Fourteen years ago, you and Yeonwoo were still in high school in Seoul. Back then, he was completely in love with you. He watched you more than the teacher did, pretending to listen while his eyes kept drifting back to your face. Whenever you focused on the lesson, he would sketch you in his notebook. Whenever you frowned at a tricky problem or laughed quietly at something small, he captured that too. By the time you became friends, he already had a whole sketchbook filled with drawings of you.
When he finally courted you, he bought the dog plushie you always stared at in the department store during mall trips in Myeongdong. That was the day you said yes. He gave you the sketchbook afterward, embarrassed but happy. He always assumed you threw it away later. You never did.
When you turned eighteen, you made the decision that changed everything. Your parents wanted you to go to university, maybe Yonsei or Korea University, and build a secure future. Instead, you ran away with Yeonwoo. You left home, school, and every plan your parents tried to secure for you. You believed being with him was enough.
You married soon after. The ceremony wasn’t grand, just something small in a local wedding hall because his business was still struggling. You became a stay-at-home spouse, thinking it was temporary. It wasn’t. Years passed, and the life you imagined slowly drifted further away.
Now in your thirties, you barely recognize the marriage you once wanted so badly. Yeonwoo rarely comes home, and when he does, you smell perfumes that don’t belong to you. Younger scents. Expensive ones. You don’t ask him anything. There’s no point. You already know he’s seeing other people.
Some months, you only see him two or three days. Sometimes five if you’re lucky. The rest of the time, you live alone in your apartment in Gangnam, which feels more like a waiting room than a home.
A year ago, your health started to decline. You noticed bruises forming too easily. You felt tired no matter how much you slept. You went to the hospital alone, expecting something simple. Instead, you heard the word “백혈병” — leukemia.
You received the diagnosis alone. You signed the papers alone. You started treatment alone.
Yeonwoo never noticed the weight you lost or how pale you became. He wasn’t home long enough to see it.
One night, your fever wouldn’t go down. You were shaking so badly you could barely hold your phone. You didn’t know why you called Yeonwoo. Maybe you just wanted to hear him. Maybe you hoped he would come home for once.
He answered after a few rings.
“Yeonwoo…?” you said quietly. “Are you coming home tonight?”
There was a short pause.
“I’m working overtime,” he replied, his voice flat and distant, like he had said those words too many times to care how they sounded.
But in the background, you heard something that didn’t match his excuse.
A faint thump. The rustling of bedsheets. A muffled laugh — soft, young, unmistakably not yours.
Your heart dropped.
Yeonwoo must have heard it too, because he quickly shifted the phone and covered the microphone for a second.
“I told you, I’m busy,” he said again, harsher this time. “Don’t wait for me.”
Your throat tightened, but you forced yourself to answer.
“Okay.”
He didn’t say anything else. He just hung up.
You sat there with the phone in your hand, fever burning through your body, the apartment silent around you. The rustle of bedsheets and that stranger’s laugh replayed in your head long after the call ended.
You were sick and alone in a small apartment in Seoul, fighting an illness he still didn’t know about. And Yeonwoo was somewhere else, tangled in sheets with someone who wasn’t you.
For the past year, you lived your entire marriage and your entire sickness the same way:
Quietly. Painfully. Completely alone.