Chapter 3.4

To apologize for the last incident as well, she contacted Eun-hee saying she would buy her lunch.

She headed to a brunch cafe near Eun-hee’s officetel, as it happened to be mealtime.

“Did you sober up a bit?”

“Yeah. I was sorry about last time.”

“No. It was nice to see your old self.”

Eun-hee roughly explained what had happened at the bar. What an amazing friend she was, even provoking to deliberately call her husband to the street food stall. She hadn’t thought that far herself.

“I see.”

After hearing everything, several questions arose. It was somewhat unexpected that her husband had rushed over immediately.

He hadn’t even abandoned her when she was drunk and left. Did she look that pitiful?

Moreover, there were no traces of him holding her at night.

It was impossible. He had only laid her on the bed, but how had her husband restrained himself from s*x?

Indeed, the only conclusion she could reach was that she had looked that pitiful and had sprawled out disgracefully while drunk.

“Can I ask why you want to divorce?”

“I talked about that too, huh.”

She thought she had really spilled all kinds of stories while drunk. Still, she was truly fortunate that Eun-hee was the one who heard her drunken rambling. She was a friend who didn’t enjoy talking about others and kept her mouth shut.

“My husband made me honey water this morning.”

“Did he?”

“While drinking it, I regretted every sip disappearing.”

“It’s unexpected for your husband, but you can just ask him to make it again next time.”

“There won’t be a next time.”

She was absolutely certain. That was just a very special case. How many times had her heart fluttered from the occasional kindness her husband showed?

She had always suffered alone in her heart.

It was foolish. Wanting broth when there wasn’t even rice to share—until finally it became unbearable, and she only wished to run away.

[T/N: 👉 The Korean original says something like:

밥도 없는데 국을 원했다.

(literally: “She wanted soup even when there wasn’t even rice.”)

Meaning:

Rice = the basic foundation (in Korean meals, rice is essential, soup is secondary).

Soup = something extra, something that usually accompanies rice.

So the metaphor is:

She didn’t even have the “basics” in her marriage (love, care, warmth), yet she still longed for “extras” (affection, tenderness, small gestures).]

But there was no other way besides running away.

As long as she stayed by her husband’s side, she would want more. She would have no choice but to do so.

That’s how human hearts work.

The more she wanted, the less she would be able to receive from her husband, so eventually she would wither away and die. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want to die like her mother.

“I don’t want to hope for anything more from my husband.”

“You’re right. That day, he did seem terribly cold.”

“I want to protect my self-esteem. …Eun-hee. Can you understand what I’m saying?”

Even if Eunhee couldn’t, she herself did. Others might laugh at her choice. They might say love didn’t matter, that with such a husband she should cling to him unless he divorced her first.

But she had realized too late—that wasn’t a life lived as a human being. She hadn’t married to become her husband’s doll.

Perhaps she had once believed she could change him after marriage.

However, all she could do for her husband, who was devoted to management to grow the company, was wait for him to come home from work.

And allow her husband who came out of the bathroom to hold her as much as he wanted. She thought that way she could hold his heart too.

How on earth could she change her husband? Looking back, she had been incredibly arrogant.

“Ah-jin. Compared to kids these days, you married at an early age. Honestly, I wanted to stop you, but it seemed like you wanted it, so I didn’t stop you. At the wedding, you were unusually excited and smiling so beautifully.”

It was indeed an early marriage. She was a twenty-three-year-old bride.

At that time, she thought she was fully grown. She wanted to prove her worth to her father through marriage.

And she wanted to be by her husband’s side as a wife.

Even knowing that love wasn’t even a consideration for this man obsessed with work when it came to marrying her, she pretended not to know and had taken her husband into her heart from the very first matchmaking meeting.

She thought she could manage those feelings well by herself.

However, like suffering from a fever, she was swept away aimlessly. Her heart swelled with each occasional kindness her husband showed.

When she came to her senses, she had been pushed too far by the waves. So far that she couldn’t even remember where twenty-three-year-old Go Ah-jin had stood before becoming someone’s daughter and wife.

Wasn’t three years enough effort?

She now wanted to find her resting place.

“If you’re going to leave home before the divorce, you can stay here.”

Eun-hee wrote down an address and the entrance code on a memo pad. She said she had to write at an officetel arranged by the production company for about six months. Since her original home would be empty, she told her to go stay there.

“Thank you, Eun-hee.”

“Don’t mention it. It’s nothing compared to what I’ve received from you.”

“Still.”

“That’s the place I rented with the money you gave me. It’s a very special place to me, so you have to keep it clean. Got it?”

When she hesitated to accept out of embarrassment, Eun-hee joked and pressed the memo into her hand. Since she put it that way, refusing would have been even more embarrassing.

“By the way, you know running away from home really doesn’t suit you, Ah-jin.”

“I wanted to try it at least once.”

She hadn’t even done it as a child.

Actually, she had desperately wanted to run away from home. Even though she hated the relationship between her mother and father, she couldn’t leave her mother’s side.

Without her, her mother might simply die. And so, in staying, she herself had to wither. Caring for someone fading away only sickened the healthy too.

So now at least, she had to live like herself. To do that, she had to try everything she could.

“Who knows, it might be your breakthrough.”

Eun-hee muttered as if talking to herself. Thankfully, she didn’t tell her to reconsider or give advice about facing reality.

“Still, if it’s been three years, you must have been physically compatible, right?”

However, in the following words, her cheeks turned red. Eun-hee added an explanation that she was currently planning episodes for a couple in their third year of marriage.

“That’s… ugh.”

Suddenly, Ah-jin held her right jaw. Her molar hurt sharply. A piercing pain rose from deep within, unfamiliar and strange.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. My molar area is slightly…”

While covering her jaw, she frowned. The pain kept coming up. When she described the symptoms, Eun-hee clicked her tongue, saying she thought she knew what it was.

“That’s probably a wisdom tooth.”

“Wisdom tooth?”

“I had mine extracted as soon as I turned twenty. Ah-jin, you’re still a baby.”

A wisdom tooth. The name sounded bizarrely inappropriate for such intense pain. Just in case, when she pressed the area where her tongue was poking with her tongue, it was swollen. Tears welled up in her eyes.

“Is this normally this painful?”

“Let me see. Even though it looks like this on the outside, it might have fully grown inside.”

“Mmm.”

When Eun-hee said she shouldn’t just sit there but should hurry to a dentist, she said she would. It was quite troublesome to have to go to a dentist like this when she hadn’t been to one for over a year.

The dentist she used to go to was near her in-laws’ place and her husband was a regular there. Since she couldn’t go there anymore, she had to find a new place.

***

When she mentioned the wisdom tooth at the pharmacy, they gave her painkillers. The kind pharmacist’s words that painkillers were good but she should have it extracted as soon as possible were grateful, but secretly made her a bit scared.

She usually couldn’t swallow capsules well, but because it hurt, she forced herself to swallow them. Only after feeling her swollen tonsils subside a little did she leave the pharmacy.

Eun-hee’s house was a slightly old multi-family villa located around Mia Intersection Station. Unlike its worn exterior appearance, the inside of the house was very neat, and the living room was warm, probably facing south.

It was definitely more cozy than the large two-story house she had lived in with her husband.

She liked that she could see the entire interior of the house at a glance from the living room. She hugged a cushion and leaned back on the sofa.

She searched for wisdom teeth on her phone. There was “extraction” in the related search terms, so she clicked on it. It was full of reviews that couldn’t be read without tears.

〈Mine was an impacted wisdom tooth, and the swelling after extraction was enormous. I couldn’t eat or sleep for about two weeks. It wasn’t a wisdom tooth but a disaster tooth.〉

〈I thought I only had one wisdom tooth. When I went to the dentist, the doctor said all four had come in and suggested extracting them, so I thought this life was over.〉

〈When I was young, all my friends got theirs extracted but mine didn’t come in, so I was happy. No, everyone! Getting them extracted when you’re even a year younger is the winner.〉

Reading the reviews made her scared. She had thought it was just extracting a cavity, but it was something much more tremendous than that.

Some bloggers even posted photos of extracted wisdom teeth. Unable to resist her curiosity, when she looked, it was full of cracked tooth fragments and blood.

She skipped past the posts about going with a husband. In the past, she would have arranged his regular checkups, but now that divorce was looming, she couldn’t possibly ask him to go with her.

‘You’re not a little kid.’

If she were to tell him, her husband would probably respond like that.

And didn’t they say the face would swell up? Rather, she felt like it would hurt even more from the stress of trying to handle it gracefully in front of her husband.

And no matter how much she had decided to part ways…. she didn’t want to show such an unsightly face.

Just then, the calendar app’s schedule notification rang. It was the day she was supposed to go to her father’s house for dinner. The place where her father’s legal wife and their children were.

A sigh escaped automatically. Even though she always went alone as usual, she didn’t know why she felt so reluctant to go today.

She briefly looked down and scanned her outfit, then squeezed her eyes shut. If she went like this, it would definitely be an outfit that would draw criticism, but since there was no one she wanted to look good anyway, it didn’t matter.

It was even more so since there was no way her husband would come to that gathering.