Chapter 141
Chapter 141
Back in my previous life, I always wished I had a little more time.
Every night, stuck working late without proper overtime pay, commuting to some far-off company, I still couldn't bring myself to quit; I had to make ends meet. The whole time, I was thinking: if only I could have some time to myself.
Even on weekends, when I finally could rest, I'd just collapse. Couldn't even think about games or movies. All I managed was to read a few pages of a novel before passing out.
There were times I dreamed of being born into a chaebol family, just playing around and living without ever worrying about money.
......Honestly, a part of me still feels that way. I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about it when I first woke up in Sara's body.
The kind of life where you throw money around every day and still more pours in than you can spend. The stuff I'd only ever seen rich people do online, collecting supercars, adopting rare animals, building an amusement park inside your house, all of it suddenly possible.
A fortune vast enough to fulfill every single "If I had that much money, I'd..." daydream I'd ever had.
And yet, possessing all of that, Sara wanted only one thing.
Love from her last remaining family.
Looking back now, the only reason I even had those dreams, or delusions, in the first place was because I already had, more or less, the things most people have. Friends I could meet up with now and then to talk about life, even if work kept us apart. Family to lean on when things were hard. Parents who cared about me.
I'm not trying to claim I had a life nobody could envy.
I'm just saying that I had what Sara never did.
Unlike my previous life, where I could never stick with any hobby or interest for long because I was always short on time, now time was the one thing I had in abundance.
Because unlike Sara, who used to share my vision and talk to me about this and that, I couldn't do any of those things.
All I could do was wander through Sara's heart and read her memories.
I'd glimpsed it before, but Sara's memories were a monotonous chain of ordinary days.
She stayed inside the mansion except when she went to school. No one to talk to. No one to play with. Naturally, no friends.
She wasn't even allowed to use the internet unless it was strictly necessary.
Though in truth, all of it, every bit of it, was something she could have done, if she'd only wanted to.
When I asked for a smartphone, Yang Hye-in handed one over. Whenever I stirred up chaos inside the mansion, the staff might have looked flustered, but none of them ever tried to stop me.
That's right. Sara could have done anything, if she'd only set her mind to it.
She'd just had her spirit broken so early that she never learned how.
......Sara was sitting on the bed, hugging her knees and staring vacantly ahead.
At a glance she looked almost like a still frame, but if you watched closely, you could see her shoulders rising and falling in a steady rhythm.
A single moment, plucked from somewhere in her repetitive life.
On impulse, I sat down beside her. I knew perfectly well she wouldn't answer even if I sat next to her or spoke to her. This place was only a replay of her memories, after all.
Because back then, there had been no one at Sara's side.
The sight of her sitting in her room, killing time without doing anything, was simply heartbreaking.
"Maybe if I'd come just a little sooner."
The silence pressing down on the room was so heavy that I muttered the thought aloud.
Naturally, the young Sara showed no reaction.
I moved closer and sat beside her. Maybe it was because the Sara in this memory was so young, but even compared to me, who shared her face, she seemed smaller.
"If I'd arrived when you were even younger, before you ended up like that..."
"...Ended up like what?"
"Ah."
Sara cut off my words.
I turned my head and found the young Sara looking up at me, her gaze steady. Her features weren't all that different from the current Sara, but maybe because she was still so young, her eyes looked a little wider and softer.
But what I saw inside those eyes wasn't childish innocence. It was something much deeper—wounds that wouldn't heal easily. The dark memories of her childhood.
"You're here?"
At my question,
"Yeah, I'm back!"
Sara smiled brightly.
Then she leaned her face against my shoulder.
Sara always liked it when I appeared a little bigger than her. She liked leaning on me like this, being held, looking up at me.
Even someone as oblivious as me could tell; that was the look a child gives a parent she never had.
Well, I'm still a bit too young to have a daughter like that, but anyway.
"Was school fun?"
"Yeah!"
We had this conversation almost every day.
The only times I could meet Sara were when she was asleep, but I didn't mind it all that much.
"So, at school..."
The Sara facing me launched eagerly into the story of her day. What they'd served for lunch, what had happened with Ha-neul and So-hee and Su-a, what Son A-reum had pointed out today, how many laps she'd run around the field, how much she'd practiced with the soccer ball.
All of it was stories about peaceful days inside an ordinary, repeating routine.
Nothing felt serious or urgent. I thought that was a relief.
Because I saw it as the process of Sara finding the life she wanted for herself.
Take away "Mother's love", the one goal that had defined her life, and she'd been nothing but an empty shell. A newborn who didn't know why she should live, or how. A frightened child who had never learned the things she was supposed to learn, never received the love she was supposed to receive, and had no idea how to form relationships with people.
That was probably why Sara had tried to hand her entire life over to me in the first place.
But even that Sara had changed a lot by now.
The Sara who once told me she was going to "sort out her own life" and then stepped out to the surface of consciousness—she no longer talked about leaving everything to me.
I didn't know when she might ask for my help again, but for the time being, she seemed to be doing well.
That was a good thing.
It is a little sad not being able to see Ha-neul, Su-a, and So-hee.
I do feel a bit wistful that I can't go running anymore, something I'd really come to enjoy. And it's a little lonely not being able to kick a soccer ball around, a thing I'd only just started to get the hang of.
But all of those things—hadn't they originally belonged to Sara in the first place?
"...Are you okay?"
At some point while I'd been lost in thought, Sara had stopped her excited chatter and was looking up at me with a worried expression.
Ah. My mind had wandered off somewhere else for a second.
"Huh? Of course I am."
"Really? You're not sad about not seeing your friends?"
"......."
At times like this, Sara could be unnervingly sharp.
Maybe it was because she'd almost never faced people directly, but her instincts for reading emotions were sometimes outright chilling.
Maybe it was a talent she'd developed over all those long years of never forming a single relationship, just watching, observing, as if from a distance.
"No, I'm fine."
If I said I wasn't sad, I'd be lying.
But like I said earlier—those were all things Sara should have had from the very beginning.
Hadn't the original game even included a Ye Sa-ra Route?
Not that I know the story of every route. In fact, the parts I do know aren't even from playing the game myself—I only watched someone else play it. And even then, only as a highlight reel of all the most entertaining moments.
Still, at this point, it's impossible not to see it.
In that game, the true heroine was probably Ye Sa-ra.
Branch into any of the male character routes, and Ye Sa-ra inevitably appears as the villainess. She doesn't stand out as much in the female character routes, but still—why does a Ye Sa-ra with such a painfully sad past suddenly emerge as a villain?
Maybe it happened because she'd given up on everything. Or maybe, in her own way, she'd used it as a kind of "method."
Because in every single route, Choi Na-kyung ends up giving up on Ye Sa-ra.
Yeah. Even if I'd never interfered, maybe Sara would have realized on her own that her relationship with Choi Na-kyung had become twisted, and maybe she would have fought to break it apart with her own hands.
An uninvited guest who barged into Sara's life and stuck her nose into everything, without ever meaning to.
That's where I stood now.
In the long run, the right thing is probably for me to leave this body.
This life is already over, after all. It's not going to help a teenager with her whole future ahead of her to have an extra male personality rattling around in her head.
"I'm okay."
But, for now, that's how I answered.
Because Sara was staring up at me with such an anxious expression.
Right here, right now, I'll stay sitting beside her and hold on to her resolve.
"Really?"
"Yeah."
And then, someday.
When the day comes that I'm no longer needed in Sara's life.
Like an imaginary friend from childhood, remembered for a while, then forgotten, I'll walk the path a wraith is meant to take.
I've made up my mind.