“Are the kids asleep?” he whispered, twisting the doorknob. The voice was the same one I’d fallen asleep to for years, yet that night it brushed the back of my neck like a cold baseball. Instead of answering, I closed my eyes. The baby monitor on the nightstand blinked a lonely red.
Can you still smell tears?
While he showered, I traced the hollow of his pillow under the covers. Eight years ago it had been incandescent, every strand of hair a spark. Now it smelled only of settled sleep: fatigue, formula, a faint hunger.
What scent is this?
My own unwelcome perfume, the one no one holds anymore.
He came back with his phone instead of a towel. The screen was dark, yet in the blacked-out room it glowed faintly blue. I counted how long his gaze lingered there: three seconds? five? Or 0.8? The figure was imprecise, the feeling razor-sharp. He had seen what he wished he hadn’t.
Truth always hovers at the edge of vision
Case one: Day 3,065 of ‘Yujin’ and ‘Jae-in’
Yujin still refuses to believe it. At 2:23 a.m., while a three-year-old and a seven-year-old slept, Jae-in said, “I’ve got overtime,” and his eyes were shards of ice.
—Coffee before you go? —No, I’ll just head out. —The kids keep asking for you… —Get some rest.
The click of the door sounded like cracking ice. Yujin sat on the edge of the bed and lifted Jae-in’s pillow. No cologne—only the scent of a new soap, one their bathroom had never seen.
From that night on she washed his socks obsessively, mixing them with the children’s. If a single strand of someone else’s hair is there, I’ll find it first. Among the spotless socks she found herself gasping for air.
Case two: Seo-yeong’s last embrace
Seo-yeong remembers the precise moment of her last embrace with the father of her two children. It happened in the car after day-care pick-up. Their five-year-old had fallen asleep in the back; the newborn whimpered softly in the car seat. He reached over first. His forearm grazed her shoulder.
Why so weightless?
—Rough day? —Yeah, the kids… —Still, you held up well.
In that instant she understood: he had not embraced her but the role of the woman who endures—wife, mother, the one who no longer cries.
Seo-yeong turned to the window. 4:30 p.m.; the sky was burning red. Like the sky, the marriage was quietly turning to ash.
Why do we stay, knowing it will end like poison?
From the moment we give birth, we become someone’s mother. Our bodies feel annexed, like borrowed land. A husband’s gaze is no longer a crescent moon ablaze; it’s a street-lamp flickering at the edge of an abandoned field.
What keeps us from leaving is not fear itself but the terror of realizing it is already over. Eight years of debris—ultrasound photos, first-birthday cakes, videos of the baby saying “Dada”—would vanish with us.
So we drink the poison and smile. For the children. Because it’s too late now. Because imagining someone new is worse.
Final question
Do you still press your face to his pillow, wondering who else has lain here? When the children are asleep and your hand accidentally brushes his, do you ache to know whose hand he held today?
And do you still not want the answer?