The Daughter No One Sees

Because her eyes were closed, she kept catching herself scrutinizing his features. She had always known he was handsome, but she had never studied him this openly, this deliberately, before.

The moment Lee-jin realized how long she had been staring blankly at his face, she hurried to speak.

"What are you doing? Never mind. Forget it."

Smearing clay onto a face carved like a statue—she couldn't bring herself to lay a finger on that face. Lee-jin shook her head firmly.

"Why? Do you think opportunities like this come along every day?" Kang-hyun said, one eye narrowed to a sliver. He seemed to mean that the offer still stood, but the sight of that single narrowed eye had a charm all its own. Her fingertips twitched before she could stop them. It was troubling, the image that crept in—what would happen if she cupped his cheek with her clay-stained hands?

If he had been some guy she was toying with at her whim, she probably wouldn't have hesitated to put her hands all over his face. But Lee-jin was cautious by nature, a woman whose excessive politeness had long since hardened into instinct.

"There's no need for both of us to get filthy."

When she refused to move the way he wanted, Kang-hyun clicked his tongue inwardly. The road ahead was long. Very long.

"And here I was planning to declare war the second you touched my face," he said, smiling with mock disappointment.

"You think I'm still a kid?"

Lee-jin laughed brightly, a memory surfacing of one chaotic day long ago when the three of them—her, him, and Yi-hwan—had torn around getting into trouble together. If I still thought of you as a kid, we wouldn't be doing any of this.

Kang-hyun regarded her with a slightly crooked gaze, then said, "Should we stop by Cheongjukje later? I want to show you the place at night. It's completely different from daytime—if you take it in now, it'll help when you're making your pottery."

"Sure. We can go once I finish this piece and clean up."

After dinner at their usual restaurant, the two of them headed for Cheongjukje. The streetlamps glowing all around mingled with the wooden pillars unique to the hanok, spilling out a warm light.

"Wow, this is gorgeous. The atmosphere is totally different at night." Lee-jin looked around, a faint flush in her cheeks.

"Want to walk a bit?"

Kang-hyun led her onto the footpath that wound toward the bamboo grove. When the wind stirred, the bamboo—so tall it seemed to scrape the edge of the sky—knocked against itself with a long, rustling hiss.

It was the kind of sound that made a person sentimental.

Why are you coming home so late again?

You came home even later yesterday, oppa.

Are you and me the same? You're too pretty to be out wandering at night. Absolutely not.

Yi-hwan's voice—shameless, doting nonsense—seemed to weave itself in among the whisper of bamboo leaves.

"Do you miss him? Yi-hwan?"

At the sudden question bored into her ear, Lee-jin stopped dead in her tracks and turned to face him. Another gust swept through, and the bamboo leaves rustled again.

"Because I miss him a lot. If I'd known I was going to lose him like that, I would have seen him more often. I can't tell you how much I regret it."

She had never expected Kang-hyun to lay his heart bare like that, and for a moment her eyes wavered. Unable to contain the longing that had ambushed her out of nowhere, she knit her brow. Something seemed to lodge tight in her throat, and the words came out forced, squeezed from somewhere deep.

"Me too. Even now, whenever my phone rings, it startles me. Even though I know he can't call anymore."

She had never been able to say any of this to anyone. It was only because Kang-hyun had known Yi-hwan so well that she could speak it aloud.

"Forgetting him completely isn't possible anyway. So let's take it slow. It's okay to grieve."

Strangely, those words were a real comfort. And that was when Lee-jin realized she had been quietly whipping herself forward all this time, telling herself she wasn't allowed to drown in the sorrow.

"Thank you. That really does help."

She smiled at him with genuine gratitude, never realizing how heartbreakingly fragile that smile looked.

What greeted Lee-jin when she came home was darkness. Not a single light burned; the whole house lay submerged in black.

"Hhk, hkk……"

The sound of weeping seeped out through the crack of a door, and Lee-jin's face went rigid. Mom. Again.

For one short, brutal moment she agonized. Should she open the door, walk in, and tell her mother to stop crying? Or just pretend she hadn't heard anything?

Perhaps because she had just spent the evening talking about Yi-hwan with Kang-hyun, it all felt more wretched, more unbearable than usual. She didn't think her mother's grief was wrong—it wasn't—but the truth landing harder than ever was that in her mother's eyes, she simply didn't exist.

Yesterday, and again today, her mother had room in her heart for one person only: her brother. And it felt like a grim guarantee that tomorrow, and the day after, it would be the same. Something inside her crumbled.

Did her mother even see her as a daughter at all? How else could she never, not once, have worried about her? Her mother had been so swallowed by the grief of losing her son that she never noticed what her daughter did all day, what she ate, what went through her head. Truly nothing. Not one thing.

And tonight, of all nights, it felt uniquely bitter, uniquely unfair. She knew she was supposed to understand her mother's pain. She knew she should be thinking, she must be struggling so much to be like this. But she couldn't. She just couldn't.

Lee-jin stood motionless in the dark living room and drew a slow breath. No tears came, but her chest seized and twisted as if a fist were wringing out her heart, and breathing itself became a struggle.

Yi-hwan is the man of this house, so you're the one who has to bend.

You be the one to hold it in.

Her mother's well-worn refrain droned in her ears like a ringing in the blood. There was nothing new in it—there never had been—and yet those words from the past turned into invisible thorns, stabbing at her again and again. Even with oppa gone, nothing changes. Nothing.

Why? Why? Until when? Resignation and a refusal to accept it tangled together into a hopeless, knotted mess.

Her breath grew short, her throat closing as if strangled, and panting, without quite knowing what she was doing, Lee-jin pushed open the door to Go Myung-sook's room.

Creeeeak—

The old hinge let out a sound she hated.

"Mom……"

At the sound of her voice, Go Myung-sook lifted her head. Then she came crawling across the floor to the doorway, seized Lee-jin by the ankle, and said, "Our Yi-hwan. Our Yi-hwan wasn't the kind of boy who could die. Right? Hm? Something must have gone wrong. They made a mistake, didn't they?"

Looking down at her mother's face, drenched in tears, Lee-jin felt something snap quietly inside her head—a clean, bloodless break.

"Mom. Oppa is dead. I'm never going to see him again. He is never coming back to this house."

She packed into those words everything she had spent months dodging, everything she had refused to say. Her emotions surged, and her eyes burned hot in an instant. Like some wounded animal keening, she groaned the words out and repeated them.

"Oppa is gone! Do you hear me? He's never coming back!"

"No. No……"

Go Myung-sook shook her head wildly, refusing to believe it. Watching her, the tears spilled down Lee-jin's face in a broken rush.

"Then what am I to you, Mom? Am I even your daughter?"

Go Myung-sook stared back at her daughter's twisted, anguished expression and responded blankly. "What……?"

"Your daughter is alive! She's right here! But you can't see your living daughter—you only see your dead son!"

Go Myung-sook was lost. She couldn't make sense of any of it. Her daughter had always been obedient. Careful, considerate, gentle—this was the first time in her life she had ever heard Lee-jin raise her voice like this.

"If I died, would you cry for me the way you're crying for him?"

The words fell out of Lee-jin like a murmur to herself, and Go Myung-sook's heart lurched.

"What? How—how can you say something like that?"

At the rebuke, Lee-jin's face contorted into something even more pained. "Why? It's not like you ever listen to me."

Go Myung-sook should have shot back—when? When have I ever refused to listen to you?—but the memory wouldn't come. She ransacked her mind, and still she could not find a single time she had truly heard her daughter out.

The aimless, faltering drift of Go Myung-sook's eyes was answer enough.

Lee-jin had never expected comfort from her, much less a decent excuse. She let out a long breath and fought to gather up the storm of feeling inside her.

"Just go to sleep. Stop worrying about me."

She said it, but underneath, she was terrified—terrified that her mother might actually agree. Without waiting for an answer, Lee-jin fled the house.

Go Myung-sook stared blankly at the sensor light glowing at the front door. When it winked out and the dark rushed back in, the strength drained from her shoulders and she sagged where she sat.

Out on the street, Lee-jin just walked. She pressed her lips tight shut to keep from crying, but the tears kept leaking through anyway. She was struggling to swallow the sounds escaping her like moans when her phone buzzed against her hip.

Could it be— A flicker of hope, thin as thread: could it be Mom? She pulled out her phone, but of course, it wasn't. It was Moon Kang-hyun's name—the man she had somehow come to lean on more than her own family. She took a steadying breath, then pressed the call button.

"You make it home okay?"

At the sound of his voice, the tears she had been holding back came flooding out all at once. "Yeah. I'm home."

She tried to answer casually, but her voice cracked to pieces.

"Seo Lee-jin. Where are you right now?"

And Kang-hyun caught it instantly.