“I found out later that the facility had already contacted my mom…. Apparently she’d given up her parental rights.”
Shin Juho let out a light laugh, like he was talking about someone else’s life entirely.
“So I just said, I’ll go to the facility. Felt like I’d die young if I stayed under my dad.”
“……Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“What’s there to be sorry about. It’s old news for me anyway.”
Shin Juho brushed it off and sat down across the narrow dining table. With bowls of steaming porridge placed in front of each of them, he asked in his usual easy manner.
“What about you?”
“Ah, me….”
Munyeong stirred his food with his spoon and thought for a moment. He felt his way through the memory slowly as he began to speak.
“I don’t remember all that well, but… I didn’t have a father.”
“…Ah.”
“It was just me and my mom, in this really small room.”
“Well, kids like us are all pretty much the same.”
Shin Juho listened with a familiar smile, as though feeling a kinship in shared misfortune.
“My mom was really young.”
“…….”
“So the people in the neighborhood gossiped a lot. Because the mom was too young, you know how it is. Prejudice and all that.”
“I know.”
“But she seemed like she was holding on tooth and nail… and in the end, I guess she couldn’t help it.”
“…….”
“I was abandoned at Seoul Station. I was only five years old, but I think I knew from the start. She told me to wait nicely and she’d be back soon… and even hearing that, I think I already felt it — oh, I’m being left behind.”
“Shit. That’s how it is. You feel it.”
“But I just waited anyway. About three days? I squeezed in and slept among the homeless men there… just kept holding out. I’d get thirsty and go drink from the bathroom sink, but I was so terrified of missing the moment mom came back that I’d sprint back frantically?”
Munyeong said it with a soft smile, as though it were a fond memory, and Shin Juho let out a dry laugh and scolded him.
“What’s there to smile about?”
“Just — honestly. That little kid, what was he so desperate for.”
“Ugh, this is exactly why kids like us don’t talk about those days.”
“…….”
“It ends up feeling like a contest of who had it worse — a miserable past competition.”
“Sorry. I brought it up for nothing.”
“You must have really been hurting. To talk about all that. Let’s just eat.”
“…Yeah. It’s good.”
Seeming like he didn’t want to say more, Shin Juho changed the subject with an uncomfortable look. Smiling, he made his voice deliberately brighter as he boasted.
“I got fruit too. When you’re done eating I’ll peel a pear for you.”
“You didn’t have to go that far.”
“Hey, if you don’t eat well when you’re sick, you get worse. Like I don’t know from experience.”
“Honestly….”
“And if you’re laid up this bad, that means you were really going through it. I was genuinely shocked when I got the call, seriously.”
Just from everything he’d shown up with, it was easy to tell how worried he’d been. Juho was the scatterbrained type — the kind who got taken care of, not the kind who did the taking care.
“Thank you.”
“Oh, right. These are medicine.”
“Medicine?”
“Yeah. Oh — I ran into that guy right out front.”
Shin Juho stood up mid-meal and handed over a large shopping bag as he spoke. What kind of medicine needs a bag this big? Munyeong looked inside with a puzzled face and asked again.
“Who?”
“That guy. Your friend.”
“…My friend?”
You’re the only friend I have almost slipped out before he caught himself.
“Yeah, the one who said he went to school with you. I guess he knew you were sick? He asked me to give it to you — obviously told me not to tell you he said that, but. What reason is there not to tell? Right?”
Shin Juho still didn’t seem to like Yeon Haejeong much, giving the shopping bag an unimpressed thwack as he spoke. Munyeong took out the items one by one with a dazed look on his face. There was an armful of medicine alone — a comprehensive cold remedy, fever reducer, muscle relaxant, headache medicine and more — and on top of that, a box of individual red ginseng pouches and a heated abdominal massager.
“Is that guy pretty well off?”
“Huh?”
“I almost didn’t think so. But then I saw the car he was driving — insane. Was it a Cayman? Or a Caymera?”
Shin Juho thought for a moment, then seemed to lose interest and went back to eating. Munyeong found his appetite gone, a restless, unsettled feeling coming over him. He was grateful that Yeon Haejeong had found out he was sick and come, and that he’d put together all these things. Something in his chest fluttered enough to make his heart itch — but just days ago, that same person had turned away coldly and said he had no need for someone like him. He couldn’t figure out what Yeon Haejeong’s heart was, or what to do with it. Every time he thought it couldn’t be what it seemed, Yeon Haejeong would do something to make him second-guess himself again — how was he supposed to receive that.
Munyeong forced his swirling thoughts down and quietly asked Shin Juho, who had already finished his bowl and was gulping down water.
“Are you sleeping over tonight?”
“Nope?”
“Really? You must be busy these days.”
There were times Juho had been glued to his place for a whole week — but strangely, lately he was harder to see than before.
“Ah, well…. Yeah.”
The slight evasiveness caught Munyeong’s eye. In that exact moment, sensing something off, Munyeong’s brow furrowed faintly as he asked again.
“Lately… nothing’s going on, right?”
His debt paid off, out of the game — Shin Juho was now working steadily as an entry-level employee at a small company. He had struggled a lot at first, but he seemed to be holding up better than before, and Munyeong had let himself relax.
“Like what?”
“…You’re doing okay, right?”
“What are you talking about, obviously——”
Shin Juho stopped mid-answer, and seemed to finally catch the intent of the question — his eyes narrowed.
“You don’t think.”
He did think. The problem was that the debt Shin Juho had built up during his athlete days had come from gambling. He had always said there were three things he could never quit — women, substances, and gambling. Knowing Juho was someone who struggled to resist temptation, Munyeong worried about him from time to time.
“Ha, come on. Are you crazy? How long has it been since I dropped that——”
Shin Juho wiped whatever stiffness had crept onto his face and put on an even more exaggerated grin.
“Don’t worry. If I let you support me and then go and do that again, I’m genuinely not a human being. Might as well drop dead, honestly.”
He kept going in a jokey, playful tone and turned his back to clear the empty bowl. He seemed to be subtly avoiding eye contact — but when someone said something that strongly, there wasn’t much reason not to believe them. It wasn’t the prospect of Juho falling back into gambling and running up debt again that frightened Munyeong. It was the fear that if he fell back in, he might not be able to get back up this time. That was what scared him most.
“You didn’t have to put it that way.”
“I’m saying don’t worry. Oh, I got tangerines too?”
Shin Juho shook a plastic pack of tangerines with a big grin. Munyeong followed his easy laugh with one of his own and said quietly, the way he always did, “Those’ll be good.”
A gentle, unremarkable peace settled in. The peace that had been his — the kind that had continued until Yeon Haejeong appeared. The chaos that would uproot that peace entirely was already too much for Munyeong to bear.
