A pain you had never felt before knifed through your stomach and left you clutching the edges of the bathroom sink. Your fingernails pressed against the porcelain so hard it hurt. For a moment you just stood there with your head bent, heart beating an irrational tattoo. Your mouth hung open and you tried your best to simply breathe through the sudden intense nausea. The stories you’d heard from your girlfriends about heartbreak had definitely not mentioned anything about this – the sense of betrayal so deep that it was physically making you sick.

It’s been three days. Three days since you came home from work and had your world cave in around you. It had started out like any normal day for you. You’d gone to your job, chatted with co-workers and daydreamed your free moments away. When you were finally free to go home you grabbed your purse, stuffed your phone in it and all but ran to the parking lot. Jiyong had only gotten back from Big Bang’s latest tour the previous night. You’d been too tired to celebrate or appreciate his return so you had plans to make up for it tonight. You had the stupidest grin on your face when you walked into the house you two shared with bags of groceries for the meals you planned to cook for your man and the lingerie that you’d picked up – all for him.

You had just put the bags on the countertop when you heard the distinctive sound of mail falling through the slot in the front door. Being the slightly OCD person you were, you just had to go get it. You were sorting it into piles as you always did when you came across the large envelope with your name on it. You didn’t recognize the handwriting and that gave you pause. Who the heck sent things by mail anyways? You set it to one side and tried to continue your sorting but your curiosity overrode the small voice in the back of your head that was telling you to resist opening it. You sighed, picked it up and slit it open with one of your fingernails. Just then your phone went off, some stupid alarm that you had forgotten to deactivate. The envelope dropped from your hands and its contents fell in an arch on the floor.

You froze when you saw what they were. Your brain started working overtime; first denying vehemently what was depicted in the series of photographs, then trying desperately to justify it. They were fake. The pictures were fake, you decided. That lasted all of ten seconds. You didn’t know how to react or what to do. You were numb. You just stood there staring at the pictures on the floor until your neck began to ache. That was when some sense of reality returned. You knelt and quickly stuffed them back into the envelope and put that back on the counter. The bills you put in the little box designated for them. Then you calmly packed up everything that belonged to you and carted it out to your car. You were about to leave when you remembered the groceries and dashed back to the kitchen for them. Jiyong. He could starve to death for all you cared.

That was three days ago. You had driven your car to your cousin’s apartment on the opposite side of Seoul and moved all of your stuff in. Your cousin was currently spending a week in Canada with her boyfriend. She wouldn’t mind that you’d done this.  You had gone looking for water in the fridge and stumbled on a small bottle of Grey Goose. You were not much of a drinker under normal circumstances but u tipped that baby back and took two gulps of the liquor. The whoosh of the alcohol hitting your bloodstream made you giggle and gave you a brilliant idea. You were far from drunk so you went out to the parking lot, got in your car, drove it to Itaewon and simply parked in an alley and left it there with the keys still inside it. You took a bus home.

Two days ago you had woken up and decided that you were going to make it as hard as possible for Jiyong to find you. You grabbed a pair of scissors from your cousin’s office and gave yourself a haircut, resulting in emo  bangs and shoulder-length tresses. You opened one of your bags and pulled out a pair of scuffed knee high Converse you hadn’t worn in years. After a quick shower you pulled on a green bandeau skirt, a black vest and your recently resurrected shoes. You shoved your wallet, phone and lip gloss into a white Jansport backpack you found lying around and took off. You came back with colored contacts, hair dye, a pair of cute blue-framed glasses and a new Samsung S III. Your old phone was resting on the bottom of the Han river.

This morning you had snapped a photo of yourself with your new phone. You looked completely from how you had before you found out. There was the hair – you had had waist-length black hair for as long as you could remember and now you were sporting a light brown hue. Green eyes looked good on you. Your clothing style had reverted to what it was before you had changed it to fit the demands of being with one of the most fashion-conscious men in South Korea. You liked the change.

Thus far the numbness had served you well. You were not concerned about it. You hoped it would last forever but some part of you knew that sooner or later you would have to deal with a world of hurt. You had known it was coming. You had tried to prepare yourself as well as you could. You had thought that you were ready right up until a minute ago when you had tried to watch an episode of your favorite drama on your phone and had the misfortune of having a Big Bang ad crop up. You saw his smiling face before you could close it and the pain began.  

For the rest of that week and all of the next you stayed in the house. Your cousin returned from her trip, took one look at you and declared that you could stay for as long as you wanted to.  It was a living thing, this pain of yours. It slept, letting you forget for hours on end that your husband had cheated on you with a Japanese Barbie, before waking to catch you unprepared and burn another hole through your heart.

One day a call came through, from a number you did not know. You accepted it because you thought perhaps it was your cousin – that girl lost a phone at least once a month – and almost had a heart attack when you heard the familiar voice on the other line. Jiyong. He didn’t let you speak. He started pleading for you to come home, begging you to let him know where you were, how you were, asking for your forgiveness then cutting himself off and saying he knew he didn’t deserve it. He went on like that for a full five minutes before you hung up on him.  He had promised you multiple times that he would never hurt you. He had sworn before God, your family, friends and about a hundred members of the Korean press that he would be faithful to you. He had chosen the end of your marriage when he chose to break those vows. Maybe someday in the distant future you would be able to tolerate him.

For now you wanted him to burn in hell for all eternity.

A/N: There is a third part to this....it shall be up...in give or take a week.