DH ✦ Ch 32

After eating every last bit of food on the table, Ga-young was so full that it was difficult to breathe.

She carried the empty dishes over to the outdoor faucet in the corner of the yard. She had eagerly volunteered to do the dishes, only to get scolded and smacked lightly on the back by Soon-hee.

“Oh, you’re such a nuisance. Just sit quietly on the wooden platform.”

Ga-young went over to Bong-man, who was preparing to weed the garden, and tried to persuade him to let her help. At least his reaction wasn’t as harsh.

“You’ve got nothing to do. Your aunt says she’ll wash all the dishes and make some bokbunja juice, so you just sit there and drink it.”

“I’m so full that I think I need to move around. I’ll at least pull out some of the little weeds.”

“Wonder where the weeding hoe is.”

He quickly found a small hand hoe in the toolbox and handed it to her, but her outfit immediately failed inspection.

“If you really want to do it, go to the room and find yourself some mombbe work pants.”

Ga-young dashed into the management building. Instead of heading toward the main bedroom, her feet naturally carried her toward a small room that was practically a storage closet.

“They must keep the work clothes in here.”

The little room was stuffy and hot, with no ventilation, and was packed with miscellaneous things.

An old rusty heater, a broken fan, a herbal medicine pot, a blender, and machines used in different seasons were all crammed together. At the back of the room stood an old chest of drawers.

Ga-young opened the five-drawer cabinet, starting from the top.

Two drawers contained winter work clothes lined with fleece.

The drawers below held Ga-young’s own clothes—casual clothes from her teenage years that had faded yellow with age and were now fit only to be used as rags.

“They didn’t even throw these away.”

Ga-young smiled faintly and reached for the handle of the drawer below.

A chill suddenly ran down her spine, and the smile on her lips froze.

She had definitely chosen the wrong room.

There was no way her aunt would keep the mombbe pants she often wore hidden away in a storage room like this. She should have left immediately.

But pointless curiosity kept her rooted to the spot.

The moment she opened the fourth drawer, the corners of Ga-young’s eyes trembled.

There was a high school uniform.

Most students only needed two, but Ga-young had needed six.

One had been scraped against a cement floor. Another had more than ten cigarette burns. Another had been stained with red oil paint. She had thrown those away at the garbage incinerator so that her aunt would never discover what had happened to them.

The money she had saved for ten years, along with money she had lied about needing for workbooks and received from her aunt, had gone toward buying new uniforms.

The one preserved inside the drawer was the last one—the only clean one.

Soon-hee and Bong-man had no idea what kind of ordeal this uniform had been a remnant of.

Ga-young had been an exemplary student since middle school, never losing her place at the top of the entire school or her position as class president. That must have been why they had preserved the uniform as a precious memory from their pretty niece’s school days.

Overcome by a surge of resentment, Ga-young pulled out the neatly folded uniform.

She decided that if there was anything else like this, she would throw it all away, and irritably opened the final drawer.

The moment she saw what was inside, her hips dropped heavily to the floor.

There was a princess dress and a pair of ballet shoes, things Yoon Jeong-ho had bought for her when she was very young.

There was also a framed photograph.

In it, a little girl about to enter elementary school clung to Yoon Jeong-ho’s arms, smiling.

Ga-young drew up her knees and buried her face in them.

Several fragments of the past came rushing back without permission.

They were memories she would rather claw her brain open and bleed than remember.

Yoon Jeong-ho, that piece of trash, had been a single father.

He had raised Ga-young, a daughter born from a one-night accident, alone from the time she was a newborn.

Even if her frontal lobe were carved away, some hazy memories of that time would remain.

Yoon Jeong-ho had actually been quite a good father.

Although he had relied on childcare support programs that extended from daycare and kindergarten to after-school care at elementary school until late in the evening, outside of the hours he worked as a taxi driver, he devoted all his energy to taking care of his daughter.

When Ga-young was eight, Yoon Jeong-ho changed jobs and became a driver for an entertainment agency, and he began drinking more.

But even then, it was only to the extent of quietly drinking alone in the kitchen after putting his daughter to bed.

Ga-young parted from that man when she was nine, in the second grade of elementary school.

There wasn’t even a goodbye telling her to live well.

It ended when Yoon Jeong-ho failed to come home one day without contacting her.

In a shabby hillside neighborhood, Ga-young spent that terrifying night alone in a one-room apartment, pulling the blanket all the way over her head.

Even the next morning, when she packed her schoolbag and left for school, she did not lose her courage.

What she heard from her classmates that day was a shock powerful enough to shatter the world of a young child.

“Your dad killed someone.”

“Ga-young’s dad is the ‘ashtray murderer.’”

She ran out of school immediately.

The moment she returned home and turned on the television with trembling hands, Ga-young collapsed helplessly onto the floor.

“My dad couldn’t have done it.”

But it was her father.

Yoon Jeong-ho was everywhere, without exception, in the headlines of terrestrial news broadcasts and news channels.

He had killed an actor who belonged to the entertainment agency where he worked as a driver.

The actor had recently become a Hallyu star after his latest starring film became a huge hit throughout Asia.

The crime had taken place on the first day of filming for a movie the actor had chosen as his next project.

In front of countless cameras from the media outlets competing to cover the story, Yoon Jeong-ho had struck the lead actor on the back of the head with an ashtray.

The footage of the murder was replayed countless times on television.

In the initial reports, even the victim’s face was barely blurred.

Yoon Jeong-ho’s name and face were exposed to everyone without even following the legally prescribed procedures for publicly identifying a suspect.

Talking about a murderer’s human rights seemed almost ridiculous anyway.

Ga-young lay helplessly on the floor and watched television.

She didn’t want to look, but she couldn’t turn away from the news.

Just in case.

Maybe there would be a report saying the murderer was someone other than her father.

But as time passed, that hopeless wish only dried out her soul until it became a barren desert.

She didn’t go to school, let alone leave the house.

She was old enough to understand how horrific a crime her father had committed.

She could easily predict how she, his daughter, would be treated because of it.

Every path nine-year-old Ga-young had walked bore Yoon Jeong-ho’s footprints alongside hers.

Everyone would treat her like a criminal too and point their fingers at her.

And in fact, the visits from a welfare organization volunteer who had previously come twice a week with side dishes because Ga-young was from a single-parent household suddenly stopped.

For a week, she remained buried beneath the ashes of despair, leaving only a tiny opening through which she could breathe.

Then her aunt and uncle came looking for her.

Soon-hee and Bong-man hugged Ga-young, whose body had become painfully thin and whose consciousness was fading, and wept bitterly.

“Ga-young. Wake up. Auntie’s here.”

“Oh, you poor thing.”

That was how Ga-young came to Gangwon Province, where her aunt and uncle lived.

The couple had no children of their own, so they cared for Ga-young devotedly as though she were their biological daughter.

Ga-young recovered physically and emotionally without much difficulty.

In addition to the relief of knowing that nobody around her knew about her relationship with Yoon Jeong-ho, she had been born with a strong survival instinct and self-esteem.

There were occasional moments when she flinched.

Whenever a heinous murder occurred, the media would inevitably bring up Yoon Jeong-ho again.

The victim had been a famous actor, and the entire country had seen the footage of the murder.

Yoon Jeong-ho had become etched into the public consciousness as the very embodiment of a murder crime, regarded as almost as notorious as a serial killer.

Throughout her teenage years, Ga-young behaved impeccably so that no one could find fault with her.

She was the exemplary student whom teachers and other adults praised endlessly.

To the boys, she was their first love—the girl they desperately wanted to date but couldn’t bring themselves to approach.

To the girls, she was someone they admired, someone they wanted to resemble and become friends with.

That was Yoon Ga-young.

Even with a few twists and turns, her life had flowed peacefully, like a winding stream.

But in the year she became a senior in high school, the ground beneath Yoon Ga-young’s feet turned into a deep-red mud pit.

“Ga-young, we were in the same class when we were in second grade at Jeongmin Elementary School. You remember me, right?”

“I don’t think so. I’m sorry.”

It began with a girl who had transferred from Seoul approaching her as though they were old acquaintances.

Ga-young had tried desperately to ignore her, but she remembered the girl.

She spent sleepless nights gripped by fear, clinging only to the memory that the girl had once been a good child.

A week later, her classmates began avoiding Ga-young and whispering behind her back.

About two weeks after that, during the morning homeroom period, the entire class refused to greet the teacher according to the commands of their class president, Ga-young.

Despite the homeroom teacher’s intervention, Ga-young was forced to voluntarily give up her position as class president.

When she continued to ignore whatever anyone said about her, the group bullying only intensified.

The classmate assigned to share her desk moved their desk to the very back row, and her dormitory roommate moved out of their room.

Whenever Ga-young gave a presentation in class, her classmates would collectively imitate the buzzing of flies.

During evening self-study, someone would draw an ashtray on the blackboard.

At every mealtime, someone would throw leftover food onto Ga-young’s tray. On several occasions, they simply dumped an entire pile of leftovers onto it before walking away.

Dozens of times, someone deliberately stuck out a foot as she walked down the hallway, causing her to trip and fall.

An ashtray filled with red oil paint was sometimes left on Ga-young’s desk.

After silently throwing it into the trash several times, they changed its location to her chair.

One time, she failed to notice it and sat down, covering her school uniform in paint.

After enduring the silent hostility and refusing to speak to her classmates for a month, Ga-young finally exploded.

“You bastard.”

She slapped the leader of the school bullies who had been orchestrating the harassment.

The furious boy grabbed Ga-young by the hair.

“Fuck! I was letting you off because you’re a girl.”

“Let go! Let go of me! I said let go!”

Ga-young fought back with everything she had.

But she was no match for the brute strength of the much larger male student.

She was dragged roughly out into the hallway.

Her uniform tore as she was scraped across the cement floor, and blood appeared on her legs.

Even after seeing that, the students merely stepped aside and watched.