No matter how much he tried, Yulhee wasn’t easy to please. She didn’t like any of the cartoons that he wanted to watch together with her, she didn’t like playing outside although she thought the garden was nice. She wanted to help out in the kitchen, but Woohyun was the one who’d taken over making lunch for the guests that he, as nicely as he could had to repeatedly decline her offer to ‘wash rice and veggies in the sink’ although ‘she did it with omma all the time!’ 

Yulhee didn’t like the omelette that he made, and she didn’t even know why she didn’t. She did talk a lot like she usually did but she did not talk in the way that she did at home. She didn’t want to say anything about school, she didn’t have favorite colors or favorite animals or favorite books to read. She didn’t have anything favorite! she exclaimed, and Woohyun pouted, looking up at me, perhaps accepting that Yulhee was no easy nut to crack. 

Throughout their interaction, I realised that the mother of Yulhee inside me wasn’t exactly pleased as well, and that alarmed me. I sat on the sofa and watched Woohyun talking to Yulhee, helping her choose a movie. At home she watched the documentaries on the sinking of Bismark and about Russian lady night bombers on repeat to the point she remembered all the characters and lines by heart. She wasn’t going to like Ponyo or Totoro or Princess Mononoke as much as she enjoyed watching warships sink and bomb dropping soviet women. As I watched the two of them, my heart was sinking and dropping as well.

Woohyun may not have realised it, and he couldn’t be blamed as well, but he spoke to Yulhee in the way that he would talk to a baby. He used a soft, high pitched tone and referred to himself in third person. ‘Ahjussi would do that, ahjussi would find a nice movie for you,’ and even more so, he addressed her in third person as well. ‘Does Yulhee-Ssi like Kiki? It's about a little girl like Yulhee-Ssi and a cat’. Yulhee had never been spoken to like that. We never used baby voices and incomplete sentences. There was a time that I did, but Sung Gyu insisted that she had to grow up knowing how to speak clear, well developed sentences. His belief was that we built an environment for her where she grew up to be her own individual self. And that was what I was witnessing now, Yulhee being her own unique self and an adult struggling to understand her. I felt that weight in my heart too, that concern and constant fear. Woohyun would never be Kim Sung Gyu.

I could bring Woohyun into her life, as a friend, as an uncle, as another adult she knew. But it was evident, it's going to be hard for Woohyun to live up to the father that she knew. No matter what we did, where we went, whom she met, Yulhee was going to continue to seek for the likes of her father in others or her father himself. She wanted that reliance, she wanted an equal of him. It was evident in the way that she brought him up on every occasion possible; ‘Appa and I watch news in the evening everyday!’, ‘Appa said there will never be a big war again’ It was as if it gave her comfort to think of his presence in her life whenever he was not around. She was essentially a part of him as much as he was a part of her. They were family, and I was the evil trying to push them away. Another reason. It appeared in my mind before I could fight that thought. Another reason to stay.

Sometime in the late afternoon, we were in Woohyun’s garden watching Yulhee playing with the cat. I had left my phone inside. It didn’t occur to me until I went in to refill Yulhee’s bottle with warm water and found it on a kitchen counter along with Woohyun’s, ringing away. I picked up the phone, yet the call ended before I could answer it. It was Sung Gyu; calls and texts in every platform possible like sirens in panic. Dread crept into my heart as I stared at the phone, waiting for it to ring again, and it did.

“Good heavens, Jung Eunji, where on earth are you!” Sung Gyu’s voice barked at me on the other end, and I immediately caught the signs of fright in his voice. “I’ve been calling you thousand times, pick up the damn phone would you?!?”

My first instinct was anger, then irritation. I was naturally affected by Woohyun who’d been lovely and affectionate towards me through the day, only to be blasted in my ear by a very irritated Sung Gyu. But then, realisation hit me. I never really told him that I was going away, and he must have finished work and walked out into an empty house, no wife, no child; especially no child. I couldn’t possibly blame him.

“I’m sorry” I tried reasoning out in a quiet voice. “I just accidentally left the phone-,”

But it was as if he wasn’t even hearing me. “Where are you, where is Yulhee?” His voice was like thunder. “I was away for just one ing day and you’d taken off with her without even telling me, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I gripped my phone tightly in my hands and took a deep breath. There it was again, as expected without warning, his senseless assumptions and accusations. While it was partially true that I had left him with the child that I gave birth to and raised, he behaved as if I had done wrong to her. 

“I’m sorry that I left without telling you” I replied, keeping my anger at bay. “I didn’t take off anywhere, I just came out with my daughter just like any other mother would”

There was silence, and I imagined him in a fruitless attempt to calm his horses. “Fine” he said in the end. “Where are you? I’ll come over, I’ll pick you up”

At the same time, Woohyun peaked his head inside from the front door and looked across the house at me. Overcome with guilt, I turned away from him after gesturing with my hand.

“No, it’s okay, I drove myself here”

“I’ll take a taxi, tell me where you are” he pushed on.

I sighed heavily, my hand on my waist and closed my eyes. This was what my mother meant when she said ‘You tell a thousand lies to hide one’. That was what I was doing right at that moment, spurring out hundred different lies just to hide one.

“No, I’m fine oppa, I can come by myself,” A moment and I added for emphasis; “I don’t want you to get yourself lost again”

This seemed to have done it. I heard a resigned sigh on the other end. “Where are you then? Are you at your mum’s?” I could have lied at that time, and lied to my mother to make her lie to him, telling that I was there with her, but I couldn't bring myself to. The last thing I wanted was him calling her and creating a bigger mess. So I lied to him instead.

“I’m at a friend’s...Hyejoo’s” I replied, swallowing my own words. Sung Gyu knew Hyejoo, he knew she was the only friend I had. 

A moment and “Okay…” He said in his usual conversational tone. “Then….stay safe, Eunji. Take care of Yulhee, don’t let her out of your sight”

I was already guilty of letting her out of my sight; I peaked out the kitchen window and found Woohyun and Yulhee seated on the grass, the cat laying between them. “I will, she’s fine”

“Okay” He sighed. “At what time are you coming back? Shall I make something for dinner?”

I felt a tight knot forming in my throat. It's been so long since Sung Gyu last offered to make dinner for us. It may have been one of his odd days when he behaved normally again, perhaps because both Yulhee and I had left him behind on his own.  I felt almost tearful, realising that it was a chance that I couldn’t possibly pass. But I had promised Woohyun, I had already told him we’d stay, and he was going to take us out for a meal.

“No...Oppa” I found myself telling him with a heavy, heavy heart. “Hyejoo and I...we’re having a sleepover today, a girls’ day out with Yulhee”

He was silent for a second, and when he spoke again, disappointment was palpable in his voice. “Ah, okay, alright Eunji...then have fun”

The call ended at that point, and for the next few minutes, I stood still in Woohyun’s too-white, too-large kitchen, my phone clutched to my chest. There was warmth in my eyes, my chest inflated, that balloon taking up space inside me again. For a moment, I couldn’t believe what had become of me, lying to my husband, lying to myself. It was for the best. I told myself again, closed my eyes and tried to wipe the sound of his voice from my mind. For myself, for Yulhee and him. It was for the best.

“How was the day for you?” I asked Woohyun later in the night. We were lying in bed together, curtains drawn, early autumn wind blowing through the windows. It's been a few hours since we’d returned home from a lush, expensive dinner buffet and a stroll down the park. The food was great, the atmosphere incredible. Yulhee had the time of her life, especially since she met a new friend in the play area of the hotel, an american-korean child with whom Yulhee confidently conversed in English much to Woohyun’s amazement, and had her favorite ice cream in the park. She was pretty beat by the time we got back, so I gave her a bath, put her in her pajamas and she soon fell asleep in one of the two extra bedrooms that Woohyun had in his house. We retreated to his bedroom afterwards, took half our clothes off and made love in complete silence. Just in case she came searching for me, we dressed ourselves again, and held each other in the quietness, catching up on the time we lost.

“It was...exhausting” Woohyun said and he laughed good naturedly. I understood what he meant.

“She’s quite a handful isn’t she?” I asked him, thinking fondly of my daughter. Not everyone could keep up with her energy. For Woohyun it was just a start. 

He chuckled lightly, his head tossed back, his fingers in my hair. “She’s not a handful, darling, she’s brilliant but she scares me”

I looked up at him and smiled.

“I guess she’s taking after her mother” Murmured Woohyun leaned in and nuzzled the curve of my neck. My smile dropped at that, as the same sense of utter guilt stirred alive inside me. If Yulhee ever took after her mother, she wouldn’t be the bright, expressive child that she was. I wouldn’t know what a child who had taken up after me would be like, but the only things I knew Yulhee had gotten from me were her eyes and the curls of her hair while everything else she had learned from her father. I couldn’t tell Woohyun any of this, so I remained quiet letting him kiss me, letting his hands rub my skin under my shirt. I was only half registering his touch while the other, the more rational side of me was overcome with a sense of guilt and remorse that I couldn’t understand. 

“I’m also amazed, to be honest…” Woohyun was saying after he had moved away from me. “She knows two languages already, and she watches the news everyday...how does her little brain take all of that?” Woohyun looked down at me. “Do you think it’s good for her?”

I shrugged, looking ahead. It was a question that we’ve been asked so often. But she had grown up like that, she went to nursery as herself and would unhesitantly be herself. The only people whom I’d heard that concern from were from people who either weren’t professionals related to children or did not have kids. Woohyun easily was the latter. 

“We raised her like that…'' I swallowed, unable to bring myself to say the rest. “My...husband and I. He looked after her the most, so she learned things from him”

Something flashed through Woohyun’s eyes, something unreadable. Envie? Irritation?

“I don’t think it's good for her,” Woohyun replied. “She’s still four, she should be watching cartoons and painting in coloring books, but she’s already talking about the second world war instead”

I felt a tinge of annoyance at this. It was meaningless, perhaps, unintentional. Maybe I was tired of being told how I should raise my child. I gave him a tight smile, nevertheless, and looked away. “It hasn’t done her any bad. She’s four and a half, she’d be five soon. It’s good she’s growing up learning about her past”

“But things like wars are too much for her. That can leave a negative impact on her”

“Or even better-,” I found myself telling him, recalling the exact words that Sung Gyu had said to someone who said something along the line when they had met Yulhee as well. I looked at him and smiled. “She would grow up knowing more about the world”

A moment, and Woohyun hummed in response. “It’s your daughter, what can I say..” He sighed, yielding in the end. “If you’re raising the future president, I can’t really complain, can I?”

I laughed in response. There was a moment of thoughtful silence during which we just stared ahead, out the open window at the tranquil street. I liked the silence, I liked this comfort of normal conversations with no possibility of angry squabbles in the end. But still, there was this distinct sense of dread inside me, a sense of uncertainty, a tinge of guilt. Woohyun not only did not know Yulhee, he did not try hard enough to get to know her. It may have been only my understanding, my desperate attempts to see right through him, hoping he would shift and change to fit into the mold that I had made in my mind to suit Yulhee as a father figure. But it was an emotion I couldn't easily shake off, hanging onto me like a parasite. And this sense of guilt only worsened with what Woohyun said next.

“Well, I always wanted my son to be a soccer player”

Initially I thought he was talking about possible boy children in the future. It took a moment for it to register in my mind, the sense of his words. He spoke in the past tense...the uneasiness in my chest only grew worse.

My son. Woohyun had a son? 

“Wait…” I muttered and untangled myself from him. I moved away. “You have a son?”

Woohyun looked undeterred by the question as if I had known all along. “I do,” He replied.

Cold trepidation ran down my spine. Then anger. Then betrayal. “But you never told me”

He shrugged. “You never asked,” He replied. “And I always thought you knew”

“How could I?” I returned incredulously. “There’s no way that I would”

“Everyone at work knows”

I blinked, my hand fisted on his quilt. “No, I don’t”

He sighed heavily and looked into my eyes. “Well then I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, I have a seven year old son, Eunji”

I was, in all honesty, mystified. I did not know how I felt, what this deep sense of regret that I felt could possibly mean. “You should be…” I found myself telling him mechanically. “Because there’s no way I could know”

Woohyun was quiet as he scanned my face. “Does it bother you, Eunji? That I was married?” He asked me.

Did that bother me? Was that what I was bothered by? Just a few minutes ago, I was not thinking about even the possibility of that being true. Woohyun was just the person that I was going out with, the man I was seeing behind my husband's back, the one I had decided to leave him for. But now all of a sudden, I was learning he’d been married and also had a child. How did he expect I would feel?

“No I…” I started slowly and met his eyes. “Are you still married?” I found myself asking him. I knew I shouldn’t. But I wasn’t the one who had been keeping things secret. 

“No” He shook his head. “I'm divorced”

“And-and the wife?”

“Lives in Japan with my son”

I nodded. “Why didn’t you tell me then?”

“Because it's in the past and it doesn’t matter anymore” He replied, and there was a certain weight in his voice. He moved closer to me. “Besides, Eunji, you are married too; I wouldn’t have gone out with you if I wasn’t”

There was far too much to take in, too many loopholes in his logic for me to acknowledge. I could only stare at him for a very long time, my mind empty, thoughts scattered all over the place. I didn’t know what to say to him afterwards, even after he reached out and took my hands in his. “It's all over now, it ended a long time ago” He was telling me, unsmiling, but there was something in his eyes which both consoled and terrified me. “When you’ve gotten divorced and when we can finally get together, Eunji, we can start all over again. You, me and Yulhee. We can all be happy”

For that one moment, I was beginning to question everything. That promise of happiness, the need to start again. I thought back to the last phone conversation I had, the lies I had said, the disappointment in his voice. I was standing in the crossroads again, taking two steps backwards after the one step forward that I took. I was back where I started, lost and confused. So for that night, I decided to sleep on it and let time take its course.

♡♡♡

The next morning, I woke up in Woohyun’s arms, the first time I had gone to sleep with him into the next day. Despite that, I didn’t feel exactly gratified as last night's incidents came to my mind. The marriage that he’d kept from me, the divorce, the child. I wasn’t a better person than he was that I couldn’t even call him out for betraying me. And when I found a text on my phone afterwards, Sung Gyu asking me what time we were coming home, my heart fell even further. We’d never stayed away from home overnight like this; it was only Sung Gyu who did, so his worries were understandable. I replied briefly that we would be returning soon and moved on to freshen myself.

We didn’t stay for too long. The revelations have somehow ruined the mood a bit, and on top of that Yulhee was so eager to go home. She was loud and cranky all morning, and I thought I saw a wince on Woohyun’s face although he tried to be accommodating. So we didn’t stay for breakfast, collected our things and I told Woohyun goodbye. As I drove away, I turned back to look at his dainty little house and felt a flash of regret. It appeared a lie to me, all of a sudden. A dainty little house, a dainty little lie.

I stopped at a cafe and bought breakfast for Yulhee, the only thing that could make her less cranky. A milkshake and a slice of cake did definitely fix her mood, although she couldn’t finish half of it. 

“Was it good?” I asked her, reached out and dusted off the crumbs of cake off her face. “Do you feel better now?”

She nodded enthusiastically and had a long gulp of chocolate milk. “Cake is always the best!”

I laughed. “Do you want anything else, Yulhee?”

She shook her head, then looked up with widened doe eyes. “But let's take something for appa''

At the mention of him, that balloon in my body inflated even more. It had gotten bigger to the point of exploding now, and I could hardly breathe.

“Of course, we should,” I agreed with a smile and pulled out my purse. “What should we get for him?”

Yulhee didn’t take too long to think as if she knew his order by heart. “Iced americano!”

It was his favorite drink. He didn’t eat much, hardly had breakfast before running to work back when we were just dating. He lost so much weight at that time, deeply engrossed in his research. I could still recall how his tuft of untrimmed hair looked too large on top of his small face, his skinny arms, boney shoulders and how I forcefully packed him breakfast and even brought to the gate of the university just so he could get some energy before work. It felt like an eternity had passed since then. Sung Gyu was nearing his forties now, and he had put on more, kept his hair trimmed and no longer needed his breakfast packed or me waiting by the gate. But a large part of him was still the same Sung Gyu, including the iced americano that he loved. 

I left Yulhee to finish her drink and headed back to the counter, and every step I took I felt like I was dragging my heavily chained feet, chained by my own bad decisions. Not only had I driven Sung Gyu to the edge until he’d fallen ill, I was also muddling things up for my child. I had only seen women like me in movies, read in books; I hadn’t thought they would really exist. And even worse, that I would become one of them.

I bought him a tall cup of iced americano and different types of bread that he would like. I returned to the table, walking that walk of shame. In front of Yulhee, I smiled brightly although I was about to do something that I did genuinely dread. 

“Are you done?” I asked. There was half finished cake and half finished drink. But she patted her stomach and smiled. I proceeded to finish it up for her, yet everything tasted like sand for me.

“Yulhee-ah” I called her after a while, gripping the fork in my hand. The thing about mothering a daughter too smart for her age who was also close to her father was that I couldn’t possibly make ill thought decisions and get away with it, unless I did the wrong thing that I shouldn’t. I looked up and met her eyes.

“You know, yesterday Appa was having a long day of work, and we were having a lot of fun together, right?”

“Fun?” Yulhee made a face as if it wasn’t what she would define as fun. 

“You know, we met omma’s friend, we went to the hotel and had a nice meal, we went to the park and ate ice cream. They are all fun things, right?”

“Okay” Yulhee shrugged. Evidently she did not agree.

“Anyway” I continued. “Your appa was stuck with work the entire day, and we did a lot of things without him. So it won’t be very nice if we tell him that we did fun things without him, isn’t it? He’d be upset”

Yulhee seemed to contemplate this for a moment, and I truly thought she wouldn’t agree with that as well. Miraculously so, she did. “Appa must have been really tired” She said sympathetically, and I nodded in response.

“Yeah, he must have been” I went on and finished the rest of her chocolate milk. “So let's not tell him any of the things that we did yesterday, okay? We would go out to a nice place like that with him one day. But let's keep all the things we did yesterday as our secret so we don’t make him sad, hm?”

Yulhee furrowed her brows and thought about what I said for even longer as I watched her anticpantly like I was waiting for a judge’s verdict. She could be awfully blunt sometimes, and completely honest that I didn’t think she’d feel the same way that I did or if she would keep it a secret. I hadn’t thought things out clearly when I’d decided to bring her into this mess, and now I’d surely have to live with the consequences at some point. But I didn’t want that to be now.

“If he asks, we would tell it was a girls’ thing” I pushed on desperately.

“A girls’ thing?” She questioned. I nodded.

“Yeah, you know, a secret between you and me”

“Does it mean I can tell grandma?”

I raised my hands in panic. “No sweety, the girls are you and me,”

“But grandma is a girl too”

I sighed. There was no easy conversation with her. “Yes sweetie but the girls in our house is you and me”

“Okay” Yulhee said in the end. “It’s a girls’ thing”

I smiled tightly and held out a pinky finger at her. “Promise me you’d keep it a girls’ thing, Yulhee?”

Yulhee wiped her sugar stained hands on a paper napkin, reached out and entwined her tiny pinky finger around mine. “I promise!”

I didn’t really expect Yulhee to keep that secret, but once we got home, she proved me otherwise. Sung Gyu was in the kitchen when we stepped inside, our bags in tow. He looked better than he did the last time I saw him; his face brighter, and actually out of his dressing gown and silk pajamas. Yulhee and he reunited as if they have been apart for months, which made my heart heavy again. They really didn’t have to do that, but I also couldn’t have expected anything else. Sung Gyu picked up his daughter, climbed up on his feet, looked up at me and smiled. My heart leapt out of my chest, stricken in shame. I had spent a night away from home, with his daughter, in my lover's arms as my husband waited at home convinced otherwise. I couldn’t possibly face him now, look him in the eyes, not when he smiled at me like this.

“How was your day?” He asked us, not one in particular, but I panicked and answered myself.

“It’s been great, yeah, um-,” I picked up the coffee and the bread and held out to him. “We bought you coffee”

His face lightened up, seeing that it was his favorite. “Oh, thanks...thank you” He set Yulhee on the ground.

“So how was it for you, Yulhee? Did you have fun?”

“Yeah,” Yulhee answered vaguely as I picked up the bags, ready to escape the situation lest she reveals my ploy. Instead, she struggled to climb into a kitchen stool, so Sung Gyu helped her up into it. Yulhee looked through the bread that we bought. “Did you have the conference yesterday too?”

“Mm” He had a gulp of coffee, and I realised I was already invisible, although I was uncertain if I was safe to leave. “It was about climate change, Yulhee...do you know what that is?”

I crossed the hall, left our bags in my room and returned to the kitchen to start making lunch. But mostly because I wanted to see if Yulhee was about to say things that she shouldn’t.

“It's when it starts raining in the odd times of the year,” Sung Gyu explained when she shook her head. “When it gets too sunny, lands dry up, ice starts to melt because of things that people do that harm the environment. It can be a problem to the governments as well”

“So did you tell the president about it?” She wanted to know, and Sung Gyu laughed lightly. Yulhee liked telling everything to the president, like the president was a country’s equivalent to a store manager.

“No, sweety. At the conference there were people from different cities and we talked about what we can do about problems like that”

Yulhee seemed to have already forgotten where she had come from and was more keen to hear what her father had to say. “So what are you going to do?”

I quietly went on to cook the rice, put something of a stew together, transfer the kimchi from containers to bowls.

“We’re going to make better laws,” Sung Gyu carefully explained to her. “Better laws for big companies, for farmers and fishermen so they do their jobs without hurting the environment”

“Wow” Yulhee exclaimed in fascination. “I hope they do that and stop the rain soon…” A moment, and “I hate the rain” She said with spite.

Sung Gyu softly laughed in response. And in my mind, I was comparing the two. Indeed Yulhee had not liked Woohyun. She didn’t like the baby talking and doing the kind of things he did, and she loved, loved and loved her father which made me rethink everything. On days like this when Sung Gyu was being his usual self, I wanted to continue with him forever. But then these days lasted only so long while bad days were repetitive and longer. It was now a matter of when the next bad day pushed either him or me right off the edge.

“Anyway, Yulhee” Sung Gyu brought up after a moment, “How was your sleep over? Did you have a lot of fun?”

I was by the stove, stirring a pot of curry that I’d just made, and my hand froze over.

“It was fine,” Yulhee merely replied.

“What did you guys do for two days?”

There was silence, and I took the moment to turn off the stove and carry the pan to the table. Yulhee looked up at me, her eyes stricken, and then looked back to her father.

“Ah, I can’t tell you appa, it’s girls stuff”

Sung Gyu looked perplexed. He may have sensed something then, and slowly he looked up at me. My heart stopped, yet I didn’t dare turn away. I merely set the pan on the table as if I hadn’t seen the thoughtful look in his eyes. In the end, Sung Gyu laughed good heartedly, responding to Yulhee after I went away. “Girls stuff! That’s great, Yulhee, I hope you had fun”