Since a cleaning company was being called in, there was no real need for him to stay behind and volunteer to handle the aftermath himself. He replied with an acknowledgment and ended the call, and in an instant, silence settled in. Yuhyeon set the file he’d brought back down.
Might as well change my clothes while I’m at it.
It was a relief that Glock had uniforms specifically for the part-time serving staff. Yuhyeon pulled out an unclaimed uniform from a pile stacked in the corner of the break room. It wasn’t uncommon for college students to work only briefly during vacation and then quit, which was why there were always a few unused uniforms like this lying around. Fortunately, for something that had been stuffed in a corner, it didn’t smell.
Yuhyeon stripped off his soiled clothes, changed into the uniform, and checked himself in the mirror. A white shirt and black slacks. Glock’s dress code leaned toward a neat, clean-cut style, so wearing this out wouldn’t draw much attention. He fished his transit card and cash out of the clothes he’d taken off, then shoved them into one of the cabinets. Since he had no bag to carry them in at the moment, he was only taking his valuables with him. He had a serving shift scheduled for the afternoon anyway, so he could grab the rest then.
Oh? I guess I didn’t leave it here after all.
He had remembered that he needed to retrieve the button-down he’d used to apply pressure, and had gone into Room 1 — but only an empty space greeted him. It seemed the paramedics had taken it with them when they loaded Seongjun onto the stretcher. He didn’t own many fall outerwear pieces, and the loss left a bitter taste in his mouth.
❄ ❄ ❄
On his way home, Yuhyeon thought of his landlady and ducked into a nearby café. His biological father had undoubtedly caused her trouble, and he wanted to bring something as an apology — a cake, he figured. He wondered what strawberry cakes were going for these days. He’d never bought one for himself, so he had no real sense of the price range. He could only hope it wasn’t too expensive.
“Welcome, this is Double Win Dessert.”
As he stepped toward the display case where the cakes were arranged, the café’s standard greeting reached him. Yuhyeon scanned the cakes on display and worried his lip between his teeth. The slice cakes were nearly ten thousand won apiece, and a whole cake was entirely out of the question. In his heart he wanted to give her something proper, but he didn’t have the funds for it.
“One slice of strawberry cake, to go please.”
In the end he chose a slice. While it was being packaged, he gazed down at the whole cakes with lingering reluctance. The ten-thousand-won bill crumpling in his grip said it all. Every time money ran short, the same draining helplessness came over him, and he felt deflated before he’d even seen his landlady.
Standing at the bus stop on his way home, Yuhyeon fell into thought. A vague, formless worry about the future crept in without warning and his mood sank. How much longer could he keep living off part-time work? There was no answer to that. All he could do was carry the weight of an unhappiness that was hard to look away from, and tell himself to try a little harder.
Twenty-eight wasn’t old — but it wasn’t young either. With each year that passed, worry about what lay ahead filled him more naturally. That was part of why he had clung to Glock so stubbornly, even when things were hard. There was a rumor that Glock hired long-term part-timers as full-time staff. If he made the switch to a permanent position, he wouldn’t have to worry so easily about being let go — and that gave him something to hold onto.
Whether that’s actually true is another question.
A rumor was still just a rumor. Yuhyeon had been there three years and still wasn’t a full-time employee, and he’d never seen it happen to anyone else at Glock either. Someone couldn’t have started it as a joke for no reason — more likely the story had gotten distorted somewhere along the way. He was staring blankly downward, mind adrift, when the announcement chiming through the bus snapped him back to reality.
“Driver, I need to get off!”
Lost in thought, he had nearly missed his stop. He hit the bell in a rush and bolted to the rear door, tagging out as he went. Fortunately, the bus hadn’t gone far past the stop, so he was able to get off without much trouble.
What should I even say to start?
Yuhyeon climbed the uphill road, mentally rehearsing the conversation with his landlady. He played it out step by step in his head — apologizing for whatever ordeal his biological father had put her through, then handing over the cake. The fact that they weren’t particularly close on a normal day made him even more unnecessarily anxious. He bit down on his dry lips. Just don’t fumble over your words. The gravity on his face was the kind that made it look like he was heading into a job interview.
As he neared the house, the cake in his hand felt tinier and tinier. Wasn’t it too stingy for something meant as an apology? Yuhyeon, thoroughly deflated, stared down at what he was holding and gave a slow, small shake of his head. He hadn’t had enough cash to buy anything better — it wasn’t as if he’d had a choice. He decided to stop dwelling on pointless regret. He stepped into the building, passed his own unit — 201 — and went up one more floor. Since he was only stopping to drop off the cake, he headed straight to 301 without going home first.
I wonder if she’s in.
It would have been proper to call ahead, but his phone was broken, so he had no way to reach her. The teal-colored front door felt unusually daunting today. He stood there fidgeting with his fingers and toes for a long moment before making up his mind and schooling his expression into something firmer.
“Is anyone home?”
He knocked with a loosely curled fist, but the inside was quiet. It was 2 p.m. on a weekday, not a weekend, so there was nothing strange about no one being there. He counted silently to about ten in his head and was just about to turn and leave — when the firmly shut door swung open.
“It’s the young man from 201.”
The landlady raised her eyebrows at Yuhyeon’s unexpected appearance, asking with her expression what had brought him here. She had her head tilted to one side and was wearing an apron — it looked like she had been in the middle of a late lunch.
“Well… I heard my father came by.”
“…Ah.”
At Yuhyeon’s words, the landlady pulled her lips into an awkward smile. She had chosen not to mention it to avoid worrying him, yet somehow he already knew the full story. The landlady let out a small, worried sigh. Her eyes and chin tilted faintly upward, as if she were recalling what had happened the day before.
— What do you mean, what’s the problem! I came to collect the deposit my son put down!
— And does the young man in 201 know about this?
— Know about it? Does a father need his kid’s permission to look after his own money? I even brought the resident registration. I’m not some suspicious person.
— No, sir, from what I’m hearing, something about this doesn’t add up… Even if it is your son’s money, this is money tied up in a contract. I have no obligation to hand it over to you.
The landlady had been picking up trash in the yard the day before when a man suddenly cornered her and demanded she hand over the deposit. He was so aggressive about it that before she heard the words “201,” she had actually found herself wondering whether she had ever stiffed a tenant on their deposit.
Then, in a flash, she remembered something — when the tenant from 201 had first moved in, he had brought up his biological father with visible hesitation. The color had drained from his face just at the mention of the man. The circumstances he’d described, with such difficulty, had been enough to make her click her tongue. Just how terrifying must his father’s abuse have been, for him to have fled like a fugitive just to move here? It was a wretched story, the kind that stirred pity.
Just as she was about to call the police to get rid of the unwanted visitor, Gyeongjin had appeared. Gyeongjin had tried to defuse the situation without letting it escalate, but ended up getting struck across the face by the man’s father. It hadn’t been a deliberate swing from the start — it had happened as the man was thrashing and struggling. Gyeongjin had lost his balance and fallen, and it seemed the man had panicked, afraid he’d seriously hurt him. The man who hadn’t flinched even at the mention of the police had turned and bolted.
Gyeongjin must have told him.
She herself hadn’t said anything to Yuhyeon about the previous day, so it could only have been Gyeongjin. The landlady’s eyes caught Yuhyeon’s sunken shoulders. That was exactly why she had kept her mouth shut. It was heartbreaking to see Yuhyeon carrying his biological father’s wrongs as though they were his own, wearing shame on his face like it belonged to him.
“I’m truly… sorry. It’s not much, but please accept this.”
Eyes cast downward from embarrassment, Yuhyeon held out the cake. The landlady took the box from him, and in doing so, had a good idea.
“Young man, have you eaten?”
“Sorry?”
“Stay for a meal if you haven’t. I just finished making kimchi-jjim.”
The landlady opened the door wide and gestured for him to come in. Yuhyeon blinked at her invitation a couple of times — and then the scent of the kimchi-jjim drifted past his nose, tempting and warm. The mouthwatering smell of deeply fermented kimchi coaxed at his appetite and then slipped away just as quickly. His empty stomach groaned relentlessly at the hunger-inducing aroma. He tried to grab hold of his stomach — which was making noise at the worst possible moment — and excuse himself, but the landlady added one more thing, as if catching him before he could leave.
“I made way too much, wouldn’t you know it. If I eat it all on my own, I’ll be having kimchi-jjim every single day for a week.”
She urged the hesitating Yuhyeon inside. He had come to apologize to her and ended up about to get a free meal instead. He wasn’t sure if this was really alright, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to answer. Then, in that moment, their eyes met. The landlady smiled gently and told him not to feel burdened — to think of it as something casual. Whether it was that warmth she showed him, strength returned to the legs that had gone stiff.
“Then I’ll take you up on that.”
“Come on in, make yourself comfortable.”
It was his first time inside someone else’s home — and of all places, his landlady’s. Embracing the unfamiliar feeling, Yuhyeon nodded at her reassurance that he didn’t need to be nervous. On the small table set out in the space that served as both kitchen and living room, dishes and side items were neatly arranged. No rice bowls yet — it looked like Yuhyeon had arrived just as the table was nearly set.
Is that the kimchi-jjim?
The aluminum pot sitting over the gas flame was considerably large. It was the moment he realized that what the landlady had said about making too much wasn’t entirely an exaggeration. She turned off the low-burning flame, took out the well-cooked aged kimchi and pork, and began snipping it all into generous chunks with a pair of scissors.
