Chapter3
893 Words
Han Soo-ah didn't stop shaking until she was inside her car, the doors locked, Hae-sung safely buckled into his booster seat in the back. Even then, her hands vibrated against the steering wheel like tuning forks.
"Mom, why are you crying?"
She touched her cheek, surprised to find it wet. "I'm not crying, baby. I just have something in my eye."
"You always say that." Hae-sung's voice was small, perceptive beyond his years. "Is that man my dad?"
The question hit her like a physical blow. She gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles went white.
"Why would you say that?"
"Because we look the same." Hae-sung said simply, without accusation, the way children state facts about the weather or the colour of the sky. "And he is the man in the picture you always look at."
Soo-ah's breath caught. "What picture?"
"The one in your wallet. The boy with the red hair and the guitar."
Her son, she realised, had been cataloging her secrets for years. She pulled out of the parking lot, merging into traffic with a jerk that made the car behind her honk. The drive to their small villa in the Gwangmyeong district took forty minutes on a good day, and today was not a good day.
Their home was a modest two-bedroom on the third floor of a building that had last been painted sometime in the early 2000s. The elevator rarely worked, so they climbed the stairs together, Hae-sung chattering about the ice cream and the "prince" while Soo-ah's mind replayed the moment of recognition over and over.
He had looked at Hae-sung.
Not just looked. Seen. That was the difference. Ji-hoo had always had a way of looking at things,at her, at his dreams, at the world, like he was memorising every detail for a song he hadn't written yet. When he'd looked at Hae-sung, she'd watched something shift behind his eyes. A door opening. A lock breaking.
He knew.
He couldn't know, not for sure, but he suspected. And Lee Ji-hoo had never been a man who could let a suspicion rest.
Inside the apartment, she went through the motions of the evening: dinner, Hae-sung's bath time and story time before he finally dozed off. Only when his breathing evened out did she allow herself to collapse onto the worn couch in the living room, the apartment's silence pressing down on her like water.
Six years.
Six years since she'd left. Six years since she'd discovered she was pregnant two weeks after Ji-hoo had signed his exclusive trainee contract; the one that explicitly forbade dating, scandals, or anything that might distract him from becoming the star his agency was molding him to be.
She remembered the day she'd found out. Sitting on the toilet in her mother's bathroom, staring at two pink lines, her entire future collapsing into a single point of terror. She'd been eighteen. Ji-hoo had been eighteen. They'd been careful but the real problem wasn't the pregnancy. It was the timing.
He was supposed to debut in six months. The agency had invested three years of training, millions of won, and the hopes of a dozen executives who saw in Lee Ji-hoo the next big thing. If they found out he'd gotten his girlfriend pregnant, they'd drop him. Not maybe. Definitely. K-pop idols weren't fathers. They weren't even boyfriends. They were fantasies, commodities, products to be consumed by fans who paid for the illusion of availability.
Soo-ah had made a choice. Not a good choice, not a fair choice, but the only choice she could see. She'd told her parents first. Her mother had cried. Her father had gone silent for three days, then emerged with a plan: they would move to the countryside, to her grandmother's old house in Jeolla Province. She would have the baby there. She would raise it there. And Lee Ji-hoo would never know.
She'd written the text message a hundred times before she sent it. I'm sorry. Don't look for me. Be a star. Then she'd turned off her phone, removed the SIM card, and disappeared from Seoul as if she'd never existed.
For six years, she'd told herself it was the right thing. She'd watched him debut on a tiny television in her grandmother's living room, watched him win music shows and acting awards and the hearts of millions. She'd watched him grow from a boy with a guitar to a man with a legacy. And every time she saw his face, she'd whispered to herself: You did this. You saved him.
Her phone buzzed. She almost didn't look. But some morbid curiosity made her pick it up.
Unknown number. A text message.
"I know you're scared. I was scared too, for six years, thinking you were dead or gone or married in another country. But I saw his face. He's mine. Don't bother denying it. I'll be outside your building tomorrow at 9 AM. If you run, I will find you. I've been looking for you for six years, Soo-ah. I'm not going to stop now."
She read it three times. Then she deleted it, though she knew she'd remember every word for the rest of her life.
She didn't sleep that night. She sat on the couch, staring at the wall, and she thought about running.
But there was nowhere left to go.
- Writer
