“A gift.”
At 7:23 a.m., while sleep still clung to my fingers, my husband pressed a stick of white plastic into my palm. Not chocolate, not roses, not a ring—just a slim wand with a clear cap, something that looked like a pregnancy test yet wasn’t.
“Fifteen years,” he murmured. “Let’s take one.”
He smiled, but his eyes wavered coldly. I nodded. I already knew the answer; we were only confirming it.
Was that morning this heavy?
One day in their third year of marriage, Mi-jeong smelled it on Seung-min’s underwear: a cloying, viscous musk from a brand she never used. The scent lingered between the sheets, on the pillow, even on the doorknob, refusing to fade.
No, nothing happened.
Yet when she closed her eyes, a stranger’s breath still tickled her ears. From that night on, Mi-jeong slept in fragments, combing through Seung-min’s hair strand by strand. The fragrance never disappeared; it simply moved from place to place.
“I dropped it—sorry.” Seung-min bowed his head. The white stick rolled across the bathroom tiles. Mi-jeong picked it up. On its pale body, two faint pink lines had appeared. The word positive was absent; there were only the lines. They overturned fifteen years of photographs one by one.
“When did it start?”
Instead of answering, Seung-min asked, “And you?”
Silence filled the living room. For the first time in fifteen years, Mi-jeong saw fear in her husband’s eyes. That fear reflected back from her own and grew larger.
“I saw you through the window.”
Mi-jeong closed her eyes. “Under the convenience-store lights, your hand was on someone else’s waist.”
Seung-min said nothing. A moment later, he closed his eyes too.
“I saw you as well.”
“The night you left for a business trip, the blouse on our bed—it was your favorite.”
In each other’s pupils they summoned the same scene, yet the figures differed. One memory held the glow of a streetlamp, the other the bedside lamp. Recalling the lingering scent in the hollow of a throat, they apologized—words aimed at each other, but truly meant for themselves.
Why, knowing of the other’s infidelity, can we not endure it? Why dream of revenge? After fifteen years, Mi-jeong rested her ear against her husband’s chest for the first time. The heartbeat was unchanged, but beneath it seeped a faint metallic taste of iron. She recognized the flavor: the secret savor of a desire she too had cultivated.
I tried to erase you without knowing it, by imprinting your scent on my own skin.
On this fifteenth anniversary morning, Mi-jeong asked, “When did we begin abandoning each other?”
Seung-min pointed instead to another kit on the table—this one for HIV.
Yes, we already knew everything.
And so Mi-jeong asks herself: When did you begin betraying me?