Chapter 39: The Son

Ji-yeon didn’t hide.

That’s the thing I’ll always remember. She could’ve. There was a window. There was the space behind the broken bed. There was the waxed cloth over the hole in my ceiling, and I swear for one second I saw her look at it.

She didn’t hide.

She stood up. Picked her navy robe off my floor. Put it on. Buttoned it. All the way to the throat. Every button in the right hole this time. She pinned her hair up in a bun with three quick stabs of a hairpin. Put her spectacles on straight.

It took her maybe twenty breaths. Her hands didn’t shake once.

Then she walked to the door and slid it open.

Gi-chul was standing on the walkway. Glasses fogged. Hair wild. Breathing like he’d run all the way from the Gwak compound, which he probably had. He was holding a lantern in one hand and a little red silk bookmark in the other.

He looked at his mother.

He looked past her. At me. Sitting on the floor next to a broken bed in nothing but a blanket.

At the book. Lying open on the floor between us. Page forty-one. Charcoal notes in his mother’s handwriting in the margin.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

"Gi-chul," said Ji-yeon. Perfectly calm. "It’s late. You should be in bed."

"You should be in bed," said Gi-chul. His voice cracked. "At home. In OUR house."

"I’m a grown woman."

"You’re my MOTHER."

The lantern shook in his hand.

Down on the second floor, a door slid open. Then another. Then another. People waking up. The academy girls. A drifter. Somebody’s snoring stopped. Across the walkway, Ayla’s door slid open an inch and her eye appeared in the crack.

Ji-yeon didn’t look at any of them.

She looked at her son.

"Come inside," she said quietly. "Please. Not on the walkway."

"I’m not going in THERE—"

"Then we’ll go down to the courtyard. But we’re not doing this in front of the whole inn, Gi-chul. I raised you better than that."

He stared at her.

Then his face crumpled. Like a little kid’s. Like a twelve-year-old who just found out the world isn’t the shape he thought.

He turned around and walked down the stairs.

Ji-yeon followed him.

She stopped at the top of the stairs. Looked back at me. Just for a second.

No words. Just her face. And it said: Stay here.

I stayed.

I didn’t hear what they said down there. I tried not to. I sat on my floor with my blanket and my broken bed and the stupid book, and I listened to the rain start up again on the waxed cloth over my ceiling, and I waited.

It was a long time.

Once, I heard Gi-chul shout. Just one word. I couldn’t make it out.

Once, I heard Ji-yeon laugh. Short. Surprised. Then quiet again.

Then, after almost an hour, footsteps on the stairs.

Only one set.

Gi-chul came back up alone.

He stopped in my open doorway. He’d stopped crying. His glasses were clean. He looked at me sitting on the floor.

I didn’t know what to say. What do you say? Sorry I slept with your mom? I wasn’t sorry. She’s a great woman? He knew that.

So I just said, "Hey."

"Hey," said Gi-chul.

He came in. Sat down on the floor across from me. On the other side of the book. He picked it up. Looked at page forty-one. At his mother’s notes.

Not physically possible. Confirmed.

He made a sound. I thought it was a sob.

It was a laugh.

"She graded it," he said. "She graded the pillow book."

"She grades everything."

"She graded my baby teeth. When they fell out. She wrote down which ones came out on schedule." He shook his head. Wiped his eyes under his glasses. "Do you know what she said to me down there?"

"...No."

"She said she was happy." He stared at the page. "She’s never said that. Not once. Not when Father was alive. Not after he died. Eight years. She runs the shops and she checks my homework and she goes to banquets and she never says she’s happy." He looked up at me. "And then tonight she said it. Standing in a dock-district courtyard at midnight in the rain. With her robe buttoned perfectly. About YOU."

I didn’t say anything.

"I wanted to hate you," said Gi-chul. "I really, really wanted to. I ran all the way here wanting to." He closed the book. "You’re my friend, Mu-jin. You’re the only friend I ever had who didn’t want something from my family. And you were sleeping with my mother the whole time."

"...Yeah."

"That’s so weird."

"It’s really weird."

"It’s SO weird."

We sat there.

Then he started laughing. Really laughing. Hysterical, shaky, exhausted laughing. And somehow I was laughing too. Two idiots on a floor at midnight next to a broken bed and a pillow book, laughing until we couldn’t breathe.

When we finally stopped, Gi-chul stood up. Pushed his glasses up.

"She went home," he said. "I told her to go first. I needed... a minute."

"Are you going to be okay?"

"No." He walked to the door. Stopped. Didn’t turn around. "But Mother said if you lose the duel, she’s going to burn Elder Gu’s silk warehouse to the ground with her own hands. And she means it. So don’t lose."

Then he was gone.

I listened to his footsteps going down the stairs. Across the courtyard. Past the gate desk. Out into the rain.

I didn’t hear which way he turned.

I didn’t think to.

I couldn’t sleep after that. Of course I couldn’t.

So at dawn I went up the hill to the hot spring. The soldier at the gate desk wrote it down without even looking up. Baek Mu-jin. Dawn. Hot spring. He’d stopped asking for reasons.

Someone was already there.

Yeon-hee. Up to her shoulders in the steaming water, her back against the rocks, her eyes closed. Her medicine bag on the flat stone. The one where she’d given me the balm massage. The one where she’d asked me for something nobody else ever had.

She opened her eyes when she heard the gate.

"I heard," she said. "The whole inn heard."

"Of course."

"Are you alright?"

"...I don’t know."

She looked at me for a moment. Then she moved over on the rocks. Made room.

I got in.

The water was so hot it hurt. Then it stopped hurting. I sank down next to her and let my head fall back on the stone.

For a while, neither of us said anything. Steam. Pines. Birds starting up.

"Dong-min’s home," Yeon-hee said finally. "Since yesterday. Inspections are done."

Oh.

"He slept in the bed last night," she said. "Next to me. For the first time in five months. He held my hand." She stared at the water. "He said he’s been a bad husband. He said he’s going to try harder."

The steam curled between us.

"That’s good," I said. And I meant it. Mostly.

"Is it?" She laughed a little. "I lay there all night holding his hand and thinking about you. And feeling terrible. And then thinking about you more." She shook her head. "Welcome to being the other one. I told you it was terrible."

"You did."

She turned her head and looked at me.

"Mu-jin. I need to ask you something. And I need you to say yes."

"...Okay."

"On the night the three of us were in Ayla’s bed. I told her you never pinned MY wrists." Her cheeks went pink. Not from the heat. "I’ve been thinking about it. For weeks. I’m always the careful one. The physician. The one who counts your pulse and asks if it hurts."

She held out her wrists. Both of them. Under the water.

"I don’t want to be careful this morning," said Yeon-hee. "Not after last night. Not with my husband’s hand still warm on mine."

She looked at me. And her eyes were very, very bright.

"That’s my part," she whispered. "That’s what I want."

I took her wrists.

Pinned them against the warm rock above her head. Not hard. Just enough.

She gasped. Her whole body arched in the water.

"Like that?"

"Like that," she breathed. "Don’t let go."

I didn’t let go.

She wrapped her legs around my waist under the water and pulled me in. The hot water sloshed over the edge of the pool. The steam rose up around us so thick I couldn’t see the pines anymore. Just her face. Flushed. Eyes half closed. Biting her lip so hard it went white.

She wasn’t the careful physician this morning. She was something else. Something she’d been keeping in a drawer for weeks, behind the herbs and the bandages and the pulse counting.

She was loud.

So loud the birds stopped singing.

[Target: Dam Yeon-hee.]

[Harmony: dormancy ended.]

[Harmony reawakened.]

Warm water. Soft and slippery. The first one. The one that started all of this, sliding back into my belly like it was coming home.

Three.

Three out of five back.

I didn’t let go of her wrists until she told me to. And she didn’t tell me for a long time.

We were floating afterward. Her back against my chest. My arms around her. Exactly like that first dawn after the first night. The sky going pink through the steam.

"You’ll go back to him," I said quietly. "Today."

"I’ll go back to him today."

"And hold his hand."

"And hold his hand." She leaned her head back on my shoulder. "And I’ll feel you in my wrists all day. Every time I take someone’s pulse." She smiled with her eyes closed. "Terrible."

"Terrible."

The gate creaked.

We both turned our heads.

Tae-man was standing in the gateway. Out of breath. Soaked from the dawn mist. He didn’t even look at us. Didn’t make a joke. Didn’t cover his eyes.

That’s how I knew something was wrong.

"Bro," he said. "It’s Gi-chul."

I sat up so fast I splashed Yeon-hee in the face.

"What about him?"

"He never went home. His mother sent servants looking for him all night. I helped." Tae-man swallowed. "A night watchman saw him around the third bell. Walking alone. In the rain. Toward the clan district."

The clan district.

Where the Baek estate was.

And next to it, on the other side of a wall I’d once climbed over in one shoe—

"The watchman says he knocked on a gate," said Tae-man. "And they let him in."

He didn’t have to say which gate.

"Gi-chul walked into the Gu Clan estate," said Tae-man, "and he hasn’t come out."