🏆 THE AMBY AWARDS 2023 TOP PICK - DIVERSE LIT 🏆
It's Rin and Hye-jin against the world. Or so it should have been.
Nagara Rin and Joon Hye-jin, college sweethearts and passionate gamers, have lived a fairytale marriage. Not even a decade after did...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The moment the door closed behind her, Rin had an idea of how this would all go down. Hye-jin took her time letting go of the rusty knob, her turned back giving more anxiety in his gut than the sight of her face when she showed up earlier at the gate.
Rin stepped forward, his bare feet skidding against the dusty floorboards in dire need of polishing. "Hye-jin, I—"
"Why are you here?" she asked. She still hasn't turned to face him. Her tone was quiet, resigned. It's like she was truly confused as to why her husband was in the same room as her.
When he failed to give a coherent answer, that's when Hye-jin whipped towards him. From there, everything became clear. Red-rimmed eyes, sunken cheeks, pale, chapped lips. Her hair stuck to the back of her head like a crown in disarray, held back only by a plastic hair clamp missing a tooth or two. The sleeves of her beige, baggy shirt hung from her shoulders. It never occurred to me she was still in her loungewear. Did she...did she get on the bus on those?
"Why are you here, Rin?" she echoed. Her hollow voice bounced against the wooden walls of the house. The sounds of mourners' feet thudding against the floorboards and the idle chatter of guests bled through the gaps between the planks.
Rin's words fought to surge out of his mouth, but he did his best to hold them down. Nothing he said would calm the silent, brewing storm in front of him that was Hye-jin. She was angry, and rightly so. He got why, but he couldn't reconcile it with the fact she was the one who pushed him to do what he did.
"I couldn't find you in the house. I can't contact your phone. I've reached out to all of your friends and they all don't know where you are," Rin balled his fists by his sides, the hell of the past few days coming back to his mind. The cold streets, the frantic begging, the anger curling at the base of his throat at having to disturb people to get them to help him solve his own problem. It's dehumanizing. It's...not Rin. "I did what any good husband would do. Can you blame me?"
Hye-jin's shoulders shook—the weakest quiver—but it wasn't lost on Rin. She was doing everything she could to hold it in, to never appear like what she was feeling inside. He had seen this sequence play out a number of times, but this was the first time where he was the one causing it himself. "Yes," she breathed out. Her hair bounced with the motion of her head. "I can blame you for a lot of things other than this. But let's focus on the topic at hand."
She tapped a hand to her chest. Her feet made scratching noises as she stalked towards me, her eyes flashing with untethered rage. "You have no right to show up here. Not toting those police cars with you. Not bearing that clueless look on your face, like you can't believe this was even happening," she sniffed. "Not at my mother's funeral."
A weight settled on his shoulders then. So, the commotion outside was as real as this conversation. When he burst into the gate of Hye-jin's ancestral home, he noticed the black hanboks, the white flowers, and the sticky smell of incense burning in the air. But all that faded when he saw Hye-jin peeking from the ante of the house, looking like she had just seen a ghost.
