.

Pregnant. Seven weeks. Gestational sac. Heartbeat. Missed miscarriage.

The words coming from Jei’s mouth lodged in his head one by one. They were not words whose meaning he did not know, yet his understanding was slow.

“Day after day, I waited for the heart to beat. But it didn’t. For a week, I prayed every day. I went to church, I went to the cathedral.”

Her large eyes were full of moisture, but she did not let the tears fall. As if she were someone with no right to cry, she quickly wiped them with her palm before they could drop.

“How could a mother not notice that there was a child inside her belly?”

“…….”

“I took medicine because my head hurt, and I lived on digestive pills because I felt nauseous. So what if that’s why the baby died? I couldn’t shake that thought.”

As if she intended to settle everything with this confession, she did not hold back her words.

But Iheon was different.

It was a truth he was hearing only today for the first time. The bundle of materials in his grip was crushed. The edge of the paper dug into his palm, but he felt no pain.

“What did you just say?”

“…….”

“……You were pregnant?”

“…….”

“Why…… didn’t you tell me?”

What came to him first was guilt over an absence that could never be undone.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I didn’t know what to say, and I couldn’t sort it out.”

It was a truth that had come far too late—something he should have known as her husband and as the child’s father.

“Is that why you went to the United States? Without consulting me, without a single word?”

“I’m sorry. Back then I hated myself so much, I was scared and at a loss, and all I wanted was to run away. I knew I had to tell you, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.”

The day Jei disappeared was the day Iheon returned from attending a three-day, two-night seminar held in Jeju Island.