“I was going to tell you tonight.”
11:47 p.m. After the last train had gone, our faces in the subway window were too sharp, too clear. Jin-woo was gripping my hand so tightly, and on his palm I could still see the smear of my friend’s lipstick.
“I’m sorry. I really am.”
I’ve lost count of how many times he’s said it. For three months he’s repeated the same apology, and each time I simply nodded. Instead of let’s end this, the words that slipped from my mouth were it’s okay.
The real reason we can’t finish it
We don’t stay together out of love. We stay because we can’t face the truth. The moment Jin-woo kissed my friend—when I saw it—our relationship was already layered with lies upon lies.
If I say “let’s be done,” Jin-woo will leave. Then I’ll be alone, left to cradle this filthy truth by myself. Isn’t it better for two people to guard the secret together?
A voice inside me whispered: Is this revenge? Pity? Or just plain fear?
My reflection in her eyes
Every night Seo-hyun draped her arm across Jin-woo’s neck. She knew that I knew.
Two weeks ago, outside the restroom of a bar, she met my gaze and said, holding up the lipstick she’d pulled from her purse:
“You’ll stay, won’t you? You know this isn’t the end.”
Since that day, the three of us have forged a perfect covenant of silence. Jin-woo probably believes he loves us both. But we loathed yet needed one another: Seo-hyun needed Jin-woo’s infidelity, I needed Jin-woo who hid that infidelity, and Jin-woo needed his own desire.
What we’re hiding is more than an affair
Last December, Jin-woo bribed his boss. The money had been set aside for our wedding.
Seo-hyun had two abortions in college; no one knows one of the pregnancies was Jin-woo’s.
I embezzled from my company—small sums, but steadily for two years.
Each of us nurses a dirty secret. That is why we cannot part. If one leaves, the secrets of the others might surface.
The allure of taboo, or the thrill of complicity
Psychologist Esther Perel says affairs often draw couples closer. A shared secret becomes the glue that cements a relationship.
We no longer love, yet we cannot detach. Lies are our daily bread: Seo-hyun’s lipstick on a collar, Jin-woo’s motel receipts in his wallet, the deleted messages on my phone. All of it binds us tight, like murderers burying a corpse together in the middle of the room.
Finally, to you
Tonight Jin-woo will come home late again, the scent of Seo-hyun clinging to his clothes. I will smell it and still smile, say, “You worked hard today.”
Are you, too, holding a filthy secret with someone? Ending it sounds simple—so why are you still in that place?
Or is the secret you carry even dirtier than ours?