Blocked, But Never Gone
The moment Yun-seo checked the notification glaring up at her from her phone screen, her expression froze over, cold and hard.
As the revolting messages came pouring down the screen, a fresh wave of goosebumps crawled up her skin. The relentless contact had died down for a while, and she'd actually let herself believe she was free — but no. It was starting all over again.
Blocking him did nothing; the man simply swapped numbers every single time and came crawling back with his pitiful texts. Worse still, he always set his contact name to something like that.
Even after she'd gone all the way to Bondo to change her number, he'd somehow sniffed it out like a ghost and called anyway. That abnormal, obsessive persistence made her skin crawl.
And whose fault is it that I got dumped in this godforsaken island clinic in the first place?
“Hah…….”
The unpleasant memories she'd tried to bury came bubbling back up, one after another — fragments of a time when her life had actually seemed to shine.
There had been a period when the whole island — no, even the nearby mainland towns — buzzed with talk of the local girl who'd gotten into medical school. A time when Yun-seo herself never once doubted that she'd stepped onto a genuinely brilliant trajectory in life.
But she'd learned too late that the dazzling life she thought she had never existed at all. The road she'd believed led to a glorious future was in truth a sheer drop straight into the gutter.
She'd found out that her boyfriend of four years, Kim Jun-young, was cheating on her in the worst way imaginable: by walking into his apartment unannounced and catching the filthy scene with her own eyes — him tangled up in bed with a woman she'd never seen before.
As if that weren't enough, she then learned the shocking truth that she had been the other woman all along. Jun-young was the clear victim in all of this — or so the story went — and thanks to his fiancée storming into her workplace and throwing a violent fit, Yun-seo was branded a shameless homewrecker in an instant.
She was hounded out of the hospital, and the rumor spread so viciously that no other hospital would take her.
In the end, Yun-seo had to carve her Seoul life out of her chest, bloody and raw. In a state closer to giving up than not, she'd come down as a contract physician to the Yanggido Public Health Sub-clinic — her hometown, a posting so undesirable it was on the verge of shutting down. That had been six months ago now.
Her entire life had been capsized over the sin of loving the wrong man. She was still gritting her teeth at Kim Jun-young's endless contacts blinking up on the screen when—
“Aigoo, and they had to end it there again, the nerve!”
At Grandma Pil-soon's gravelly voice, the grandmothers began hauling themselves up out of their seats one by one. With the ending theme of the TV drama washing over her, Yun-seo felt as though she'd just dropped out of the unreal swamp of the past and landed with a thud back in the reality of the clinic.
“We'd better be heading home now.”
“Did you enjoy the show?”
Hastily setting her phone face-down, Yun-seo smoothed over her dizzy expression and managed a strained smile.
“Ee-e, came out crisp as new, so it was a treat for the eyes, I tell ye. We'll be back tomorrow, so if there's anything ye want watched, say it ahead of time.”
“Of course. Get home safe, everyone.”
Only after seeing off the crowd of grandmothers shuffling out the door did she collapse back into her chair. Mental exhaustion came flooding in, and she was just closing her eyes when San — who had appeared beside her without her noticing — leaned against the corner of the desk and sidled up with a question.
“What's the matter with you, Doc? Sitting there like a sack of barley with the lid nailed on.”
“You're mistaken, I'm afraid.”
“Doesn't seem like it. You've had ‘I'm in a foul mood' written across your face in big letters this whole time.”
He answered with an air of feigned innocence and rolled up his sleeves. In the pale threads of light filtering through the window frame, dust rose in a hazy cloud from his clothes every time he moved.
Yun-seo's gaze drifted, inevitably, to the filthy cuffs of the man's sleeves. All that rolling around on a rooftop had left San's hospital gown in tatters.
Dwelling on the past and moping about it was a luxury she couldn't afford — her patient's hygiene was simply too catastrophic. She needed to pull herself together.
“Ah — excuse me a moment, I'll be right back.”
“Where to? Will it take long?”
“No, just the back yard. Won't even take a minute.”
She all but fled to the back yard and undid the bundle of clothes strapped to the sidecar of the old motorcycle. The scent of aged wood and salty sea air hit her all at once. Her grandfather's familiar smell seemed to finally settle the raw, frayed edges of her nerves.
But the moment she gathered the clothes and stepped back inside the clinic, the fragile composure she'd barely managed to hold onto shattered in an instant.
“Is this Dr. Ko Yun-seo's phone? Yes, it is.”
San was answering a call, phone pressed to his ear, the very picture of nonchalance.
“Me? I'm just someone living off the Doc's—”
“San! What do you think you're doing?!”
Rushing over as if she'd seen a ghost, Yun-seo snatched the phone out of his hand. Kim Jun-young's grating voice exploded through the speaker.
He was worked up, spewing filth and obscenities in a rage, and Yun-seo jabbed the end-call button immediately. Her heart was pounding so hard it felt like it would burst through her ribs.
“Wh-why would you answer someone else's phone without asking?”
“Well, it's been ringing off the hook for a while now. I figured it was something urgent, so I picked up, and…….”
San trailed off, studying her face.
“One look and I could tell. A stalker, something like that, am I right?”
“……You don't need to know anything about it.”
The shame of having her most carefully hidden dirty laundry exposed made her words come out sharper than she intended. San blinked at the icy reception, then pressed a hand to his temple with an awkward look.
“I'm sorry. I stuck my nose in where it didn't belong.”
The usual easygoing, teasing lilt had drained out of his voice, and only then did Yun-seo realize her mistake.
When she thought about it, the problem was the lunatic blowing up her phone, not San for answering it in her place. If anything, the fault was hers, for never having blocked Kim Jun-young properly in the first place.
“……Just ignore it from now on, please. There's no urgent call that could ever come for me. I'm sorry for being so touchy.”
“Don't apologize. I'm the one who messed up, so.”
As the raw anger and humiliation subsided, a crushing awkwardness rushed in to fill the space. Yun-seo held out the armful of clothes she'd been clutching, shifting them awkwardly in her grip.
“And…… I brought some clothes from the house. They were my grandfather's, so I'm not sure they'll fit, but I figured they'd be better than nothing.”
“Clothes?”
San's eyes landed on the bundle. He grabbed the clothes right out of her hands and turned them over this way and that, letting out exaggerated cries of admiration.
“Whoa, this is exactly my style. Your grandfather must have been quite the sharp dresser.”
It was a cheerful bit of banter that shattered the awkward atmosphere in one clean stroke.
By the time she looked up, he'd already slipped back into his sly, grinning face, and he bustled off toward the on-call room with the excited stride of a man determined to try them on that very minute. His retreating figure was so lighthearted it was as if he'd forgotten her bristling reaction entirely.
Is he trying to lift my mood? Or does he really not think anything of it at all?
Yun-seo was staring at the closed door of the on-call room, letting out a hollow breath, when her phone convulsed in her palm, buzzing like it was having a seizure.
The obsessive messages kept stacking up, and then his profile started changing in real time. Through the glass window she could see the photos he was uploading: the glittering night view of a luxury hotel, wine glasses, a Patek Philippe on his wrist — every shot deliberately staged to flaunt his wealth, brimming with desperate bravado.
And why is his username like THAT now, of all things? The display name was so shameless she could barely stand to look at it. Yun-seo's brow knitted into a hard line.
“Please, by all means. Please don't forgive me — and stay out of my life forever while you're at it.”
Skimming over the newly changed username one last time, Yun-seo added this number to her block list without a moment's hesitation.
He was bound to show up with yet another new number before long, but if she refused to engage, eventually he'd exhaust his own supply of rage and fall away on his own.
Praying it would happen just like that, she turned her phone face-down once more — folding the past away, piece by piece, and pressing it firmly down.