When I took Psychology 101, the professor taught us about random reinforcement. Put three group of rats in three separate cages, each equipped with a bar. The first group of rats got a pellet every time they pressed the bar. The second group never got pellets, no matter what how often they pressed. The third group got pellets just once in awhile.

The first group,the professor said, eventually gets bored with the guaranteed reward, and the rats who never get treats give up, too. But the random rats will press on that bar forever, hoping each time they press that this time the magic will happen, that this time they'll get lucky. It was at that moment in class I realized I had become my father's rat.

He'd loved me once. I remembered it. I had a handful of mental pictures, postcards that had gotten soft around the edges from being handled so often. Scene one: Gwiboonie, age three, snug in her father's lap, head against his chest, feeling his voice as he read Where the Wild Things Are. Scene two: Gwiboonie, age six, holding hands with her appa as he led her through the doors of the elementary school on a warm summer Saturday to take her first grade reading test. "Don't be shy," he tells her, kissing both of her cheeks. "You'll do great."

I remember being ten years old spending whole whole days with my father, running errands, meeting his secretary, and Mrs.Yee at the dry cleaners who did his shirts, the salesman at the clothing store who looked at my father with respect as he paid for his suits. We'd pick up brie at the fancy cheese shop that smelled wonderfully of freshly roasted coffee beans, and old jazz records. Everyone seemed to know my father's name. "Dr. Kim," they'd greet him, smiling at him. And all of them, from the clerk at the cheese store to the security guards in his builing, seemed to know not just who he was, but who I was too. "Your father says you're very smart," they'd say, and I'd stand there, smiling, trying to look smart.

But days like that became rare as I got older. The truth was, my father mostly ignored me. He even ignored my mother. He came home late, he left home early, he spent his weekends in the office or on long drives. "to clear my head." Whatever affection we got, whatever notice he paid us, was parceled out in small doses, administered infrequently. But oh, when he loved me, when he put his hand on my head, when he leaned my own head against him... there was no feeling in the world that could ever beat it. I felt important. I felt cherished. And I would do whatever it took, press the bar until my hands bled, to get that feeling again.

He left is for the first time when I turned twelve. I came home from school and there he was, unexpectedly, in the bedroom, piling undershirts and sock balls into a suitcase. "Dad?" I asked him, startled to see him in the daytime. "Are you.. are we..." I wanted to ask him if we were going somewhere—a trip, maybe? His eyes were heavy and hooded. "Ask your mother," he said. "She'll explain."

And my mother did explain it—that both she and my father loved me very much, but they couldn't work things out between the two of them. I was still numb from the shock of that when I found out the truth of what was going on from Kim Hyojung, one of the popular girls. Hyojung was on my ski team, but in a completely different league socially. On the skis, she looked as though she'd prefer that I not be on the team. That I could transmit my own personal taint and send nerd-germs creeping through her skis. Three years later she'd be infamous for administering restorative s to three of the five starters on the boys' basketball team during half-time of the state play-offs, but I just didn't know that yet.

"Heard about your father," she said, plunking herself down at my table, which was in a corner of the lunchroom where Hyojung and her possy rarely ventured. The Dance club kids and my friends from Junior Dancers stared, openmouthed, as Hyojung and her friend Yoon Bora slung their purses over the backs of two plastic chairs and stared at me. 

"Heard what?" I asked warily. I didn't trust Hyujung, who'd ignored me through six years of school, or Bora, who's hair was always perfectly feathered. Hyojung, as it turned out, couldn't wait to tell me. "I heard my mom talking about it last night. He moved in with some dental technician in Gangnam." I toyed with my bowl of rice, buying time. Was this true? How could Hyojung's mother know? And why was she talking about it? My mind was fluttering with questions, plus the half-remembered faces of all the women who'd ever scraped my teeth.

Bora leaned in to deliever the final blow. "We heard," she said, "that she's only twenty-seven." Well. So that would explain the gossip. Hyojung and Bora stared at me, and my dance-team friends stared at them staring. I felt like I'd been suddenly onstage, and I didn't know the song lyrics, or the dance that went along with the song.

"So is it true?" Hyojung asked impatiently. 

"It's no big deal," said Bora, evidently hoping to get me to spill via sympathy. "My parents are divorced." 

Divorced, I thought, tasting the word. Was this what was happening? Would my dad do this to us? I lifted my eyes to the popular girls. "Go away," I told them. I heard one of my dance friends gasp. Nobody talked to Hyojung and Bora that way. "Leave me alone. Go away!"

Bora rolled her eyes. Hyojung shoved her seat back. "You're a big fat loser," she opined, before scurrying back to the popular kids' tables, where everyone's shirts had little alligators, and all the girls ever had for lunch was Diet Coke.

I walked home slowly and found my mother in the kitchen, with about ten half-unpacked bags of groceries arrayed on the counters and dining room table. "Is appa living with someone else?" I blurted. She shoved three packages or premade kimchi into the freezer and sighed, her hands on her hips.

"I didn't want you to find out like this," she murmured.

"Kim Hyojung told me," I said. My mother sighed again. "But she doesn't know anything," I said, hoping my mother would agree. Instead she sat at the kitchen table and motioned me to join her.

"Mrs. Kim works at the same hospital as your appa," she said.

So it was true.

"You can tell me things. I'm not a little kid." But at that moment I wished that I was a little kid—the kind whose parents still read to her in bed and held her hands when she crossed the streets.

My mother sighed. "I think this might be for your father to tell you." But, that conversation never happened, and two nights later, my father had moved back. I stood in the backyard and watched him pull him suitcase out of the trunk of his little red sports car. I was cying. My father never even looked at me as he crossed the gravel driveway, the heels of his boots crunching with each step. If he's back now, that's good, isn't it? He won't leave anymore, right? I stared at the door, watching it slowly close behind him. I needed answers. My father was unapproachable, my mother was no help. "Don't worry," she'd scold me. Her face was etched with the lines of sleeplessness. "Everything's going to be fine, honey." This from my mother, who never called me honey. As much as I dreaded it, I would have to go to the right source.

I found Kim Hyojung in the girls' room the next Monday afternoon. She was standing at the mirror, squinting as she reapplied her lip gloss. I cleared my throat. She ignored me. I tapped her on her shoulder and she turned to face me, her lips pursed in distaste. "What?" she spat.

I cleared my throat as she glared at me. "Um... that thing... about my father," I began. Hyojung rolled her eyes and pulled a pink plastic comb out of her purse.

"He moved back," I said.

"How swell for you," said Hyojung, now combing her bangs.

"I thought maybe you might have heard why. From your mom."

"Why should I tell you anything?" she sneered.

I'd spent the whole weekend planning for this contingency. What could I, unpopular Kim Gwiboon, offer sleek, beautiful Hyojung? I pulled two items out of my backpack. The first was a five-page paper on light and dark imagery in Romeo and Juliet. The other was a fifth of vodka that I'd swiped from my parents' liquor cabinet that morning. Hyojung and her crew might not have been as academically advanced as I was, but they made up for it in other feilds of endeavor.

Hyojung snatched the bottle out of my hands, checked to see that the seal was unbroken, then reached for the paper. I yanked it back. "First, tell me."

She gave a little shrug, slipped the bottle into her purse, and turned back toward the mirror. "I heard my mother talking on the phone. She said that his dental friend told him that she wanted children," she said. "And I guess your father doesn't want any more. And looking at you," she continued, "I can understand why." She turned to me, smirking, extending her hand for the paper.

I threw it at her. "Just copy it over in your handwriting. I put in some spelling mistakes, so they'll know it's you, not me." Hyojung took the paper and I went back to class. No more children. Well, the way he treated me, that made sense.

He stayed with us for almost six years after that, but he wasn't the same. The little moments of kindness and love, the nights he'd read to me in bed, the Saturday-afternoon ice-cream cones and the Sunday-afternoon drives, were gone. It was as if my father has fallen asleep, alone, on a bus or a train, and woken up twenty years later, surrounded by strangers: my mother and I, both wanting things—help with the dishes, a ride to dance practice, ₩10,000 for the movies, his approval, his attention, his love. He looked out at us, mild brown eyes swimming with confusion, then hardening with anger. Who are these people? he seemed to be wondering. How long will I have to travel beside them? And why do they think I owe them anything?

He went from being loving, in an absent-minded, occasional way, to being mean. Was it because I knew his secret—that he didn't want any more children, that he'd pobably never wanted me? Was it that he missed the other woman, that she was his one true love, forever denied to him? I thought that was some of it. But there were other things, too.

My father was—is, I suppose—a plastic surgeon. He started off in the army, working with burn victims, wounded soldiers, men who'd come back from the war with their skin pink and puckery from chemicals, or lumpy and disfigured from shrapnel. But he discovered his true genius after we moved to Seoul. There, the bulk of his practice involved not soldiers but society ladies, women whose only wounds were invisible and who were willing to drop millions of won on a discreet, skilled surgeon who'd make their bellies tight, their eyelids less droopy, who'd eliminate saddle-bags and double chins with a few deft of the scalpel. 

He was successful. By the time he left us the first time, Kim Dongyul was known as the man to see in the greater Seoul area for tummy tucks, chin lifts, nose jobs, jobs. We had the requisite big house, the curved driveway, the in-ground swimming pool with hot tub in the back. My father drove a Porche, my mom drove an Audi. We had a maid clean twice a week; my parents threw catered dinner parties every other month, and we went on vacations to Pyeongchang for skiing and Jeju Island.

And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you'd read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor. He didn't want this life. That much was clear. He was miserable tethered to this suburb, to the never-ending schedule of dance practice and spelling bees and skii lessons, tied down by mortgage payments and car payments, habit and obligation. And he took his misery out on us—and, for some reason, on me especially. Suddenly, it was as if he couldn't bear to look at me. And nothing I could do was right, or even close.

"Look at this!" he'd thunder, of my B+ in algebra. He was sitting at the dining room table, a familiar glass of scotch at his elbow. I was skulking in the doorway, trying to hide myself in the shadows. "What is your excuse for this?"

"I don't like math," I'd tell him. In truth, I was just as ashamed of the grade as he was angry about it. I'd never gotten anything less than an A in my life. But no matter how hard I tried, or how much extra help I got, algebra confounded me.

"Do you think I liked medical school?" he snarled. "Do you have any idea how much potential you have? Do you have any inkling what a waste it is to squander your gifts?"

"I don't care what my gifts are. I don't like math."

"Fine," he'd say with a shrug, flinging the report card across the table like it had suddenly acquired an offensive smell. "Be a secretary. See if I care." He was always like this, to both my mother and I—snarly, surly, dismissive, and rude. He'd come home from work, drop his briefcase in the hall, pour himself the first in the series of scotches on the rocks, and storm by us, upstairs into the bedroom, locking the door behind him. He'd either stay up there, or retreat to the living room, with the lights turned low, listening to symphonies. Even at thirteen, even without the benefit of a basic music appreciation class, I knew that nonstop symphonies, backed by the rattle of ice cubes in his glass, could portend nothing good.

And when he did speak to us, it was only to complain how tired he was, how little appreciated; how hard he worked to provide things for us, "you little snob," he'd slur, "with your skis and swimming pool."

"I hate to ski," I lied, "and I'd rather swim with the other kids at the Rec Center," I said, which was true. All of my dance-club friends would invite me, but I always had to tell them I couldn't. The phone was always ringing, another sore spot with my father. "That goddamn phone!" he'd yell when it rang during dinner. But we weren't allowed to take it off the hook. It could be his office, after all.

"If you hate us so much, why do you even stay?!" I'd scream at him, taunting him with what I knew was the truth. He never had an answer—just more insults, more anger, and more scalding, punishing rage. And at thirteen, I became "the dog."

It's true, thirteen was not the year when I was looking my best. In addition to the s I'd sprouted, seemingly overnight, I had acquired a mouthful of complicated-looking metal and rubber bands to correct my overbite. I had a horrible haircut, which wasn't doing my face any favors. I bought clothes in two sizes—baggy and baggier—and spent the whole year in a perpetual stoop, trying to hide my chest. I looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, only with zits and braces. I felt like a walking affront, like a collection of the things my father spent his days waging war against. He was all about beauty—its creation, its maintenance, its perfection. Having a wife who'd fallen short of the mark and hadn't stayed thin was one thing, I supposed... but a daughter who'd failed so flagrantly was, evidently, unforgivable. And I had failed. There was nothing beautiful about me at thirteen, nothing at all, and I could feel that fact confirmed in the hard, hateful way he looked at me, and in all the things he said.

"Gwiboonie's very bright," I heard him tell one of his golf buddies. "She'll be able to take care of herself. Not a beauty," he said, "but smart." I stood there, hardly believing what I'd heard, and when I finally believed it, I crumpled inside, like a tin can under a car's wheels. I wasn't stupid, and I wasn't blind, and I knew that there were many ways in which I differed from Kim Hyojung, from girls in movies and on posters in boys' bedrooms. But I'd remembered his hand on my head, his beard tickling my cheek as he kissed me. I was his daughter, his little girl. He was supposed to love me. Now he thought I was ugly. Not a beauty... but what father doesn't think his little girl is beautiful? Except I wasn't little. And, I guessed, I wasn't his girl anymore. When I looked at the pictures of myself from that time—and, understandably, there are only about four—there's this horrible desperate look in my eyes. Please like me, I'm pleading, even as I'm trying to hide myself behind a row of friends and family at a birthday party, beneath the hot tub bubbles during a pool party, with my lips drawn in a pained smile, stretched tight over my braces, ducking my head into my neck, hunching my shoulders, slouching to make myself shorter, smaller. Trying to disappear.

Years later, in college, when a friend was recounting some bit of suburban childhood horror, I tried to explain how it was with my father. "He was a monster," I blurted. I was an English major, versed in Chaucer and Shakespear, and still hadn't found a better word than that. My friend's face got very serious. "Did he molest you?" she asked. I almost laughed. Given how much of my father's conversation with me revolved around how ugly, how fat, how hideous I was, molestation was the last thing I would have expected.

"Did he abuse you?" she asked.

"He drank too much," I said, "He left us." But he never hit me. It would have been easier if he had.Then there would have been a name I could give it, a box to put it in, a label for the box. There would have been laws, authorities, shelters, TV talk shows where reporters gravely discussed what I was enduring, a built-in recognition of what I'd experienced, to help me through. But he never raised a finger. And at thirteen, at fourteen, I had no words for what he was doing to me. I didn't even know how to start that conversation. What would I have said? "He's mean"? Mean meant being grounded, meant no television after dinner, not the kind of daily verbal assult my father would routinely deliver over the dinner table, a scathing recitation of all the ways I'd failed to live up to my potential, the walking tour of the places that I had failed.

And who would have believed me? My father was always charm personified to my friends. He remembered their names, and their boyfriends' names, he would inquire courteously about summer plans and college visits. They wouldn't have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain. And I had no explanation, no answers. When you're on a battleground, you don't have the luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war. You just keep you head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close the covers and pretend that nothing's broken, nothing's wrong.

The summer before my last year of high school, my mother went to stay at one of her friend's rental house in Daegu. I had my first summer job, as a lifeguard at a local country club. I told my mom that I'd stay home, watch the dogs, hold down the fort. I figured it would be fine. I could have the house to myself, entertain my twenty-three-year-old boyfriend away from her watchful eye, come and go as I pleased. For the first three days it was fine. Then I came home in the predawn hours of the fourth morning, and it was as if I were twelve again. There was my fatherin the bedroom, the suitcase on the bed, the stacks of white T-shirts and the piled of black socks— maybe the same ones, I thought wildly, that he'd taken the last time. I stared at them, and then at him. My father looked at me for a long moment. Then he sighed.

"I'll call," he said, "when I have my new number."

I shrugged. "Whatever," I said.

"Don't talk to me like that!" he said. He hated when I was flip. He demanded respect, even—especially—when he didn't deserve it.

"What's her name?" I asked.

He narrowed his eyes. "Why do you want to know?"

I looked at him and couldn't think of an answer. Did I imagine that it made any difference? Could a name even matter?

"Tell your mother," he began. I shook my head.

"Oh, no." I said, "Don't make me do your dirty work. If you've got something to say, tell her yourself." He shrugged, like it didn't matter. He added a few more shirts, a fistful of ties. "I'm glad you're leaving. Do you know that?" I said. My voice was too loud in the early-morning quiet of the house. "We'll be better off without you," I finished.

He looked at me. Then he nodded. "Yes," he said, "I think maybe you will." He went back to his packing. I went back to my bedroom. I lay on the bed—the bed where my father had read to me, a million years ago—and closed my eye. I'd been waiting for this, after all. I'd known it was coming. I thought it would feel the way it does when a scab over an old wound finaly falls off—a momentary pang, a little bit of pain, a sense of absence. Then nothing. Just nothing at all. That was what I was supposed to feel, that was all I wanted to feel. I thought fiercely, tossing and turning on my bed, trying to find comfort. It didn't matter, I told myself, over and over again. I just couldn't figure out why I was crying.

For college, I had decided that I wanted to study abroad in America. I went to the Princeton, because he told me to, in one of his last acts of hand-on parenting. I'd wanted to go to Smith University. I liked the campus, liked the idea of an all-girls' school, where the focus would be on learning, where I could be free to be who I was.

"Forget it," my father pronounced over the table. He'd been gone for six months by then: relocated to a new suburb, living in a brandnew shiny condo with a brand-new shiny girlfriend. He'd agreed to meet us for dinner, then canceled and rescheduled twice. "I'm not sending you to some dyke school."

"Dongyul," said my mother, her voice quiet and hopeless. All of her good humor and cheer had been leeched from her by then. It would be years before she laughed and smiled easily. My father ignored her, glaring at me suspiciously, a forkful of steak raised halfway to his mouth. "You aren't a dyke, are you?"

"No, appa," I said, "I actually prefer threesomes." He chewed. Swollowed. Patted his lips with his napkin. "That's two more people than I'd have thought would be interested in seeing you ," he said.

As much as I'd like Smith, I hadn't like Princeton. The campus looked like a staging ground for a very successful eugenics experiment: Everyone was blond, preppy, and perfect, except for the few darkhaired girls who were sleek, exotic, and perfect. During the weekend I'd spent there, I hadn't seen a single person with bad skin or ugly. Just acres of shiny hair, straight white teeth, and perfect bodies in perfect clothes arrayed beneath the perfect willow trees that grew beneath perfectly Gothic stone halls. I knew I would fit in here, with the few darkhaired asian girls, since I had lost all of my teenager weight, and after my braces were off and acne cleared away, I wasn't as hideous as I was when I was thirteen.

I said I'd be miserable. My father said he didn't care. I gug my heels in. He told me it was Princeton or nothing. And by the time I'd been packed off and stayed long enough to start classes and have my graduation-present mountain bike stolen from the library bicycle rack, the divorce was final, and he was gone for good, sticking us with a tuition bill of which he's paid just enough to make it impractical for me to start over anywhere else. So quit the skii team, no big loss for me, or the team, I suspect. I got a job in the cafeteria. If college is supposed to be the best years of your life, then it's safe to say that I spent the best years of my life in a hairnet, dishing out scrambled eggs and limp bacon, loading dirty dishes on a conveyor belt, mopping the floors, looking at my classmates out of the corner of my eye and thinking that they were all so much more beautiful, graceful, comfortable in their own skins than I could ever be. They all had better haircuts.

"Good Hair" was the first article I wrote for the campus alternative newspaper. I was a freshman, and the editor in chief, a junior named Gretel asked me to write more. By sophmore year, I was a columnist. By junior year I was a senior writer, spending every hour I wasn't slinging eggs or pushing a mop writing, and I'd decided that this was what I wanted to do with my life.

Writing let me escape. It let me escape Princeton, where everyone was the same. It let me escape the insistent tug of my family and its ongoing misery. Writing was like slipping into the ocean, a place where I could move easily, where I could be graceful, and playful, and invisible and visible all at once. Sitting in front of the computer, with the screen blank and the cursor blinking, was the best escape I knew.

And there was plenty to escape from. In the four years I was at Princeton, my father remarried and had two more children. Jaehwa and Jini. He had the nerve to send me pictures and birth announcements. Did he think I'd be happy, seeing their squinched-up baby faces and tiny baby footprints? I felt like I was being kicked. It wasn't that he didn't want more children, I realized sadly. It was that he hadn't wanted me.

My mother went back to work, and her weekly phone calls were full of complaints about how schools, and kids, had changed since she got her teaching certificate. The subtext was clear: This wasn't the life she signed up for. This wasn't where she expected to be, at fifty, making ends meet on alimony and what the local school board paid permanent substitutes. "Just get your education," my mother would say wearily, after the latest recitation of how my father's checks were late again, of how her car had broken down. "Just finish up. I'll be fine."

Then, finally, it was the June of my graduation.

Except summer and Christmas breaks, I hadn't seen my father. He sent birthday cards (usually on time) and tuition checks (almost always late), usually for about half of what they were supposed to be. I felt like I'd become just one more unremarkable item on his to-do list. I hadn't expected him to come to my graduation. I never thought he'd care. But he called me a week in advance of the much-longed-for date, saying that he was looking forward to it. Him, and his new wife, whom I'd never met.

"I'm not sure... I don't think..." I stammered.

"Gwiboon-ah," he said "I'm your father. And Eunji's never been to America!"

"So tell Eunji that you'll send her a postcard," my mother said, sourly. I had dreaded telling my mother that he'd be there, but I coundn't figure out how to tell him no. He'd said the magic words, the pellet words. I'm your father. After everything—his distance, his desertion, the new wife and new kids—I was, it seems, still starving for his love.

My father, with his new wife and kids in tow, arrived furing the English Department's reception. I'd won some small award for creative writing, but they came too late to hear my name called. Eunji was a petite little thing, with an aerobicized hard body and a blond perm. The children were adorable. My floral dress had looked just fine in the dorm. Now it looked like a slipcover, I thought dismally. And I looked like a sofa.

"Gwiboonie," said my father, looking me up and down. "You've gotten so skinny. College had treated you well, I see." I clutched my stupid plaque tightly against me. "Thanks so much," I said. My father's new wife rolled her eyes. His adorable new children stared at me, as if I were an animal in the zoo.

"I, um, got you tickets for the ceremony." I didn't mention that I'd had to beg, borrow, and finally pay $100 I coundn't spare to score the tickets. Each senior was issued a total of two tickets, if you wanted anymore you'd have to pay for them. My father shook his head. "Won't be necessary. We're leaving in the morning."

"Leaving?" I repeated. "But you'll miss the graduation!"

"We've got tickets to Sesame Place," chirped his little wife, Eunji.

"Sesame Place!" repeated the little girl for emphasis.

"So Princeton was sort of on our way."

"That's... um... well." And suddenly I was blinking back tears. I bit my lip as hard as I could, and squeezed the plaque against me so tightly that I had an eight-by-twelve bruise on my midsection for the next week and a half. "Thanks for stopping by."

My father nodded, and moved as if her were going to hug me, but wound up merely grasping my shoulders and giving me the kind of shake that coaches routinely administer to underperforming athletes—a "buck up, camper" kind of shake. "Congradulations," he said. "I'm very proud of you." But when he kissed me, his lips never even touched my skin, and I knew the whole time that his eyes were on the door.

Somehow I made it through the ceremony, the dismantling of my dorm room, the long plane ride home. I hung my diploma on my bedroom wall and tried to figure out what I'd do next. Graduate school was out of the question. Even after all those breakfasts I'd worked, all those drooly pieces or bacon and curdled scrambled eggs, I was still $20,000 or so in debt. I couldn't see borrowing more money. So I lined up job interviews with the handful of small papers who were willing to even consider a college graduate with no real-world experience, in the middle of a recession, and spent the summer driving up and down the Northeast in the thirdhand van I'd bought with some of the foodservice dollars. When I loaded up the van to head out for my job interviews, I made a promise to myself—I wasn't going to be my father's rat anymore. I was going to walk away from the pellet bar. He could bring me nothing but unhappiness, and I didn't need more unhappiness in my life.

I heard from my mother that my father had moved to America, but I didn't ask for specifics, and nobody offered them. Ten years after the divorce, he no longer had to pay child support or alimony. The checks stopped coming. So did the birthday cards, or any acknowledgement that I even existed. My father had moved on, it seemed, without telling us where.

"We could find him on the internet, or something," I offered.

My mother glared at me. "Why?" And I couldn't think of an answer. If we found him, would he come? Would he care? Probably not. We agreed to let it be. If my father wanted to stay gone, we would let him.

And that was that, pretty much. I know that what had happened with my father—his insults, his critiscism, the way he made me feel that I was defective and deformed—had hurt me. I'd encountered enough of those self-help articles in women's magazines to know that you don't go through that kind of cruelty unscathed. With every man I met, I'd watch myself carefully. Did I really like that editor, I'd wonder, or am I just searching for Daddy? Do I love this guy, I'd ask myself, or do I just think he'd never leave me, the way my father did?

And where had all the care I'd taken gotten me? I wondered. I was alone. A man who'd liked me enough to want me in his family was dead, and I couldn't even say how sorry I was properly. And now that it was possible—now that it was likely, even—that Jonghyun had finally gotten to the point in his life where he could understand me, where he could sympathize with what I'd been through because of what he'd gone through, he wouldn't even talk to me. It felt like the cruelest joke, like a rug being yanked out from under me—in other words, like the way my father made me fell, all over again.

Well, that was a pretty long chapter, right? I'm sorry if it was too long! I felt like I owed anyone still reading this, for being absent for two years. Please let me know if anyone if reading this by commenting! If there isn't anyone, I won't bother updating again. Also, I'm sorry if you found any spelling/grammar errors! I tried my best to correct what I could, but I got quite lazy near the end. Please comment! <3

-Minnie