Chapter 8

Without even knowing his wife had left, he had waited like a fool.

When his wife, who had not contacted him, came home late, he picked up his phone, but the signal did not reach her.

He only learned two days later that she had already been on a flight to the United States at that time.

“PD Jei submitted her resignation a while ago. She said she was going to see her parents in the United States……”

He headed to the broadcasting station to find his wife, who could not be reached. It was only after meeting her coworker there that he learned the truth.

How was he supposed to accept his wife’s resignation and her plans afterward, when even her husband—the person who should have been closest to her—knew nothing?

He called his mother-in-law right then, but he could not hear his wife’s voice. He was only told that she was doing well.

That was the last of Jei that Iheon remembered.

And now she was telling him she had been pregnant and had miscarried.

He had found the answer to the questions that had been tearing through his mind, but new questions grew and hurt him again.

Why did you go to the hospital alone?

Why wasn’t I there?

Why, when it was our child, did I know nothing?

Why are you cruel to the very end?

“If something like that happened, you should have told me all the more. We should have been together—you shouldn’t have run away!”

“I know. But back then, I didn’t have the confidence to bear your resentment.”

Iheon ground his teeth at Jei’s selfish choice.

“Was that all I was to you? A bastard who would only resent his wife for losing a child—no, worse than a dog—”

“It wasn’t you, it was me! I couldn’t bear myself, I…… couldn’t stand myself.”

“…….”

“I didn’t even know I was a mother. I didn’t know, and they told me I had already lost it. Those words felt so strange. They said I had lost something I never even had.”

“Ha……”

Iheon tilted his chin toward the ceiling and let out a long sigh. In Jei’s words—that she had been desperate enough to run away without saying anything—he could not read a single trace of a lie.

Iheon could no longer continue speaking.

He was angry enough to want to ruin her, and yet she had already been ruined long ago.

“I regretted it. Leaving you like that. Truly. After leaving like that, when it came time to go back, I didn’t know how I could face you……”

And yet, for someone like that, she had brazenly clawed at his insides and played the weak one.

“I’m sorry, even though it’s late. For what happened to our child, for leaving you alone—it was all my fault.”

“…….”

“I know. How selfish I was. I won’t ask for forgiveness. If you want a divorce, we can divorce.”

That damn divorce.

Iheon swallowed a bitter smile.

Just thirty minutes ago, he had said with his own mouth that they should divorce, and now that he knew the truth, the word divorce grated on him.

The anger had not disappeared.

Leaving him in an empty house for half a year, trying to end everything with a single sheet of divorce papers, and running away while holding alone both the fact that there had been a child and the fact that the child was lost.

Nothing had become okay.

But now he knew.

He could not push her further.

He could not be crueler.

He could not even hate her in the end.

Fuck.

Only before Jei did Iheon become a pathetic fool.

* * *

In the car on the way home, Iheon gripped the steering wheel with his mouth shut tight. Jei, sitting beside him, also stared beyond the window in silence.

Why did they hit every red light today of all days? Suddenly uncomfortable with the silence, Iheon turned on the radio.

The host reading a listener’s story was beaming, as if something was so amusing.

It was a trivial story about going down to one’s parents’ home for the first time in a while and coming back loaded with side dishes her mother had packed.

The host laughed, saying mothers are all like that—that a mother’s love was sending her grown child off with a whole jar of kimchi and a whole pot of braised beef just in case they starved.

A mother’s love.

The fingers tapping the steering wheel stopped dead.

Of all things. Iheon glanced sideways at Jei. Her profile, gazing beyond the window, revealed no expression.

What was she thinking now?

A child. To think they had had a child. It was not that he did not believe her words, but it was also true that it did not feel real.

Would it have been a daughter? Or a son?

They say the first daughter takes after her father, and a son after his mother……

While fleeting thoughts continued, the light ahead would not change. On the radio, one amusing story after another continued.

Iheon turned the radio off.

His throat was parched. But no one spoke first.

By the time they arrived home, the sun was nearly setting.

As soon as the front door opened, an unfamiliar scent pierced his nose. It was a fragrance that had been gone from this house for a while.

Stepping inside, Iheon looked around the living room he had passed through that morning as if fleeing.

The table that had been pushed askew was back in place, the books scattered on the floor were neatly arranged to one side.

The fallen vase had been set upright again. And in it were fresh flowers.

They were lisianthus.

When had the woman who had collapsed as if unconscious woken up and cleaned this up? With what face had she gathered the traces scattered on the floor? With what thoughts had she bought and arranged those flowers?

Feeling Iheon’s gaze on the flowers, Jei spoke first.

“It felt strange to leave it empty.”

Iheon did not answer. Whatever answer he gave would only make him pathetic before her.

“The flower shop owner is the same as ever. She asked why I hadn’t come in so long, so I just said I’d been traveling.”

“…….”

“But now that I’m actually back, I didn’t know what to do first.”

As if trying to hide her bitter feelings, Jei wrinkled the tip of her nose.

“So I bought flowers first.”

Taking her eyes from the vase, Jei turned to Iheon. She gazed at him quietly with calm eyes, then added the rest.

“I thought if I filled the empty places first, I might be able to start something again.”

He could not tell what she wanted to start again.

But the place where withered flowers had stood for half a year was now filled with fresh ones. Because of that, the atmosphere of the house, which had been utterly bleak, changed all too easily.

With just a few flowers. Ridiculously so.

But the relationship between people was not such a simple matter as flowers in that vase.

Change them when you tire of them, replace them when they wither.

Relationships between people are not flowers. It would be better if they were that ceramic vase.

Once broken, they can never return to the beginning.

Iheon’s dry gaze drifted from Jei to the flowers, and from the flowers back to Jei.

The bright living room, where even the air seemed different, was irritating, and at the same time, it made him feel it. The fact that his wife had returned.

Was it really all right to leave it like this?

He could not readily answer.

Knowing the reason his wife left did not change anything.

His head said he understood, but if asked whether there was no resentment, that was another matter.

It was not resentment over losing the child.

It was resentment over her decision to handle their matter as hers alone.

The loss felt by a woman who had carried the seed of life in her belly and lost it before it could bloom—a man could never know it.

As the crude saying goes, men are creatures who only make a fuss about feelings.

Iheon’s thoughts had not changed.

At least if they were husband and wife. She should have given him, her husband, even a hint.

Tell him to stay by her side.

Tell him to share the pain.

If he had known, he would have thrown aside the seminar and everything else and flown straight back that very moment.

But his wife had not.

She had called him the only person on her side who would understand her, and yet when she needed him most, she had treated him as an outsider of no use at all.

He was angry.

So angry that even admitting he was angry hurt his pride.

The original him would not have been the kind of man to be treated like this. At least, that was how it looked from the outside.

Having established himself in academia at a young age and standing at the podium, he was a man cooler and clearer than anyone.

His voice never rose, and he never let emotion obscure the essence.

People trusted his rational, cool judgment.

But why was it that whenever it came to his wife, he always ended up like this? He felt cruelly scraped and torn to rags.

The words that they should divorce had been spoken impulsively, but half of it had been sincere.

He did not want to destroy himself any longer.

And yet.

Facing his wife as she confessed her fault in a trembling voice, he wanted to hold the woman he should have hated.

To stroke her thin back, to be drunk on her scent that seemed ready to vanish, and to live like a fool who knew nothing—would that be so bad?

Even if living like that meant one of them would inevitably be destroyed.

“What are you thinking?”

After the long silence, Jei spoke first. Turning his back to her, Iheon headed to the kitchen on the opposite side of the living room.

He took a glass from the shelf above the sink, filled it with water from the purifier, and drank it in one go, first soothing his dizzy insides.

As the water he gulped down without even breathing scratched its way down his throat, Iheon organized his thoughts on what to ask first.

“You said you’d divorce if I wanted, right?”