As she slowed her words to keep emotion from rising, my brother and I almost stopped breathing. My uncle wore a look that said he hadn’t quite processed what he’d heard.
By handing him the fact that she was an Alpha—the very weakness her father most wanted hidden—she had given my uncle the weapon to stand against her own father. A heavy secret that had been a burden, a shackle, and also a part of herself for a long time.
"If you say only that... he’ll understand what it means. Don’t worry about what comes after."
Morae tried to pay, but for the first time since he sat down my uncle wouldn’t bend. From an old brown wallet he didn’t normally carry, ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) he pulled a few bills to cover drinks for the four of us; after that, there was almost nothing left inside.
After we left the lobby, at the hotel’s front entrance my uncle asked if there was a place to smoke. Following the doorman’s directions, we went around the right side of the building to the smoking area.
A broad eave extended from the hotel entrance overhead, but it was still raining.
Maybe because the long stretch of rain had cooled the air, the heat didn’t register despite the high humidity. If anything, my bare arms felt a touch chilly.
The three of us watched, blank, as the smoke rising from the tip of my uncle’s cigarette—like a part of his body—was pulled into the rain.
"You two have liked each other since middle school."
My uncle’s eyes searched through the rainfall.
"Was it winter of your ninth-grade year, Hani...? Morae, you steamed lobster at home and said it was unbelievably good, so you brought three or four over around dinner so our family could try some. In that dead cold of midwinter. You said it was for our family, but how could I not know you brought it because you wanted Hani to eat it. I was at the sink when I opened the gate... and the way your face looked there with the pot in your hands—somehow I’ve never forgotten it."
With a short breath he drew deep on his cigarette and flicked the ash off with thick, practiced fingers.
"I’m uneducated, and I’ve spent my life just trying to put food in my mouth, so I never lived weighing words like love... but if there’s something delicious in front of you and you want to feed it to someone else, and before you feed them you can’t swallow a bite yourself... I suppose that’s love."
Just saying the word love, or defining it like this, seemed to make him feel sheepish and silly; he rolled his shoulders and gave a crooked laugh.
"Wherever you go... don’t tell anyone, not even me. If I found out, I might blurt it out under your father’s threats. Just... don’t say a word to anyone."
He said it flatly, then let out the last drag of his cigarette long, like a sigh, and added,
"In time, won’t your father forgive you? If it’s about you—he was terrifyingly devoted to you from when you were small."
That was when Morae broke into tears.
No one expected the timing. No one had even pictured Morae’s tears. Especially in a moment like this, I had thought even if tears crashed over her like a storm, she would swallow them down out of sheer will and never bare her raw feelings.
But she cried.
Like a child who suddenly trips on a flat road with no stones, with no warning at all.
At that single line, "If it’s about you, won’t he forgive you someday."
She didn’t just let tears fall quietly—she burst into sobs. Covering her eyes with her right hand, biting her lip, she cried, and my brother wrapped her in his arms.
To the world he might be the money-mad, unscrupulous "Mr. Im," but to her he was a father who would bring the world and set it down in front of her if it was what she wanted. Because he was a father endlessly weak to her, she had probably suffered more than ever on the way here.
I wondered if my own bias—that she wouldn’t cry, that not showing tears was strength—had been one of the reasons she’d been forced into situations where she couldn’t cry all this time....
Unable to look straight at her, I stared at my toes, then, worried I’d said something I shouldn’t have, I took my uncle back toward the main entrance, lost before Morae’s tears.
"I’ll go with my sister and my brother. Please go down carefully. The money... we’ll be able to send it soon."
With one hand in his pocket, my uncle rubbed the corner of his mouth with the other and looked at me.
"About that—what money do you have that you can send?"
The lines at his mouth looked deeper with worry.
I hesitated, my lips parting, because the deposit I hadn’t yet earned was basically a debt and I wasn’t proud of it. Then, forcing out a breath, I answered,
"I’m... going to paint again."
"......"
"Someone who liked my old work offered me very good terms to try painting again.... It’s not strange or dangerous money, so don’t worry—just clear the debt first."
When my uncle said he’d send me something back every month, I shook my head, hard.
My parents were satisfied so long as they could keep painting while making ends meet, so there was no extra money you could call assets in our household. I was old enough to know that taking in my father and me in that state had weighed heavily on the family. And barring a huge change of heart, my father would not want to leave that place going forward. Clearing this debt didn’t mean my uncle needed to feel guilty toward me at all. If anything, I was the one who felt sorry.
Watching his back as he peeled the plastic off a folding umbrella from the automatic wrapper and started to raise it, I finally spoke, after wavering.
I didn’t want to ask—out of a useless defiance no one would notice—but I couldn’t help it. Blood pulled me, and a crushed, unfair feeling welled up.
"How... is my father."
"......"
He looked back, set his mouth once, and didn’t really answer. He rubbed the back of his neck and gave a faint, helpless smile that said he knew what I meant.
I couldn’t deny that part of the reason I’d specified where the money came from—saying it was payment for me painting again—was to reassure my uncle, but part of me also wanted that news to reach my father’s ears.
But I didn’t want to go as far as asking him to tell my father.
It was a private flail to prove—to my uncle, to my father, to myself—that I didn’t care what my father thought.
Propping up a worn umbrella, he walked off down the old-fashioned red-brick drive where luxury sedans were lining up to pull in and out. I watched him go, then drew my gaze back.
Though the rain had been coming down all day, now hard, now soft, plenty of people were visiting the hotel. Well, for people who could get out of their cars under a broad canopy and walk straight indoors without ever having to open an umbrella, monsoon rain probably wasn’t much of a reason to stay home.
Leaning against a pillar a little off to the side of the entrance, watching people come and go, I felt my sense of reality warp. This world was nothing like the old village where my uncle was the standard for ordinary.
Here, people dressed in expensive clothes and seeming to carry a relaxed confidence were the standard, and it felt like most people lived like this. Everyone had the same look—like how, at the fish auction, the men bidding on that morning’s haul of saury looked like brothers.
With my uncle gone too, dressed in Converse and worn jeans, I was the one off-color patch here.
I felt a bit of awkward distance at the thought, but laughably enough, I was one of the people who had arrived here in a nice car.
"Washed what you wore yesterday and dried it. Put it on the shelf across from the bathroom and leave in that. There’s some fruit in the fridge, and bread on the table, so eat a little before you go."
I had to cut him off before he started worrying about my wet shoes too, mumbling that that was more than enough, that I was sorry and grateful. I hadn’t imagined he’d even tend to my soaked clothes, and sleeping so deeply in the meantime made me feel shameless.
And he said for safety’s sake it would be best if I moved around today in the car he’d prepared.
I tried to decline, saying that wouldn’t be necessary, but he was firm—this wasn’t kindness, it was a precaution. We didn’t know what plans Morae’s father’s side might be hiding; public transit was risky.
After I finished getting ready in the odd quiet of a house without its owner and went to the gate, a large black sedan stood in the rain, just as he’d said. It was an import with an emblem I recognized. The driver, umbrella up, was already out front, as if he’d heard from him ahead of time.
He suggested I use that car to take my brother and Morae to the meeting, but she refused, saying for all we knew he might drive them straight to her father.
While I was smiling helplessly at how similar he and Morae were—like siblings raised in the same conditions—in the way they doubted situations, the two of them appeared from around the far corner of the building. I pushed off the pillar.
Morae was steady again. Instead of being embarrassed or awkward about her tears a moment ago, she held my brother’s hand, looked at me, and smiled the way she always did, and I smiled back. That was all.
You have to treat Morae really well; she’s too good for you by a hundred times. People around them—half-joking, half-serious—had always said that to my brother, the surf-shop owner among them. Honestly, I think I’d carried a little of that idea myself without realizing it.
But seeing them today, hands clenched tighter than usual, I understood that was only a shallow view of their relationship.
I remembered what he’d said last night about the relationship between an artist and a supporter. Most people think that relationship leans toward the artist and can’t balance....
No outsider can ever know the depth of the communion that happens only between the two. All we ever see is what they show when they’re with other people, and trying to define the balance of two lovers by that alone is as rash as judging a restaurant’s food by its sign.
On the surface it looked like my brother was the one who couldn’t live without Morae, but seeing them today I realized the reverse was just as true. It struck me anew.
Rude as it felt to both of them, for the first time I was glad my brother was at her side.
Hooking the arm that wasn’t holding my brother’s hand over my shoulder, Morae said with mock swagger,
"Is your director someone we can trust?"
"Huh?"
I turned my head to look at her. Chin tilted with a little attitude, she spoke with a slightly sheepish face.
"You know how I am right now. I’ve gotten even more suspicious than Seo Ihan. I mean, is there any chance he’s dealing with my dad behind our backs, that kind of person?"
I shook my head.
"He’s worked with Chief Han since Hong Kong, and Chief Han trusts him deeply.... And there’s nothing for the Director to gain by going that far."
He was wealthy enough not to care about that kind of thing for money, and unless there was some incident in the past I didn’t know about that left him thirsting for revenge on me, there was no reason for him to go out of his way to force Morae or my brother or me into a bad spot.
Drawing a deep breath, Morae nodded carefully.
"Right. If Chief Han’s tied in too, it should be safe. He said we could leave as early as tomorrow?"
"Huh? Y-yeah...."
Then, squeezing my shoulder hard, she passed me her decision.
"This time, let’s lean on Seo Ihyeon."
■ ■ ■
The moment I stepped out of the bathroom I stopped again at the view in front of me. It was the Han River nightscape I saw every day from Chief Han’s living room too, and even there, when it slid unguarded into my sightline, it amazed me fresh each time. From here, the reaction was the same.
City lights bled across the gentle ripples, reminding me of Hong Kong’s skyline. The memory of Hong Kong cascaded into others, making me feel, again, how many shifts I’d gone through and how many chances I’d been given to end up here.
Waiting for his call in a hotel room so I could go see Sukhee Kim back then; standing now by the window of the penthouse at a top-class residence apartment he’d prepared for my brother and Morae—both were moments made by his kindness.
"Are you sure you’re okay getting this tangled up with me?"
I’d answered that I’d repay the debt even if I had to do other work, but the truth was I was afraid. Not of some B-movie twist where someone grabs your weakness and uses you.
As I learned that his big hands and broad chest weren’t only cold and hard, as I began to grasp the layered, distinctive colors inside him that didn’t show on the surface... I was afraid only of the end of mind and feeling—of getting more and more tangled up in him.
Bzz, bzz. The phone I’d set on the bed buzzed, and I turned back and walked to it. The saved name on the screen was "Director."
A prickle of pain and a spark of thrill hit from both sides at once, and the clash of those opposing feelings already felt like too much. I let out a breath like a deep inhale and sat on the mattress, picking up the call.
I cleared my throat and connected.
"Yes."
[...]
As if he hadn’t expected me to pick up. There was a moment of silence on the other end. Then came a breath that sounded like someone mastering anger—or sinking with deep relief.
"Why was it so hard to reach you?"
