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# 2: Déjà Vu of the Goose
For a moment, Do-hyeon froze. He could not get a word out. Had he come to the wrong house? He was about to check the address again when he heard a familiar voice from inside.
“Honey, who is it?”
It was his wife's voice.
Do-hyeon stood there frozen like a stone. The voice of the woman he had spent twenty years with, the voice he had heard every night through the phone, was calling that unfamiliar man “Honey.”
A little while later, his wife walked out to the entrance. And then she saw Do-hyeon.
The color drained from her face.
“Darling?”
It was not happiness at seeing him.
It was shock. And fear. Her expression unmistakably belonged to someone who had been caught doing something that was never supposed to be discovered.
Then two more people came out of the house.
“Mom, what's going on?”
It was Jisoo.
His daughter, whom he was seeing for the first time in years. She had become a completely grown woman now, a sophisticated working professional.
And behind her came Junho.
A tall young man. He was even taller than Do-hyeon himself.
Tears welled up in Do-hyeon's eyes.
His children.
How much he had missed them.
With a trembling voice, he finally spoke.
“Jisoo. Junho. It's Dad.”
His grown children looked at Do-hyeon.
But there was no happiness in their eyes.
No surprise, no joy.
There was awkwardness, and something even more than that.
Discomfort.
Perhaps something closer to annoyance.
Jisoo quietly said, “Dad,” but she did not approach him.
She stood there with her arms crossed, looking at Do-hyeon as though he were an unwelcome guest.
The little daughter who had once been carried in her father's arms more than a decade ago was nowhere to be seen.
The grown daughter standing before him simply looked troubled by the situation.
And his son Junho avoided his gaze altogether.
Then, slowly, he went and stood beside the unfamiliar man.
No one had told him to.
He went there of his own accord, as though that man was the one who stood on his side.
At that moment, Do-hyeon's heart collapsed.
Because this was not a case of children being dragged along without understanding what was happening because they were too young.
Both of them were fully grown adults.
They were old enough to make their own judgments. Old enough to know what was right and wrong. Old enough to know who their father was, the man who had raised them.
And yet they had chosen, of their own free will, to stand beside that man.
Not their biological father, who had sacrificed everything for them for more than a decade, but the man who had lived beside them all those years.
As though he had realized what was happening, the man asked his wife something in English. She answered quietly.
Do-hyeon could not understand the English very well, but he could tell what was happening simply from the atmosphere.
“For now, come inside.”
His wife spoke.
They could not leave him standing in the street. The neighbors might see them.
Clutching the gift bag tightly in his hand, Do-hyeon crossed the threshold of the house he had paid for.
It was his first time entering it.
The house he had bought by taking on debt in Korea and using up his severance pay.
And yet, inside that house, he was the greatest stranger of all.
The living room was spacious and warm, and family photographs hung on the walls.
Do-hyeon unconsciously looked at them.
His wife was in the photographs. So was Jisoo, now an adult. There was also a confident-looking Junho.
And standing among them was that man, smiling brightly.
The four of them looked like a perfect family.
Do-hyeon was nowhere to be seen.
The man who had worked for more than a decade and sacrificed everything to support his family did not appear anywhere in those family photographs.
Do-hyeon could not even bring himself to sit on the sofa. He simply stood in the middle of the living room, feeling that the gift bag in his hand looked utterly pathetic.
His wife told the children to go into their rooms and asked the man to leave them alone for a while as well.
Only Do-hyeon and his wife remained in the living room.
After a long silence, his wife was the first to speak.
“Darling, I'm sorry.”
With those words alone, Do-hyeon understood everything.
“Who is that man?”
His wife lowered her head.
Then she slowly confessed everything.
She had been lonely in a foreign land. While raising the children, she had needed someone she could rely on.
Then she came to know that man and began leaning on him.
It had already been several years.
Several years.
Those words made Do-hyeon's mind go blank.
Without him knowing, this family had already been living in a different form for a very long time.
“You were just too far away.”
His wife spoke.
It did not sound like an excuse. It sounded as though she truly felt that way.
“A husband whose voice I only heard over the phone, and someone who was beside me every day and held my hand. I'm a person too. I was lonely.”
Do-hyeon was so dumbfounded that he could not say a word.
He wanted to get angry.
He wanted to scream, “Do you know how I lived? Do you know how much I sacrificed for all of you?”
But he could not open his mouth.
The reality before his eyes was too overwhelming and absurd. He could not even summon enough anger to speak.
“What about the kids?”
Do-hyeon barely managed to force the words out.
“They're grown up now. What do they think of me? Of their father?”
His wife was silent for a moment.
Then she quietly said,
“The kids... they think of him as their father too. Jisoo even discussed her marriage plans with him this time. And he's been helping with Junho's tuition too. He has been paying for all of it.”
Do-hyeon felt as though he could no longer breathe.
Tuition.
Then where had all the money he had been sending them gone?
But more than that, the fact that his daughter had discussed the biggest matter of her life, her marriage, with that man rather than her biological father...
And the fact that his children had accepted that man as their “father”...
What cut deepest into Do-hyeon's heart was knowing that this was not something done by children who had followed along without understanding.
These were deliberate choices made by grown adults.
His own children had abandoned their biological father.
The father who had sacrificed everything for them.
“So... what the hell do you want me to do?”
His wife raised her head.
“Let's end this, darling.”
Divorce.
Twenty years of marriage was contained in those words.
“I don't even want alimony.”
His wife carefully continued.
“I just want us to settle everything cleanly like this. Between the two of us. On good terms.”
On good terms.
That word felt like a blade to Do-hyeon.
What was supposed to be good about this?
He was the only one who had lost everything.
He was the only one left carrying all the debt.
That night, Do-hyeon could not sleep in that house.
He went to the cheapest motel nearby and stared at the wall all night.
He did not even open the gift bag he had brought.
The Korean snacks and ramen he had intended to give his grown children remained untouched inside the bag.
The next day, Do-hyeon did not return to that house.
He did not have the nerve or the courage to do so.
And on the flight back to Korea, Do-hyeon finally cried.
Silently, for the entire fourteen hours.
His wife was one problem, but his children were not children anymore either.
If they had been, it would have been easier.
He could have waited for time to pass and for the misunderstandings to be cleared up.
But that was not the case.
His grown children were old enough to understand everything.
They had erased their father with their own hands.
And that fact weighed more heavily on Do-hyeon's heart than the debt he had accumulated over more than a decade.
After returning to Korea, Do-hyeon desperately sought out a lawyer he knew.
He asked if there was any way he could at least reclaim the house he had bought with the money he had sent.
But the lawyer shook his head.
“Manager, the house is in America, and it's registered in your wife's name. Under American law, it's her property. There's nothing we can do from Korea. If you really want to pursue it, you'd have to file a lawsuit locally in America. But the legal fees alone would be tens of millions of won. And it could take years, with no guarantee that you'll win. Given your current circumstances...”
Do-hyeon fell silent.
Tens of millions of won.
Years.
He had neither.
No, he could not even pay the interest due that month. If he had money to start a lawsuit in the first place, he would never have ended up in this situation.
And so that house...
The house he had spent more than a decade of his life working himself to the bone to buy...
Had forever become someone else's property.
The next morning.
At the company.
Do-hyeon quietly sat at his desk, making the title of department manager seem meaningless.
He had once led a team, but these days, he was being excluded from almost all the important work.
Important assignments had been handed over to his juniors, and his position was gradually becoming a place where loneliness settled in.
Then, in the morning, he was summoned by the human resources department.
When he entered the conference room, the head of HR handed him a sheet of paper.
The man could barely make eye contact with Do-hyeon.
“Manager. The issue has come up again from above. They're accepting applications for voluntary retirement this time, so I thought you might want to seriously consider it.”
Voluntary retirement.
It was called voluntary retirement, but what it really meant was that they wanted him to leave.
And this was already the third time.
“If I leave at my age...”
“With your years of service, the compensation would be fairly substantial. It would be better to make a decision while the terms are still favorable.”
Do-hyeon could not bring himself to take the paper.
They did not know.
They did not know what this company meant to Do-hyeon.
They did not know that the salary deposited into his account every month was the only lifeline barely keeping the interest on his mountain of debt at bay.
If that lifeline were cut, he would truly be finished.
Becoming a delinquent debtor.
Bankruptcy.
And after that, there were things he really did not want to imagine.
A company telling him to leave.
Debts he had to repay.
A family that had abandoned him.
There was nowhere in the world for him to plant his feet.
“I'll think about it.”
Do-hyeon barely managed to say those words before leaving the conference room.
He thought he could hear the HR manager sighing behind him.
He could not remember how he got through work that entire day.
When night came, Do-hyeon returned to his studio apartment.
As he opened the old iron door, a familiar smell greeted him.
The smell of mold and old flooring.
When he flipped on the fluorescent light, the five-pyeong room appeared cold and bare.
The only furniture was a folding dining table and a clothes rack.
Do-hyeon took off his suit jacket, hung it on the rack, and, as always, filled the pot with water.
He turned on the portable gas stove and tore open a packet of ramen.
He added the seasoning, put in the noodles, and stirred them around with his chopsticks.
But suddenly, he felt something strange.
All of this was too familiar.
Of course, it was familiar because he did this every day.
Every night, he boiled ramen in this room, in this pot.
But the familiarity he felt at that moment was not that kind.
It was not simply the familiarity that came from repetition.
It felt as though he had seen this scene before.
No, not just this scene.
It felt as though he had experienced this exact moment once before.
The shape of the noodles as they boiled.
The distant sound of a dog barking outside the window.
The exact moment when the fluorescent light flickered once.
The angle at which the shadow of the divorce papers' envelope fell across the dining table.
All of it overlapped with such vividness that it felt as though he had already experienced it once.
Déjà vu.
Do-hyeon stopped his chopsticks and quietly dwelled on the feeling.
Again, this.
He let out a small sigh.
It was a feeling that had followed him throughout his entire life.
No, it had been like this since he was young.
He would walk down an alley he had never visited before, yet feel as though he had been there.
He would meet someone for the first time and somehow feel as though he already knew what they were going to say next.
Whenever certain moments happened, he would get the feeling, “I've experienced this exact same thing before.”
It simply happened to him much more frequently than it did to other people.
Once, he had told a friend about it at school and had been treated like a strange kid.
After that, he kept his mouth shut.
When he grew up, he heard somewhere that déjà vu was an illusion caused by the brain.
A common phenomenon that everyone experienced.
So Do-hyeon had simply accepted it.
He was just someone who experienced it a little more often than other people.
And so, even today, he did not think much of it.
There it is again, he thought.
That feeling had come once more.