Chapter4
608 Words
Lee Ji-hoo didn't sleep either.
He returned to his penthouse apartment in Gangnam; all clean lines, floor-to-ceiling windows, and not a single personal photograph on the walls; and he did what he always did when the world felt too loud. He opened his laptop.
The photograph was grainy, taken in a panic, but it was enough. Hae-sung's face, frozen in mid-laugh, his small hand reaching up to touch something off-frame. Ji-hoo zoomed in on the eyes, the nose, the shape of the jaw.
Then he pulled up another photograph. A scan his mother had sent him years ago, one she'd found in an old box: Lee Ji-hoo, age six, standing in front of a birthday cake shaped like a dinosaur, wearing a paper crown that had slipped over one eye.
He put them side by side. The resemblance was so uncanny it made him nauseous.
He called his mother. It was 2 AM, but she answered on the second ring, because she'd always been a light sleeper, waiting for his calls.
"Ji-hoo-yah? What's wrong?"
"Mom," he said, and his voice broke on the single syllable. "Do you remember Han Soo-ah?"
A long pause. His mother had loved Soo-ah. She'd packed her extra banchan when she came over, called her "future daughter," started knitting baby blankets before there was even a baby to knit for.
"The girl who disappeared," his mother said carefully. "The one you searched for."
"She didn't disappear, Mom. She was pregnant. She had the baby. She had my baby."
The silence on the other end of the line was deafening.
"Ji-hoo..."
"I met him today. He's six years old. He has my eyes, my chin, my everything. He likes dinosaurs and he calls strangers 'prince' and he has a dimple when he frowns, just like Dad."
Ji-hoo was crying now, hot tears streaming down his face, and he didn't care.
"I missed everything, Mom. I missed his first word, his first step, his first day of school. I missed everything."
His mother started crying too. They sat on the phone together, mother and son, weeping for a little boy neither of them had known existed until twelve hours ago.
"What are you going to do?" his mother finally asked.
"I'm going to get them back."
"And your career?"
Ji-hoo looked around his sterile apartment; the awards on the shelf, the designer furniture, the life he'd built on the foundation of Soo-ah's sacrifice. It all felt like cardboard suddenly. Fake. A stage set that could be struck down in an afternoon.
"I don't care about my career," he said. "I care about my son."
With that, Ji-hoo said his goodbyes to his mother and tried to go to bed. He tossed and turned all night, but all he could think about was how he missed his son's first years. His mind drifted to Soo-ah, the girl he had let slip from his life those years back. He had seen her, and how being a single mother had taken a toll on her once lively personality and body, and he could not help but feel guilty, like all this was his fault. He wondered why she had not just told him, and how he would have responded if she had. As silence surrounded him, Ji-hoo couldn't help but feel lonelier than he had felt all his life. For that moment, he was not Ji-hoo the superstar, who had fans eating out of the palm of his hand, he was that heatbroken 18 year old starring at the last text his first and only love last send him:
I'm sorry. Don't look for me. Be a star.
- Writer
