Appa is monster. Appa eats eomma. Appa is bad.

For the first time in Kim’s family life, Kim Hyosung didn’t want to be with by her father but choosing her mother instead. She clung on her mother since last night, never let her off. She slept with Eunji in the little girl’s room, letting Sunggyu to sleep alone in master bedroom since she would whine and cry if her mother left her or she saw her father.

And Kim Sunggyu felt like a bad guy by this new attitude of his daughter toward him.

Hyo still clung on her mother’s lap, choosing to be fed by her mother for breakfast instead by her father like usual. She eyed her father full of suspicion while gripping tightly on her mother’s shirt, wondering whether her father would transform into a monster she was afraid of like what happened in her dream.

Eunji couldn’t stop being fascinated by this new kind of scene in their family. For the years she spent after Hyo was born, she tried so hard to win her daughter’s heart over her bias toward her father but she never did it until last night came. She was never supposed that a single dream would turn her daughter’s heart this easily. And watching her husband disappointed face was a new amusement for her this morning.

“I’ll go to work now,” Sunggyu announced as he just finished his breakfast, anticipating his daughter reaction. But the little girl was still immersed in munching her food on the lap of her mother, didn’t look at him at all.

Sunggyu felt so hurt as Hyo never avoided him like this before, and he couldn’t do anything yet to convince her attention back to him since he didn’t have too much time and had to go to work immediately. He leaned forward to kiss his wife and his daughter, but Hyo tried to dodge him giving another pang on his heart.

“Hyo, do you want to ride the car with appa?”

And the answer was only her burying her face in her mother’s chest, didn’t even want to see him. And he muttered something in his sigh and just patted her crest before made his way outside heading for work.

He wondered why it was so hard to win woman’s indescribable heart.

***

“Eomma, can we bathe it?” Hyo brought a little puppy in her arms.

“Where do you get it from, Hyo?”Eunji wasn’t surprised anymore as it was not her first time to see Hyo bringing lost animal or abandoned pet she found in the road and street around their apartment complex.

“I found this puppy sleeping under the slide in the playground, eomma. It looks so pitiful.”

“Owh, poor puppy…. Then let’s bathe and feed it, bunny?”

“Ne, eomma!”

Soon, they carried the puppy to bathe it and feed it caringly as both of these mum and daughter were such animal lovers. Hyo then played along with the puppy around the house, she looked so happy for the company of the little dog.

And Eunji was about to tell Hyo to send the puppy back to its previous place, to the playground, when Hyo asked her a wish, “Eomma, can I keep this puppy?”

“No, darling. You know that your father won’t allow it. We aren’t supposed to keep a pet in our unit.”

She pouted. “But why our neighbor ahjumma has a golden retriever as a pet? Why can’t I have one?”

“Well, yeah. But your appa didn’t want us to keep a pet here, bunny. Aren’t we having three dogs already? Dubu, Coco, and Nurung?”

“But they are living in harabeoji’s house, and they’re too big, Eomma. And they only sleep all the time. I want to have a little puppy like this to be played with,” Hyo pleaded while hugging the lost puppy she found.

Eunji sighed, Hyo indeed had a stubbornness like her father had (or maybe like Eunji herself too?). She remembered when she asked why Sunggyu didn’t take at least one of his family pet dogs into this apartment or allowed her to have a pet and he just simply said that he didn’t want to keep any pet in his apartment with some reasons.

First,