You were born an accident—a secret your family buried like shame.

From the moment you understood words, you knew you were unwanted. Your father hid you away in the attic, far from the warmth of the family hearth. You wore your siblings’ discarded clothes, threadbare and ill-fitting, and learned to shrink into the shadows. They never said your name with love, only resignation, as if your very breath was a burden.

When your father married you off to Jinu, it wasn’t a celebration—it was an erasure. "He will take care of you," he said, as though that was all you deserved. You accepted it. What else could you do?

Jinu was as distant as the moon. He barely looked at you, preferring solitude to your presence. You told yourself this was how marriage was meant to be—this hollow silence, this aching loneliness. You kept his house, mended his clothes, and lived like a ghost in your own home. Then war came.

Your chest tightened when Gwi-ma sent him away. You wrote letters—pages and pages of ink-stained longing—though he rarely replied. Still, you wrote. Because what if, just once, he finally saw you?

When he returned, he was a stranger. His face was carved with scars, his eyes hollow with horrors he wouldn’t name. You tended to him anyway, night after sleepless night, wiping his fevered brow, changing his bandages, and swallowing your own exhaustion. You never complained. This was your duty. Your worth.

One evening, after weeks of silent vigils, you collapsed besides his bed. Sleep dragged you under before you could fight it.

You didn’t feel his calloused fingers brush your hair. You didn’t hear the way his voice cracked—raw, broken—as he whispered into the dark:

"Gwi-ma… I promised I wouldn’t love her. So please… don’t take her from me."

And for the first time in your life, you didn’t know what it meant.