1. Chapter One #5
I’ve never told anyone that the timing wasn’t as coincidental as I let people believe. That I could have flown back if I’d wanted to. That some coward’s part of me was almost relieved to have a real, unimpeachable reason to stay away.
“Many people reached out to him,” my mother continues quietly, she’s aware she’s treading closer to a tentative subject. “After Jinwon too. Nothing came of it.”
I nod slowly, my eyes tracing a line of stars that might be part of a constellation.
My mother’s fingers tighten around the cup in her lap, and for a second I think she’ll let Haeil and Jinwon’s names be the last ones we speak of tonight instead of dragging up more. But then she draws in a breath, meaning she’s not finished yet.
“I tried with his father too,” she says, quieter now.
“When he was in the hospital. Those last months.” She doesn’t say what she means by last. “I called him so many times, Seyeon. Left messages on that old flip phone he used to carry around. I even drove up to Busan once, just to see if I could find him at a garage somewhere.”
I keep my eyes fixed on the stars, my jaw tightening.
“He never answered,” she goes on. “I don’t even know if he knew his father was sick until it was already too late to matter.
” She shakes her head, staring past the low wall of the yard.
“I told myself there was still a chance he’d show up for the funeral.
Even if he only stood at the back for five minutes and left. I let myself believe that for a while.”
I make an effort not to curl my hands into fists.
“But he didn’t,” she says tiredly. “I can’t say I was surprised, in the end. Disappointed, maybe. Not surprised.”
I don’t answer that. There’s nothing I could say that wouldn’t be a lie leaning one direction or another.
I didn’t go either. I remember standing in my apartment that morning with my shoes already on, my hand resting on the doorknob, and then simply not turning it.
I told myself it wasn’t my place to stand in that room and pretend to mourn a man I’d spent half my childhood terrified of.
Told myself a dozen other things that all boiled down to the same excuse dressed up in different clothes.
My mother organized the whole thing herself in the end.
Called the funeral home, picked out the incense, stood at the door bowing to neighbors who only knew that man as a mean drunk who yelled at his wife until she left and then turned that same fury on his son.
I told her more than once she didn’t owe him anything.
That it wasn’t her responsibility to bury a man who’d never done a decent thing for anyone in his life.
She never agreed with me. “He has no one else, Seyeon,” she’d say, her voice always level no matter how many times I pushed back. “And he was your father’s best friend.”
I gave up arguing after the third or fourth round of it.
There’s no talking my mother out of what she believes is right, not when it’s rooted this deep.
Whatever debt she thought she owed, whatever grief and guilt got tangled together was never going to loosen its grip on her, no matter how many years passed or how much that man proved himself unworthy of the kindness she kept extending anyway.
At least she’d had enough sense not to ask me to come to the funeral itself.
She never brought it up, not once, not even to test the waters.
I think some part of her understood there are doors a person can’t walk back through even for the people they love most, and she let me have that one door closed without a fight.
The cicada starts again behind the wall, cuts off, starts over. My mother sets her cup down on the wood beside her, the ceramic knocking softly against the platform, and her hands find each other in her lap, fingers twisting.
“Seyeon.” She says carefully. “You don’t have to do this.”
I turn my head toward her, brow lifting.
“I know what Mrs. Nam meant to you,” she says, eyes glassy.
“I know what she was to both of you, all those years she looked after the two of you when neither of us could. But she shouldn’t have asked this of you.
Not after everything that’s happened. It isn’t fair, putting this on your shoulders like some kind of last errand. ”
I look back up at the stars scattered, away from the city glow I’ve gotten used to, but since the lawyer said his name out loud in that stuffy little office I’ve known what I wanted to do.
“She knew exactly what she was doing,” I say finally.
My mother doesn’t answer right away, just watches me with the same worn, worried look she’s carried most of the night.
I turn to face her fully, offering a smile that probably doesn’t reach much further than the corners of my mouth. “She knew I’m the only one who can find him.”
My mother’s face folds slightly, like she wants to argue. I reach over and set my hand on top of hers, stilling the nervous twist of her fingers against her knee.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her, and mean it, even as my pulse thunders in my ears. “I can handle it.”
I look back out past the low wall toward the dark rooftops climbing down the hill, toward the harbor I can’t see from here but can still feel, that same old current tugging at the thread that still connects me, the one I’d thought I’d cut for good.
Ten years is a long time to run from someone. Long enough, maybe, that it’s time to stop.
“I think it’s time.”