The dark wooden door to the outer hall opens, and Minseok looks up from where he’s sitting on one of the leather couches in Yifan’s waiting room. His ex-wife walks in, the clicking of her heels on the tiled floor outside becoming muted as she steps onto the soft green carpet. Jangmi’s eyes flash across the waiting room, seeing him immediately, but she turns to the receptionist before acknowledging him. She gives her name and stands at the tall desk to fill out the form she’s handed.

Minseok watches her, watches the way the bones in the back of her hand flex as she writes, hand moving swiftly and surely across the paper. She’s left-handed, like Eunbi. She’s like their younger daughter in other ways too, in her thinness, in her height. In bare feet they’re the exact same height, but Jangmi usually wears heels. He takes in her profile, clear as her hair is drawn back from her face in a professional bun. She looks older than she does in his mind, in his memories. Of course, she is 35 now, the same age as Minseok, and Minseok knows he is lucky in his genes, his baby-face still putting him at a glance in his mid-twenties despite the fine lines beginning to appear around his eyes. The years are more visible on Jangmi, the youthful plumpness to her cheeks replaced by sharp cheekbones and a knife-edge jaw. It suits her, Minseok thinks. She is beautiful. She always was.

Jangmi hands back the form and turns towards him. Their eyes meet, and Jangmi walks across the small waiting room. She takes a seat on the couch set at a right-angle to his, in the nearer corner, so that they’re close physically but not actually sharing space. She crosses thin legs one over the other, and her black stockings go a little sheer over her kneecaps. She places her handbag calmly beside her.

“Hello, Minseok.”

“Hi, Jangmi,” Minseok says. He tries for a smile. It comes out even more lopsided than usual. “Thanks for coming.”

A couple of weeks ago, Yifan had asked Minseok to ask Jangmi to come to one of his therapy sessions. His psychologist thinks that it would be helpful for them to discuss the incident together, and also to look at how they want to move forward in a neutral environment. Considering that the whole therapy thing was Jangmi’s idea in the first place, Minseok hadn’t been too worried that she would refuse, and he’d been right - Jangmi had agreed willingly enough to come along. He is worried, though, nerves making his palms sweat again in a way they haven’t done before therapy for weeks. He’s worried about Yifan seeing how hard it is for him and Jangmi to communicate like the rational adults they both are in any other situation, and he’s worried about Jangmi seeing him in the extremely vulnerable state he’s been struggling with ever since Yifan got him to explain the incident. There hasn’t been a single session in which Minseok hasn’t cried. It’s like years and years of repressed grief have all been stored up, and now it pours out of him at any opportunity it gets. He doesn’t want to break down in front of Jangmi, but he doesn’t trust himself to be able not to.

Perhaps things will be better this time, he thinks with little hope, as they sit in silence in the waiting room. Perhaps he will not cry this time. He stares emptily at the artwork on the opposite wall, while Jangmi taps at her digital planner in his peripheral vision. The artwork is a Degas reproduction. Minseok hadn’t known that when he first came here, but he’d looked it up after several weeks spent staring at the depicted ballet dancers in white practice skirts intently tying their shoe-ribbons and preparing themselves for what’s to come.

Yifan appears to call them through. Minseok stands, watches as Yifan approaches Jangmi and introduces himself and shakes her hand. If Jangmi is intimidated by Yifan’s height and severe features the way Minseok had been, she doesn’t show it. She probably isn’t intimidated at all, Minseok thinks as he follows them both through to Yifan’s room. She spends her days in courts having verbal battles with other lawyers and doing cross-examinations on witnesses. Not much intimidates Jangmi.

Yifan has moved the seating arrangement in his room a little, to allow for a third armchair so that they are sitting in an evenly-spaced circle. Yifan’s chair is close enough to his desk that he can reach a hardback notebook without getting up. He places in his lap and flips open to about midway through. Minseok glances at it as he sits down. Yifan doesn’t usually take notes during their sessions. He glimpses that the neat black handwriting on the page is in English, not Korean, or even Chinese as he might have expected Yifan’s preferred language to be.

Yifan is thanking Jangmi for coming, and Minseok forces himself to focus on what’s going on.

“Minseok told me at our first session that it was your idea for him to see a therapist,” Yifan is saying. “He explained that you told him this was the only way you wouldn’t sue for custody of your two daughters.”

“Yes,” Jangmi says clearly, nodding as she does. “That’s right.”

“Could you explain what it was that pushed you to that point?”

“I just got so damn sick of it,” Jangmi says. “Constantly having to reassure the girls that it wasn’t their fault, that he did love them, even when I wasn’t even sure of that myself. I tried to give him a chance to get his act together, I tried to be patient and understand that he was grieving, but every year he got worse, not better. He worked constantly, he’d disappear for months at a time without contact, then show up out of the blue looking so exhausted I thought he’d collapse where he stood. It was so bad for the girls. They never knew when they’d get to see their father. I’ve tried and failed for seven years to get through to him, so I knew I had to do something drastic. So I threatened him with custody. By then, I wasn’t even sure that that would work. He was so distant with the girls I thought maybe he’d just give up on them too.”

“This was very frustrating for you,” Yifan says, and Jangmi nods, looking relieved.

“Yes, very frustrating. I didn’t want to sue for custody, but I would have if he hadn’t agreed to try therapy. It was for the sake of the girls. I felt like I had no other choice.”

“Minseok,” Yifan says. Minseok jumps. “What do you think about what Jangmi has just said?”

“I think she has a point,” Minseok says. It feels hard to speak. He always feels like this when he has to talk honestly, like he’s a rusty machine badly in need of oiling. He can’t look directly at Jangmi, or at Yifan. “Now, at least. But I was angry when she suggested it originally. I didn’t think I had a problem with working. I thought she just wanted to take the girls away from me too.”

Jangmi gives him an unreadable look. “You mean, out of spite?”

Minseok shakes his head. He feels so stiff he’s almost surprised he doesn’t creak.

“Maybe a little out of spite,” he says. “But mostly, because you thought I was such a bad father, and that...that I didn’t deserve to have children. Any children. Like...a punishment.”

“Minseok, do you think you deserve to be punished that way?” Yifan asks.

“Yes,” Minseok says.

“Why?”

“Because -” Minseok’s voice does that croaking, cracking thing that it does when he’s about to cry. Yifan knows it well enough by now that he’s passing Minseok the tissue box on his desk even before the tears start to fall down his face. Minseok grabs a handful of them and presses them hard against his eyes. He can sense Jangmi staring at him. “. I didn’t want to do this today.”

“He never cries,” Jangmi says. She sounds dazed. “Never.”

“Keep going, Minseok,” Yifan says. He sounds as calm as ever.

“Because it was my fault,” Minseok says, in his pathetic, wavering, cracking voice. He hates it so much, hates how much it exposes his raw insides. “Jangmi thinks so too. If I’d been more aware, if I’d been watching him instead of working…” the tears are coming too fast to speak through. “Sorry,” he chokes. “Give me a moment.”

“Jangmi, do you think what happened to your son is Minseok’s fault?”

There’s a short silence, broken only by Minseok’s pathetic attempts to hold back his tears.

“Yes,” Jangmi says eventually. “I do.”

It’s nothing Minseok didn’t expect. It’s almost a relief to hear her say it so plainly. He knows it’s possible to distort things and assign self-blame that doesn’t belong to him. They’ve discussed it, him and Yifan. Logically Minseok does know that the accident was just that - an accident. But Jangmi is an intelligent woman, and she blames him, and it’s just so easy, so very, very easy to blame himself too.

“Why?”

“It’s like he said.” Jangmi says. “He wasn’t aware. He was working in the kitchen, it was easier for him to keep an eye on things than me from the office. If he’d noticed things going quiet, Ilsung wouldn’t have been oxygen-deprived for so long. If he’d listened to Nayoung right away instead of sending her to me, when he knew I was busy, even that might have been enough time to save him.”

Minseok gets control of his tears enough to take the tissues from his face and lift his head. Damn this ing grief, he thinks as he swallows, hating that he has to let Yifan and Jangmi see his face when he’s been crying.

“Minseok, do you agree with Jangmi’s reasons?”

Minseok nods.

Yifan is actually writing in his notebook. Minseok has never seen him do that before. He watches Yifan’s pen jot swiftly along the faint blue line. He can’t see what he’s writing. After a moment, Yifan lifts his head again.

“Finding someone to blame - and then blaming them - sometimes makes us feel that we’ve solved a problem,” Yifan says. “In this case, both of you have assigned blame to your son’s accident. In that way, you’ve achieved a sense of completion. Jangmi, it sounds like after the accident, you had to take on full care of your younger children.”

Jangmi nods. “Yes, I did. Minseok left me to do everything. All he’d ever do was work, and I had a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old to look after as well as dealing with my own grief over Ilsung and trying to stay in my career. Minseok locked himself away. He’d never speak to me, never do a thing with the girls, like we didn’t even exist. Even when we were going through the divorce, he never fought. He didn’t even try to save our marriage. He just passively took everything, like he didn’t even care.”

“Let’s look at that from the perspective of blame,” Yifan says. “If blaming a person for a situation enables the blamer to move on and deal with vital tasks, like raising younger children, what do you think might happen if the person blames themselves?”

He’s asking both of them. There’s a short silence. Minseok’s chest hurts. The tears want to rise up again. He shoves them down. Yifan usually tells him to let the emotions run their course, but he needs to stay present today.

Jangmi is pressing her lips together. “I suppose if we follow that line of reasoning through, I had someone to blame, so I could move on. Minseok had only himself to blame, so he couldn’t.”

Yifan nods. “From what I’ve heard from Minseok, and from you today, Jangmi, it sounds to me like this situation of blame and self-blame has really caused a lot of suffering for both of you. We have Jangmi having to cope with her bereavement and with caring for her daughters with no support from Minseok, and we have Minseok having to cope with his trauma on his own.” Yifan glances at Minseok. “Could you explain to Jangmi what began to happen to you when you thought of the accident?”

Minseok shudders. “What if I…”

“You are safe here,” Yifan reminds him, again, for at least the tenth time. The man’s patience must be infinite, Minseok thinks, somewhere within his distress. “If you re-experience here, nothing bad will happen.”

“Re-experience?” Jangmi repeats.

“I have post-traumatic stress disorder,” Minseok says. It’s the first time he’s ever admitted it aloud. The words seem to hang in the room, in the sudden silence. He breathes in shakily. “Whenever - whenever I thought of…” Ilsung, his son, his baby, the accident, Ilsung with the plastic bag over his face, over his mouth where he’d tried to breathe, and Minseok feels a bolt of white horror strike him, and he’s across the room and on his knees, tearing the bag from Ilsung’s face -

Pressure on his shoulder.

“Minseok?”

He blinks. The room. Yifan. He’s stood up and crossed the room to stand in front of him without Minseok being aware of it. His hand is squeezing Minseok’s shoulder hard. It’s a way to break him out of the flashback. They’d agreed to the physical intervention a while ago.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m here.”

“Can you continue?” Yifan lets go of him and steps back. Instead of sitting down, he leans against his desk, watching Minseok carefully from beneath his severe eyebrows.

“Yes,” Minseok says. He’s started now, and there’s almost no stopping it, like a snowball rolling down a slope and gathering speed and momentum all the time. “I...every time I’d think of it, I’d relive it. Completely. Not like a memory, like I’m really there. I have no awareness of the present. I can’t tell that anything outside of the memory exists. And it’s so awful. I have to keep seeing it...keep seeing him with the...doing CPR...and failing...over and over…” he’s crying again, God damn it. He dashes the tears from his cheeks angrily. “So I worked. I worked so hard I was too tired to think of anything else. I worked all the time so that my mind was filled with patients and cases, so that I could always back off and distract myself with something else important, something else life-threatening. Because I couldn’t keep experiencing those flashbacks. They were tearing me apart. I really think I would have actually gone insane.” He takes a shaky breath. “Even the girls would trigger it. They reminded me too much of him. I couldn’t even look at them, Jangmi. And so. After a while I got pretty good at distancing myself. I could even look at photographs of him and miss him at a distance without getting into it. Then I came to my first therapy session, and it was the first time I’d tried to actually talk about it, and - I had the worst flashback I’d had for years. It wasn’t gone. I’d just learned how to avoid it. Only it turns out that in PTSD, avoidance just makes it worse.”

“Minseok, I - .” Jangmi sounds half angry, half distressed. “That’s - I never - how could you -” she stops and takes a controlled breath, visibly gathering herself together. “Why didn’t you tell me that was happening to you?”

Minseok gives a choking laugh. “I was too scared to talk about it. I couldn’t bring myself to even think about it, so I ran away. I’m not proud of it, Jangmi. But that’s what I did.”

There’s a silence, during which Minseok wipes his face with his tissues and Jangmi sits in her chair, looking shocked. Yifan breaks it by speaking again.

“How do you feel about what Minseok has just told you, Jangmi?”

“I - I’m shocked.” Jangmi shakes her head. “I had no idea.” She turns back to Minseok. “I still don’t think it’s an excuse for what you did. You don’t get to just blame everything on PTSD or something and get out of taking responsibility that way.”

“I know,” Minseok says. “I made terrible decisions about how to deal with all this. I’m not trying to make it an excuse, I’m just telling you what happened. But I want to do better now. That’s why I’m here, Jangmi. I am trying.”

Jangmi closes tightly. She looks tight all over, half-angry, half-upset.

“You could have tried harder back then,” she mutters.

Minseok closes his eyes. Yes, he knows he did wrong. But he can’t change the past. If there’s one thing he knows from all this, it’s that he can’t change the past, no matter how desperately he wants to.

When the silence has stretched for a while, Jangmi says, “About the blame thing. I feel like Minseok and I are talking about different things. I want him to step up and fix the problems of right now, the ones he caused by going distant on me, and he’s still stuck in the problem of Ilsung’s accident. That’s why it’s so hard for us to communicate. He can’t seem to get his head out of the accident and look at what needs to be done to make things work now. Is it because his self-blame is trapping him in the past?” She looks up at Yifan leaning on the desk.

Yifan gives his non-committal hum. He almost always does that, if Minseok asks direct questions like that.

“What do you think about that idea, Minseok?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I mean...I get that it was an accident. Logically I can see that. I just don’t know how I can ever stop blaming myself. And so, I can’t see how Jangmi can, either.”

“You see?” Jangmi sits up straighter, her voice rising. “I’m trying to talk about now, about our living children who need him, and he’s still talking about Ilsung! Don’t you get it, Minseok?”

Minseok shivers. He gets it, he thinks, but...

“Minseok, can you try and think about this from the perspective I gave you earlier?” Yifan asks. His voice is unusually gentle. “Assigning blame can make us feel that we’ve understood and solved a situation. To move on and be present for your daughters like Jangmi wishes, like I believe you do want, you’re going to have to let go of the blame. That means you have to accept that maybe there is no way to understand and solve what happened to Ilsung. You have to accept that you had no control of it, and you never did. That’s what accidents are.”

Jesus ing Christ, Minseok is going to cry again. He buries his face in another handful of tissues.

“You know, apart from right afterwards, in the hospital, I never saw you cry,” Jangmi says. “Sometimes I wondered if you even cared.”

Minseok feels that like a knife in his chest. He has to breathe a few times before he can reply. “Because I couldn’t let myself feel enough to cry. I’d never get that far even if I did. I’d re-experience first.”

Another silence.

“I’m sorry,” Minseok says after a while. “I never intended to leave you on your own like that, but I can see now that that’s what I did.”

“Yes, well. You being sorry now doesn’t just magically make up for me having to put up with seven years of you being a total , Minseok.” Jangmi looks away from him, turns to Yifan. “I don’t get it. Why did he get PTSD over this? I was there too. I went through everything just as much as he did, and I had to get on with life. I didn’t get to ignore my responsibilities and hide from everything like he did.”

“PTSD is a psychiatric disorder,” Yifan says. “It wasn’t a choice Minseok made or something he could control. It means he was never able to process and adjust for the experience he went through. Instead of things getting better over time, as happens to most people, for Minseok, they got worse. You sensed this, Jangmi, when you told me at the start of the session that you saw him getting worse every year. Forcing Minseok to get help was the right thing to do.”

“Is he going to get better?” Jangmi asks.

“I am getting better,” Minseok says. He gestures wryly to his damp face. “Apparently all this crying is a good sign, though it seems kind of backwards to me.”

“You are processing the emotions you’ve repressed in a normal way,” Yifan tells him. “Crying is a normal response to grief. As we work through this, you'll be able to move on. You’ve already made amazing progress to get to the point of allowing yourself to feel these very strong emotions. You should be proud of that.”

“I really am sorry, Jangmi,” Minseok says again. “I was an awful husband, an awful father. If I could change what I did back then, I would.”

“Okay,” Jangmi says, and sighs. “I believe that you do regret it, Minseok. Thank you for acknowledging that.”

Yifan asks if they’re both okay with leaving the topic of the past for now and discussing how they can make things work better in the present, and they both agree.

“So, in an ideal world, Jangmi, what would you like to see from Minseok?” Yifan asks.

“Reliability,” Jangmi says immediately. “More of what he’s been showing me in the past couple of months, really. It’s already a good start, if we can keep on like this. I want specified times where he always takes the girls, maybe regular weekends or evenings. I know that’s hard with emergency department shifts, but,” she turns to Minseok, “I also know you’re the department chief and you’re in control of your rostering. I want you to put the girls first by making it so that when you’re scheduled off-shift, even if something happens - barring a natural disaster or something, of course - you delegate, send in a junior staff member instead of going in yourself.”

“Do you think that’s fair, Minseok?”

“Yes,” Minseok says. It’s going to be hard to take such a big step back, but he wants to put his family first, now, and that’s going to make all the difference in actually doing it.

“Is there anything you would like to see from Jangmi?”

Minseok thinks. “Not really. I think she’s done a pretty amazing job already. If she’s willing to accept that I’m doing my best to change, that’s enough for me.”

---

Joonmyun wakes up to socked feet tiptoeing over the wooden floor. Closet doors open and close quietly and Yejin’s jewelry box gives a small click as it’s unlocked. In his sleepy haze, Joonmyun first wonders if there are thieves going through their apartment before he wakes up a little more and realises that it’s probably Yejin, not thieves. He opens his eyes and squints towards the sound. The shadow that moves around in their dark bedroom sure looks like his wife. She leaves the bedroom and closes the door softly behind her.

Joonmyun rolls over and gets caught in the blanket. Instead of kicking the blanket away, he closes his eyes again. It has to be super early and she will come to wake him up soon enough. He can’t be late for work, but he’s tired after a couple of bad on-call shifts. He falls asleep again immediately.

Thirty minutes later he’s woken by the press of her lips to his cheek. His eyes flutter open and he sends her a tired smile.

“Is it morning already?” he whispers. Yejin shakes her head.

“Yejoon is still sleeping, so you can sleep until he wakes up. I won’t be home until dinner.”

Joonmyun wrinkles his forehead and squints at her, but he can’t come up with the reason she’ll be so late. Yejin laughs softly and uses her fingers to flatten out the wrinkles.

“It’s the field trip today, remember?”

Joonmyun nods as her words finally spark his memory. He’s off work today and will look after Yejoon. Yejin has just started teaching at the primary school again now that Yejoon is 6 months old. She usually just does mornings, but the field trip will take up the whole day. Yejin gets up from the bed to kiss Yejoon goodbye in his cot and Joonmyun suddenly becomes much more awake as the implications strike him. His fear of SIDS lessened as Yejoon grew older, but there are still so many things that could go wrong. Without Yejin there to calm him down, it all suddenly feels very overwhelming.

There’s no way he can sleep again now that his