The bewildered public’s anger ultimately turned toward the large corporation, and afterward it became intertwined with the labor union, becoming a symbolic incident. After that, legal battles continued sluggishly, and there were no definitive results.
So when Seonwoo regained consciousness and heard all this news, there was no hope in sight.
The situation was too bad. With Dad dead and Mom in a coma, there wasn’t even time to fall into the futility of wondering what could get worse.
Moreover, as a side effect of the major impact to his head at the time of the accident, Seonwoo’s cognitive abilities were somewhat impaired. Even when he first saw Mom in the ICU, he didn’t cry or scream, just stood blankly in front of the glass window.
Seonwoo felt as if he were looking at a scene detached from reality, as if a layer of film had been drawn over it. He couldn’t properly grasp the extent of what had happened to him. In such an incomplete state, Seonwoo alone couldn’t solve anything.
The only one who extended a hand was the vice director.
A man he’d never met before, wearing a white coat and visiting his hospital room, claimed to be his family. But Seonwoo had never met any relatives in his life. Not only fourth cousins or closer, he didn’t even know his grandparents’ faces. Therefore, there was no need to distinguish between maternal and paternal relatives.
Until Mom and Dad met each other, they had no one by their side, as if they’d been left alone in the world, and Seonwoo was born under them.
Seonwoo had never looked at friends with deep ties to their relatives and felt envious or felt a sense of alienation thinking his family was different from other families.
For Seonwoo, holidays were events with set dates each year but unpredictable content. From early morning, they’d pack holiday food Mom and Dad made themselves in lunch boxes and go on family trips, with the destination being a surprise every time.
He’d traveled all over the country in the car Dad drove. Sometimes the route overlapped with homecoming roads and they’d experience traffic jams, and sometimes they’d feel leisurely on empty roads. Thanks to that, even when the holiday ended and he returned to school, he never lacked topics of conversation with friends. Seonwoo’s childhood was fulfilled by the love of those two alone.
But how should he accept the existence of a relative who appeared so suddenly?
From what he heard, the man had even hired a lawyer at his own expense to claim Mom’s innocence. Even if he really was blood-related to Mom, to Seonwoo he was just a strange Ahjussi he was seeing for the first time.
It was natural to be wary of kindness whose purpose was unknown. It also didn’t make sense that out of countless hospitals, he’d been luckily brought to a place where Mom’s family happened to be.
But the man laid it out honestly. Even though Seonwoo hadn’t asked.
[Being a doctor, you’d think everyone would care for patients with conviction, but actually there are quite a few merchants like me. Especially in big hospitals like this, attracting customers is important, and if you take on a patient from a case that’s drawing attention, it helps quite a bit with image branding. So as soon as I heard about the accident, I brought them to our hospital under the pretext of intensive care.]
[……]
[But I didn’t know the patient would be Seonmin.]
The vice director said that until the moment he received the patient chart and confirmed the face brought in by ambulance, his head couldn’t understand what he was seeing.
He also added that even facing the child of Seonmin, whose existence he hadn’t even known about, didn’t feel real.
After transfer, Mom was moved to the ICU and received treatment. Seonwoo also stayed in a private room while unconscious and received treatment no less excellent. It was possible because the one extending kindness was the vice director of a large-scale university hospital.
Seonwoo had been unconscious for nearly two weeks from the time of the accident, but excluding his right hand which had crushed bones and nerve damage, he had no major injuries. So what he did during his hospitalization was all about managing the sutured areas and rehabilitation exercises for muscle recovery.
But that process was four weeks at most. Once the sutured hand areas recovered to some degree, outpatient treatment would be sufficient. When he went through the discharge procedures, Seonwoo would have nowhere to go. The house had gone to auction.
To such a Seonwoo, the vice director made a proposal. To come live in his house until Mom woke up.
[Ahjussi is separated, you see.]
[……]
[Wouldn’t that be more comfortable for you too, Seonwoo? It’ll be convenient to come see Seonmin too.]
The vice director’s house was 10 minutes by car to the hospital, within 30 minutes even using public transportation, and an environment where there was no one to make him feel unwelcome.
Everything fit together like a puzzle. Though the fact that he had one son the same age as Seonwoo was something he only learned after everything was decided.
From now on, Seonwoo’s future was a blank slate itself. Nothing was decided. He’d given up on college admission while hospitalized. Because he’d agreed with the vice director’s words that with this hand, even if he enrolled it would be useless anyway.
So he let it be handled. The vice director said that through consistent rehabilitation, there were occasional cases of recovery, but he didn’t feel sincerity. Whether he wanted to plant meaningless hope, or was reciting a manual as a doctor, it was just empty words.
Even Seonwoo himself couldn’t really imagine his hand returning to normal. Even if he succeeded in rehabilitation through blood-sweat-and-tears effort, what would be so different from now? Unable to find meaning, Seonwoo didn’t feel motivated to actively engage in rehabilitation exercises.
The vice director also added that if Seonwoo wanted, he’d support him studying for college again, but that got mixed up with the successive interrogations during that period and didn’t remain properly in his memory.
The future where nothing was guaranteed was only opaque, but there were many things to resolve immediately.
He had to file a death certificate, stop by Dad’s art studio that had been closed for months to contact the students, and stop by the house that would be full of red notices.
But putting all those things off, Seonwoo wanted to go see Mom. No, actually he wanted to wait by her side until she woke up.
Since it was a private room, a small cot beside it would be fine. Although there were no railings and it was a narrow space, Seonwoo had no bad sleeping habits, so he could fully handle his own body.
He didn’t need a room with this much empty space. If he’d safely entered college, he would have lived in a dorm, but had he become someone living off others overnight? Even though he’d taken medicine, he fell into such light sleep that he could feel his mind was hazy.
Even in the midst of that, he felt a cool breeze. Seonwoo curled up his body with his back to the window. For the time being, he didn’t want to get up like this.
But that thought disappeared because of someone who flung open the door as if to break it.
More than the violent noise, his eyes were forced open by the force that yanked up his upper body. In an instant, as Seonwoo’s head fell backward, he reflexively regained his balance. Someone who had climbed on top of his body grabbed his collar.
“Take off your clothes.”
Seonwoo frowned involuntarily. With his collar grabbed, breathing was stifling. The surroundings were dark, so he had to squint to secure his vision.
“……”
Gradually, what was before his eyes became clear. He’d thought it might be a robber, but what had attacked him was a guy around Seonwoo’s age.
Wavy hair thickly covered his forehead. The ends held moisture, making them feel particularly heavy. The entire head of hair was so jet black as if dyed that his skin looked pale.
His features and jaw were overall thin and refined lines, but the eyebrows visible bit by bit between the thick bangs were rather dark. Even looking from the front, from the smoothly rising bridge of his nose, there wasn’t a single rough spot anywhere.
There was no need to add more modifiers. It was just a face handsome enough to elicit admiration from anyone. Whether because of his delicate features or his innate atmosphere, even though he was a guy with all the same equipment, Seonwoo thought he was pretty. Especially his eyes.
But what captured his gaze more than that was the pupils glaring at Seonwoo as if to kill him. Between the jet-black hair, two eyes without double eyelids glinted.
