14. Chapter Fourten
Istare at Ryowoon over the top of the bank books I’ve spread across the counter.
He’s up on the ladder again, one arm stretched above him working a roof panel back into place, the muscles in his forearm shifting with each twist of the screwdriver.
His wrist turns and I stare at the constellation inked into the soft skin on the inside of his wrist where the veins run close to the surface.
I can see it every time he adjusts his grip, every time he reaches for a different screw.
It’s like a taunt. A message he never meant for me to read that I can’t stop reading now.
I grit my back teeth.
Three days. I haven’t said a word to him in three days that wasn’t strictly about the store.
Pass me that. Where’s the mop? The fuse box is behind the shelf.
Clipped sentences avoiding anything that could crack the seal I’m keeping on myself.
Because every time I try to open my mouth for real, every time I look at him and think about asking, the words pile up, ten questions and a hundred accusations trying to shove through at once, and I clamp my jaw shut because I know if I open it I’m going to start yelling. And I won’t stop.
Ryowoon climbs down the ladder, wipes his palms on his jeans.
Yuro, who’s been camped out at the base of the ladder like some kind of furry safety inspector, lifts his head and thumps his tail against the floor.
Ryowoon reaches down and scratches behind his ears, murmuring soflty.
Yuro’s tongue lolls. Ryowoon straightens and walks past me toward the courtyard without a glance, looking for the tool he needs next.
I blow out a long breath through my nose. Stare down at the numbers in front of me.
My brain keeps dragging me back to that summer.
Twenty-three. The bus ride back to Seoul after everything fell apart, after I left his apartment with blood on my knuckles and something broken inside me.
I remember hunching forward in my seat, my forehead pressed to the seatback in front of me, crying as quietly as I could because I didn’t want to bother the other passengers.
The tears just kept coming silently, soaking the collar of my shirt.
Every kilometer the bus put between me and Haemok felt like it was being peeled away from me, a layer of skin, a strip of muscle.
A vital piece being pulled loose with each passing mile marker until I was sure there’d be nothing left of me by the time I reached Seoul.
And every minute of that ride, his voice echoed in my head.
You’re not special. I don’t care about anyone.
The words dug in deeper the further I got from him.
Not because I believed them. I don’t know that I ever believed them, not in the part of me that had spent twenty years learning every expression Ryowoon’s face was capable of making, every deflection, every lie he told to protect himself.
Ryowoon was a lot of things. Stubborn, reckless, infuriating.
He could be cold when he wanted to be, could shut people out like the iron gates of a castle.
But he was never cruel. Not to me. In all the years I’d known him, through every fight, every shouting match, every long stretch of silence between us, he’d never once aimed to truly wound me.
He pushed, he snapped, he ran. He didn’t go for the throat.
So what was I supposed to do with words designed to gut me coming from the one person I never expected them from?
I had no choice. The hurt was too new, too open, a burn that hadn’t even started to blister yet.
It didn’t matter if I believed him or not.
It didn’t matter if every instinct I had was screaming that he was lying through his teeth, that the look in his eyes when he said those things didn’t match the words coming out of his mouth.
None of that mattered because the one thing that was true, the one thing I couldn’t argue with, was that he didn’t want me there.
He’d made that clear. Whatever his reasons, whether it was to protect himself or punish me or some fucked up combination of both, the result was the same. He wanted me gone.
So I went.
Back to Seoul with bruised knuckles and a broken heart. I threw myself into my last year of school, buried myself so deep in coursework and student teaching prep that I barely surfaced to eat. I thought by the time reality caught up to me I’d be numb enough to take it.
Two weeks later my mom called.
Ryowoon’s gone, Seyeon. He broke into his father’s house, took whatever was in the safe, and disappeared in the night. No one knows where he went.
I asked if he was going to be in trouble for it.
She said the police looked into it when his father reported the theft, but it was unlikely they’d pursue charges.
The officers in Haemok knew Ryowoon’s story.
Had known it for years. Had known it when he was six and showing up to school with bruises the shape of a grown man’s fist. Had known it when he was fourteen and dragged himself to Mrs. Nam’s store with a broken wrist and cracked ribs.
Had known it every single time Mrs. Nam called, every time the neighbors whispered, every time the evidence of what was happening in that house walked their streets in broad daylight.
They knew. And they looked the other way, every time, because it wasn’t their household, wasn’t their place, because a father’s right to discipline his son was sacred, even when discipline looked like battery.
So no, my mom said. They probably wouldn’t go after Ryowoon for taking what amounted to pocket change from a man who’d taken everything from him.
Of course they wouldn’t. It would’ve been shameful to try.
The same system that failed to protect a child from a monster for eighteen years chasing that child down for stealing from his abuser.
Even for Haemok, even for a police force that had perfected the art of looking the other way, that would’ve been too much.
But none of that mattered to me in the moment.
What mattered was that Ryowoon was gone.
Not just from the apartment, not just from Haemok.
Gone. Vanished. This wasn’t him storming off to cool down, wasn’t him hiding in the tunnel at the playground or smoking alone behind the school.
This was purposeful. He’d severed the last remaining tie he had to that town and to every person in it, and I knew with a certainty that he wasn’t coming back.
This was his way of finishing it. Of taking a knife to whatever still connected us and cutting so deep there’d be nothing left to reconnect.
A big black period stamped at the end of our sentence.
I sat in my dorm room for twenty minutes after I hung up the phone.
On the edge of my bed, phone in my lap, staring at the wall.
I went up to the roof, pushed through the access door into the open air and I screamed.
I screamed until my throat closed up and my lungs burned and I couldn’t get enough air to make another sound.
Then I stood there, gripping the railing, gasping, and stared out at the city lights blurring through the water in my eyes and thought: how dare you. How fucking dare you leave me.
The back door bangs and I jerk back to the present.
Ryowoon strides in with a caulking gun in one hand and a roll of tape in the other, his hair pushed off his forehead, bottom lip caught between his teeth as he squints up at the hole in the ceiling, assessing.
He sets the tape on the counter two feet from my elbow without looking at me and goes back to the ladder.
I watch him climb. Watch the constellation disappear and reappear as his arm flexes and rotates above him. Watch his brow crease in concentration as he works the caulk into the gap between the panels. The same hands that held my face in the shower that summer.
The rage behind my ribcage swells, building.
Three days of silence feeding it, three days of watching him carrying evidence of everything he claims doesn’t matter inked into his skin.
Three days of biting my tongue until I taste copper while he fixes roofing panels and pets my dog and acts like the ten years he stole from us meant nothing.
I don’t know how much longer I can keep this caged.
The light outside the roll-up doors turns amber, telling me I’ve got maybe thirty minutes of daylight left.
I push back from the counter, stacking the ledgers and loose papers into a pile, rolling my neck where it’s stiff from hunching over numbers all afternoon.
I look around for Yuro’s leash. I left it somewhere near the front shelves, draped over one of the brackets maybe, or on the floor where Yuro decided to make a bed out of it.
I spot it coiled near the doorway and I’m crossing toward it just as the sound starts on the roof.
A light, scattered patter. But within seconds it’s a roar, rain hammering the corrugated panels above us so loud it drowns out the hum of the one working freezer.
I stop in my tracks and look toward the street.
Water is already sheeting off the awning in a solid curtain, the pavement outside vanishing behind a wall of grey.
The sky has opened up and dumped itself on Haemok with an enthusiasm that says it means business.
From across the store, Ryowoon clicks his tongue. I turn my head, see him standing by the freezer he’s been rewiring, arms folded, looking past me at the downpour. His eyes flick to mine.
“Might want to wait that out.”
I exhale through my nose. Drop Yuro’s leash back where I found it and head for the kitchen.