Chapter 02

At the mention of the report about their time in bed, Jaye’s face turned red, and she nodded.

“Mother really is mischievous. She casually asks a twenty-three-year-old about what kind of sex she has with her husband. Don’t you think?”

In fact, about a year ago, Sunwoo had caught her giving one of those reports, and it had caused a huge uproar in the household.

After that, he had told them never to give or receive such reports again. But while he was absorbed in his work at the company, the reports had quietly resumed and continued ever since.

“And considering that, Shin Jaye, you were awfully good at talking about it so casually.”

“That’s…”

Jaye’s face turned as red as a burning bundle of straw as she desperately tried to think of something to say, but nothing came to mind.

The truth was, all of those reports about their time in bed were things Jaye had made up.

She carefully listened to and memorized the way her mother-in-law and Yonghwa wanted the couple to sleep together, then lied and said they had done exactly that.

“You really are something. How on earth do you know anything about men and women sleeping together when you give reports like that every morning?”

Apparently, Sunwoo knew everything about the stories she had fabricated about their nights together.

“I’ll make sure you never have to give those reports again. If she asks you about it again, tell me.”

Feeling as though she had been caught making lewd fantasies and talking about him, Jaye lowered her burning face toward the ground.

“Got it?”

“Yes. I understand.”

At the end of their conversation, Sunwoo covered the top of Jaye’s head with his large hand and stroked her hair without ulterior motives, as though she were a five- or six-year-old child.

There were two reasons he had never treated her as a woman during their nearly three years of marriage. Their marriage was a fake one, and Jaye was still in her early twenties and therefore too young in his eyes.

“Then study hard. I’ll see you at home tonight.”

“Yes.”

Sunwoo got back into the sedan, and the black car made a wide U-turn in front of the engineering building before heading toward the main gate.

Jaye stood there watching until the car her husband had ridden in disappeared from sight.

They were distant with each other, yet strangely enough, whenever she met him, the inside of her throat always felt ticklish.

She liked the white flowers of the Japanese snowbell trees in spring, but whenever she got close to them, the inside of her throat would tickle. In much the same way, whenever she faced her husband, something inside her heart felt both ticklish and uncomfortable.

Left alone, Jaye quietly said the morning greeting she had been unable to give him.

“I hope you have a good day too, Vice President.”

Her white breath scattered into the cold air.

At the end of November, the campus was dazzling with five-colored autumn foliage. Half-bare ginkgo trees with yellow leaves stood against the red-brick buildings, creating the most beautiful scenery of the year.

After finishing a three-hour polymer engineering lecture, Jaye shaded her eyes with one hand and looked around the campus.

Under the clear blue late-autumn sky, the trees and grass were dressed in autumn colors, and the brilliance of it all made her eyes sting for no particular reason.

Come to think of it, her grandmother had called before Jaye left home and carefully told her to be careful because it looked like it might rain today.

Jaye tilted her head back and looked up at the sky. Fortunately, it didn’t look like rain. It was one of those days when the sky was so blue it almost felt cold to look at.

The chilly wind pierced through her thin coat, but she didn’t put on the scarf Sunwoo had given her. Instead, she carefully folded it and placed it inside her eco-bag.

The fur scarf Sunwoo had given her was too extravagant for Jaye, both in appearance and price, for a university student to wear.

“Shin Jaye!”

Minjeong, who had short dyed hair, ran over and threw her arms around Jaye’s neck. She hugged her so tightly that Jaye’s body staggered backward.

“Let go of my neck. I can’t breathe!”

“You said we’d leave together!”

“I told you in advance that I had plans today, didn’t I?”

“More importantly, if you have a little time, come eat bun cha with me. A place that makes really good bun cha just opened nearby.”

At the unfamiliar name of the dish, Jaye’s eyes widened.

“Bun cha?”

Seeing her expression, Minjeong shook her head.

“It’s kind of like Vietnamese mixed noodles. Anyway, I’m going to eat it. Want to come?”

“It’s like Vietnamese-style mixed noodles?”

Suddenly, Jaye thought of the mixed noodles her mother used to make around this time of year. Noodles mixed with finely chopped, well-fermented kimchi and sesame oil were one of Jaye’s favorite foods.

“I had a feeling you wouldn’t know what bun cha was, but I didn’t think you really wouldn’t.”

Jaye pouted at her words.

“How would there be bun cha or pasta in the countryside?”

Jaye had lived with her mother in a secluded hermitage deep in the mountains until she was twenty-one.

Her mother regarded Yonghwa, the shaman who controlled the influential Madam Ji Okhyeon of Samjeong Group, as her spiritual mother. Yonghwa kept away from the secular world because she believed it would disturb her spiritual powers, so Jaye and her mother had also lived in seclusion in the mountains, following her.

Jaye hadn’t even been able to attend school after middle school. It wasn’t until she turned twenty-one that she was finally able to return to the outside world.

After coming to Seoul, she had tried to experience all kinds of things, yet there were still foods she had never tasted.

Even though this was her third year living in Seoul, there were still endless things in the world that she had never experienced.

“Jaye, are you actually having a proper married life? Do you ever go on dates with your husband?”

Minjeong’s question made Jaye’s heart sting.

The truth was, she had only been able to enter the outside world because of that marriage.

“Who pries into someone else’s private life like that?”

“I just think it’s strange when I think about it. You had pasta for the first time with me, and you went to a café for the first time with me, too. Does your husband just leave you to yourself?”

“Maybe you can be the person I do everything for the first time with!”

“Tell me honestly. You lied about being married because you didn’t want to come to drinking parties, didn’t you? What kind of married life is that? You haven’t even gone on one date with your husband. Or are you living with some old man?”

“What’s this about an old man?”

“Unless he’s an old man who doesn’t even have the strength to lift a spoon, there’s no way he’d just leave Shin Jaye alone like this.”

“What are you talking about? I’m having a perfectly normal married life and doing everything married people do!”

At the words doing everything, Minjeong squealed and cheered.

“What’s everything? Hurry up and tell me! Tell this single woman from the engineering building all about a married woman’s real-life experiences!”

Minjeong kept pestering her to talk about married life, but there was nothing more Jaye could tell her.

She hadn’t even learned her husband’s name or seen his face until the day they got married, and since they only encountered each other in the bedroom when they slept, there was practically nothing to share.

“Stop saying ridiculous things and hurry up and go eat your bun cha or whatever.”

“Why? Come with me, too. Huh? Please?”

Minjeong grabbed the strap of Jaye’s bag and practically dragged her toward the main gate.

“I have to go to the dermatologist today. It’s my laser treatment day.”

“Oh, right. You said you had a big scar on your back, didn’t you?”

Every summer vacation, Minjeong begged Jaye to go to the swimming pool or the beach with her, but Jaye always turned her down using her scar as an excuse.

“How horrible is that scar that you’ve never even been to a public bath? If we took off the clothes of Shin Jaye, the goddess of the engineering building, it’d be quite a sight.”

“Goddess, my ass.”

“That scar has kept Shin Jaye from ever doing anything rebellious. Maybe it’s a divine sign telling you to live a proper life.”

“Divine sign, my ass.”

Perhaps, as Minjeong said, having something horrible on her back really was some kind of divine sign.

The thing that had made Jaye’s back look so frightening was the work of the woman she called Grandma, Yonghwa.

“Let me see the scar just once. I’m supposedly your best friend. You don’t think I’d make fun of you over some silly scar, do you?”

“Forget it. Once I’m finished with the treatment, I’ll dramatically show it to you, okay?”

“Once Shin Jaye’s scar disappears, are you going to walk around with your back exposed every day?”

“That’s exactly why I’m getting the treatment. So what!”

Minjeong believed that Jaye had a large scar on her back, but in reality, it wasn’t a scar at all. It was a huge tattoo.

It was a talisman called the Samjae-Somyeolbu that Yonghwa had drawn on her.

The three calamities that a person was said to experience in nine-year cycles were called samjae. A three-headed, one-legged bird called a Samdu-Iljokma was said to peck away those three calamities with each of its three beaks.

That very Samdu-Iljokma was engraved across Jaye’s back.

“Didn’t your husband say anything when he saw your scar?”

“My husband?”

“Well, of course. You’re in your third year of marriage. He’s already seen everything, including the scar.”

“Of course. He’s already seen everything there is to see.”

The reason Jaye had the Samdu-Iljokma tattooed on her back and eventually married was because Sunwoo’s fortune was said to be so unfavorable that it would be difficult for him to get through his samjae.

Originally, they were supposed to write Sunwoo’s saju and place it inside a coffin, then perform a ritual resembling a funeral to deceive the spirits. But in Sunwoo’s case, his saju was said to possess such strong energy that a ritual alone wouldn’t be enough to deceive them.

For Sunwoo, who needed an especially powerful samjae ritual, Yonghwa created a highly effective talisman and sent it to Samjeong Group’s saju divination office.

Jaye was that talisman for Sunwoo.

Yonghwa advised that the more powerful a protective talisman was, the closer it needed to be kept and embraced.

Following that advice, the two had performed a simple ritual on the day they first met, placing a cup of Hap-hwanju between them.

Jaye had become a bride sold for money that way.

By the time they reached the main gate, Jaye waved goodbye to Minjeong.

“Enjoy your bun cha, and send me a picture, too. I’m curious what it looks like. See you tomorrow.”

“Okay. Good luck with your treatment, too.”

“Yeah. Bye.”

Just then, a bus heading toward Jongno was pulling into the bus stop.

Jaye ran to the stop and boarded the bus heading toward Jongno, where the university hospital was located.

They said that if you wanted to see the real Seoul, you had to see Jongno.

Standing inside the swaying bus while holding onto a handrail, Jaye took in the sight of all kinds of people through the window.

The Gwanghwamun area, where palaces from the Joseon era stood alongside modern and contemporary architecture, was crowded with people despite it being a weekday.

People who appeared to be foreigners stood in front of the palace walls, taking commemorative photographs.

The look of wonder in their eyes as they gazed at Seoul wasn’t much different from the way Jaye looked at the Gwanghwamun area through the bus window.

Jaye had entered the outside world under the condition that she live as the wife of a man she’d never met and maintain a marriage convincing enough to fool even ghosts.

She had now nearly completed the full three-year contract.

During those three years, she had studied relentlessly and traveled around the city whenever she had the opportunity, trying to see as much of the world as she could.

Even though she had lived so diligently, new things she didn’t know about kept appearing, just like the bun cha Minjeong had mentioned. Whenever that happened, Jaye felt a deep thirst for more.

—The next stop is Hanguk University Hospital, Hanguk University Hospital.

She wanted to see more. She wanted to learn more, experience more.

Jaye had so many things in this world that she wanted to see, hear, and experience.

—This stop is Hanguk University Hospital.

The bus stopped in front of the hospital. Jaye tapped her bus card against the reader and got off through the rear door.

Along the old palace wall beside Hanguk University Hospital, yellow-leaved ginkgo trees stood in neat rows.

The treatment Jaye received at Hanguk University Hospital was to remove the tattoo.

It was also Sunwoo who had first suggested that she get rid of the frightening tattoo on her back.

Sunwoo wasn’t a particularly affectionate husband, but he allowed Jaye to do whatever she needed.

Thanks to him, the Samjae talisman that had stained her back bright red was gradually fading under laser treatment.

After three or four more treatments, the Samjae talisman, Yonghwa’s most powerful protective talisman, would disappear completely from her back.

Around the time the Samjae talisman became even fainter, Jaye’s married life would also come to an end.

It was a ridiculous contract, but Jaye didn’t regret accepting it.

By agreeing to the marriage contract, she had been able to escape the secluded mountain shrine where she couldn’t even see another person, and with Sunwoo’s support, she had been able to attend university.

Thanks to that, she had been able to freely experience the world like this.

For Jaye, it was a contract worth accepting even if it came with the disadvantage of divorce.

Jaye stopped in front of the palace wall and captured the autumn leaves against the blue sky with her phone camera.

The slight urgency in the hand holding her phone might have come from the anxiety that she would be sent back to the mountains as soon as the contract ended.

“If I become independent later, I’d like to live somewhere around here…”

The last autumn leaves of the year fell onto the pavement in the autumn breeze.

The final season she would spend with her husband was beginning.

After admiring the late autumn foliage along the palace wall, Jaye turned toward the hospital in time for her appointment.

—Bzzzz, bzzzz.

Her phone began vibrating just as she entered the hospital’s main entrance.

She stopped walking and pressed the call button.

The moment she did, an urgent voice came from the other end.

—Are you Jung Sunwoo’s wife?

Although they were only playing the roles of husband and wife on the surface, this was the first time she had received a call from a stranger asking if she was his wife.

“Yes, I am. But…?”

Just as she was about to ask what was going on, the person on the other end delivered a thunderbolt of news.

—Jung Sunwoo has been involved in a traffic accident and is being transported to the hospital right now.

At that moment, a sudden gust of wind swept the fallen leaves from the street into one mass and sent them flying far away.