“Move to the back.”

“I’m comfortable here.”

“If I get out, you won’t be getting back in looking good about it.”

She knew. That man was someone who did not tolerate anyone defying him. She couldn’t make a scene in front of the driver, so she moved to the back seat.

Even after she moved, Kangwook said nothing for a long while and simply looked at her. Since getting in the car, the drink was catching up with her, and she sat with her face faintly flushed, gaze fixed on the window outside, ignoring him. The woman couldn’t understand why Kangwook had shown up at that gathering, stayed until the very end, and was now driving her home like this. She watched the man’s profile reflected in the window glass.

“Cha Yunjoo, how did you hold it all in?”

“Hold what in?”

“I’m curious how you kept this side of yourself buried.”

“I have good patience.”

“I had no idea you could drink like that. And you’re so at ease with men.”

She knew what Kangwook wanted to say, but she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to give it any attention.

“What are you trying to say? Just say it.”

“Ha. Now this is Cha Yunjoo.”

“That’s right. This is me. After we got married, no one tried to know me, no one asked about me. They just decided that being quiet and well-behaved was who I was. I always moved like a shadow. At my parents’ house, and when I was living with you too. You never tried to know me either. You just believed whatever you wanted to believe. And then you’re surprised. Wondering why I’m acting like this.”

Heh heh heh.

After that dry, rasping laugh, the woman went quiet and leaned toward Kangwook. She had been holding herself tightly together at the dinner, determined not to get drunk, but she had let her pain spill out in a tipsy ramble and fallen asleep. The man’s eyes took in the full sight of her. Tonight, she had imprinted herself on him like a series of photographs, each one a different feeling.

He had never once thought of her as a person with things she wanted to do and things she was capable of doing. Even Kangwook himself had dismissed her as someone who just needed money spent on her and had never looked twice. But she was not someone who enjoyed any of that. He studied the sleeping woman’s face up close and let himself think. In all the time they had lived together, he had never looked at her this closely, this carefully.

‘Did this woman always look like this?’

A small, pale face, a sharp nose, and a faint scatter of freckles across the bridge of it, endearingly few. The woman he had caught glimpses of this evening had shown him more sides of herself and more expressions in one night than the woman he had lived with for three years.

The eyes that looked out at the darkness settling beyond the window were darker than the dark itself. The car arrived home, but the woman showed no sign of waking. Kangwook sat watching her sleep and thought about what to do. After deliberating for a long while with her still asleep, he got out of the car, lifted Yunjoo into his arms, and went straight up to her space on the second floor.

The man’s steps were careful as he carried her. He was startled by how light she was, light enough to make him wonder whether she was eating at all. He hadn’t known, because she always wore clothes that hung loosely on her.

The second floor, which he had almost never come up to since they married. This was her space. When they married, he had bought a two-story villa. He had chosen it for its excellent privacy, and they had set it up as their home. And like two people who never crossed into each other’s territory, the second floor had been Yunjoo’s space and the first floor his.

Perhaps because it was her space, the scent she always carried clung to the air. It was his first time entering her room. He laid her down on the bed and looked around. The white bedding and the spare, simple arrangement suited her perfectly, and a small smile escaped him.

He left her room and opened the door to another. He turned on the light. From the feel of the space, it seemed she had been using it as a studio. It was a room that told him she had been working steadily at home all this time. He remembered what the housekeeper had said, that Yunjoo never went out for personal things like meeting friends after they married. The housekeeper came about once a week, handled only the kitchen, and left.

Yunjoo had never used the car he had provided either. Even now, she didn’t drive to work. She had refused to accept a single thing he offered her. Kangwook shook his head at her stubbornness, picked up the sketchbooks piled on the desk, and flipped through them page by page, making no effort to hide his astonishment. The desk was covered in a laptop and drawings scattered in every direction.

Spread across it were countless blueprints and sketches of every stage she had ever dreamed of building. A different sketchbook held drawings that were not designs. One of them was a portrait of him, drawn on the day they first met. His eyes landed on the words written at the bottom of the page.

‘Choi Kangwook is not as great a man as his face suggests!’

Those words told him exactly how she saw him. The impression he had given Yunjoo was precisely that and nothing more. Looking at the design drafts, Kangwook could see Yunjoo’s passion. She had lived through three years by designing, fueled by the will to start again.

She had never once confronted him about his indifference or the unfairness of their marriage. She had simply waited for the day she could go back, and in this room she had kept her dream alive. Kangwook stood with his head bowed in a room that held every bit of Cha Yunjoo’s heart and longing. He had a feeling he would not forget this room for a long time.

The thought that this place, where all the pain of three years spent as his wife had gathered, had been Yunjoo’s refuge made his chest ache. But Kangwook was surprised at himself for not even knowing why it ached, and for thinking, even now, that he wanted to try again.

The marriage up to this point had been nothing more than a contractual cohabitation for him too, but now he found himself wanting to start over as a husband to her wife, the way married people actually lived. And he needed to find out what it was that kept striking something inside him. For that, he needed the woman to stay by his side.

He didn’t know why he vaguely hated the idea of her going somewhere he couldn’t see, or why it made him angry to see her with other men. But he knew he wanted to hold onto her. His head grew complicated thinking about how to do it, but his heart felt light. His goal was clear. The woman still needed to be by his side.

He had a feeling tomorrow morning would bring something interesting, and he found himself looking forward to it. The corners of his lips crept up and he forced them back down. Why was this making him smile? He didn’t like that he kept doing strange things and smiling about them.

Then the smile faded, and he thought about when exactly it had started, this feeling of being amused and drawn to smiles by the things Yunjoo did. It seemed like it had been from the moment she laid the contract in front of him and looked him straight in the eye. He could already picture her expression the next morning, could almost hear her voice. For the first time in a long while, Kangwook laughed out loud.

* * *

She stirred in the bright morning light, opened her eyes little by little, looked around the room, and felt a wave of relief. It was her room. She pressed against the mild throbbing in her head with a frown and then a thought.

‘Wait… but how did I get here? I don’t remember coming into my room…’

She remembered getting into Kangwook’s car, and she remembered talking at him in a way that felt like picking a fight as the drink crept up on her, but after that, nothing. So how was she in her room? If she hadn’t walked up on her own two feet, then the person who moved her to her room and changed her clothes was…

“Aaagh!”

Yunjoo’s voice shook the house. She couldn’t even get out of bed, just rolled and thrashed and flopped around like a woman losing her mind. But no matter what she did, what had happened couldn’t be undone. She clawed at her hair and rolled around in a frenzy, but it was something she had brought on herself.

The sound from upstairs reached Kangwook’s ears too. He had been expecting it, but hearing it was still satisfying. From downstairs, Kangwook’s loud laughter rang through the floor. 

Yunjoo probably wouldn’t come down until he left for work, and he had the mischievous thought of leaving a little late, then cast his gaze up toward the second floor. The corners of Kangwook’s mouth stretched in a way that was rare for him.

Yunjoo’s mind had gone completely blank. How could she have made such a catastrophic mistake? She had endured so much and pulled everything off so perfectly, and then to make a slip like this in a single moment. She hated herself for it so much it made her want to scream.

“Oh no. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? I’m losing my mind.”

No matter how hard she thought, there was no answer to a question that had no answer, and clawing at her hair didn’t help either. And on top of everything, thinking about the fact that Kangwook had even taken off her clothes was enough to send her over the edge entirely.