Chapter 180
Chapter 180
"And so... yes. That is why I could not leave you as you were, young lady."
That was what Yang Hye-in said.
"Seeing you smile, I could not leave myself as I was—thinking that you were simply all right now."
So she had resolved to offer whatever help Sara might be able to accept.
...
Sara said nothing.
Well, I didn't know what to say either. I was just listening.
The person Yang Hye-in had ignored wasn't me; it was Sara. And whether this matter was truly finished depended on how Sara took it.
Sara might have cut her interest and sorted out her feelings, but Yang Hye-in's guilt would likely remain.
Sara had no particular reason to worry about Yang Hye-in. Forgiving a wrong belongs to the one who suffered the injustice, not to some third party watching from the sidelines.
"Was that why you didn't want to take your leave?"
"...No."
Well, Yang Hye-in had realized her fault only after I woke up in Sara's body. If that had been her reason for refusing to leave my side, it wouldn't explain why she'd never visited her hometown before then.
"I... hated it here."
Hm.
There were probably plenty of reasons to hate it. But since I'd lived in the city my whole life, I couldn't precisely guess what someone who'd spent her childhood here would feel. A city person might balk at country living because they can't let go of urban convenience, and the reasons for leaving the countryside were just as numerous.
My own parents had actually said they wanted to leave the complicated city and go back to the countryside, which made it even harder to predict.
"May I ask why?"
Yang Hye-in seemed to nod.
"...Because being here reminded me of my parents."
The reason was far simpler than I'd imagined.
"Did your parents pass away when you were young?"
"Yes."
She paused.
"It was a forest fire."
"Ah..."
No more words came.
"My mother was carrying me out while I was asleep, and my father was carrying my grandmother out... and they were trying to salvage even a little of our poor household's belongings."
"...."
"That's why I hated it here. Even though the house was rebuilt, the place is still the same."
...Hm.
That was certainly the kind of memory that would leave a trauma.
"...."
Internally, I clutched my head.
I knew I shouldn't have come!
Ah, of course, I do think it was good that Yang Hye-in and her grandmother got to meet again after so long. The grandmother was a good person, too.
The problem was that I'd gone blundering in, knowing nothing, and cheerfully trampled all over someone else's trauma.
"...."
"...."
An awkward silence.
...I should've just not asked.
*
Thanks to that, I couldn't sleep properly all night.
I kicked the blankets with my feet, tossed and turned for a long time before I finally fell asleep, and then I saw Sara in my dream, patting my shoulder and saying,
"Hey, don't dwell on it too much. Something this embarrassing will all be forgotten once enough time passes."
And I opened my eyes again.
...
Hm. I feel like if there were ever a moment, I could pull Sara out right now.
Don't even dream about it.
...Sara doesn't want things to get any more uncomfortable either, apparently.
"Sara, are you okay...?"
The next morning, I got up with bloodshot eyes, and Ha-neul asked me that. I was that exhausted.
"Oh dear, what'll we do? I think the change in sleeping arrangements must have been hard on her."
The grandmother was so genuinely distressed that I felt truly, deeply uncomfortable. The thought that I'd come to this home, a home with such painful history, purely on my own rash impulse... I felt so sorry.
"...."
Yang Hye-in stayed silent as ever.
Well... still, I hadn't entirely failed to sleep, so it wasn't as if I'd fall back asleep and not wake for hours.
The grandmother set the breakfast table so lavishly the legs might have buckled.
All kinds of seasoned vegetables and meat dishes. To be honest, I suspected at least a few of them had been made specially for us.
"This is delicious!"
"It really is..."
So-hee and Su-a reacted that way when they tasted the grandmother's cooking.
It was, admittedly, delicious.
Ever since coming to this side, I'd been eating steaks and bread practically every day. It wasn't as if I'd eaten no Korean food at all, but most of the meals from the mansion had been like that.
That breakfast table, lightly seasoned and a little understated, was good enough to make me think it was fine to have home cooking like this sometimes.
...No, wait.
In the middle of that meal, I remembered an important fact I'd been forgetting all this time.
Come to think of it—hadn't I fired all the staff at the mansion?
The only thing I'd outsourced was the mansion's security. There were no servants to prepare food. None.
"...."
I glanced over at Yang Hye-in, sitting a little away from me and quietly moving her chopsticks. Our eyes didn't meet.
...Don't tell me Yang Hye-in has been handling all the cooking at the mansion by herself ever since then.
Not that it was impossible. One person could manage it if they set their mind to it. Especially since we ate lunch at school.
But that didn't make it easy. Cooking hadn't been Yang Hye-in's job to begin with, and she had to handle all the waste, all the dishwashing, all the kitchen cleaning—
"Sara?"
While I was sitting there with my mouth hanging open, Ha-neul called out to me.
"Uh, yeah?"
"What are you thinking about so hard?...Is something bothering you?"
Ha-neul glanced around, then asked in a small whisper.
Something bothering me... well, something had just come up.
A very big something.
...Right. Yang Hye-in had absolutely refused to take her leave. We'd argued about it, with her giving all sorts of reasons... but this was probably the real one.
Because I'd fired every other servant.
Because if even Yang Hye-in were gone, the mansion truly wouldn't function.
No, of course, we wouldn't starve just because she wasn't there and we had to handle our own meals. We could get by with disposable food, or boil some ramyeon, and honestly, we weren't so short on money that we couldn't afford to eat.
But... Yang Hye-in probably hadn't wanted that.
Maybe because she hated to see me making do with food like that.
Maybe because she thought I wouldn't want the meals I'd been eating to change.
Maybe, just out of guilt. Thinking she had to serve in whatever way she could.
"...."
I shifted my gaze toward Yang Hye-in again.
She was still picking at her food.
Our eyes still didn't meet, but I had the sense that she was deliberately avoiding my gaze.
*
"So-hee, a moment."
"Huh?"
During the day, when the grandmother stepped out for a bit, I called So-hee aside. When I waved off the others and took only So-hee with me, she actually looked a little uneasy.
...Well, we'd been moving as a group of four this whole time.
"What is it? What's going on?"
"Well..."
I hesitated, then asked.
"Is Yang Hye-in the one doing our breakfasts and dinners?"
"Ah..."
So-hee looked a little awkward, hesitated, then nodded.
"Ah, yeah. She is. I help out here and there, but mostly."
I pressed my hand to my forehead.
"Ah, um, sorry..."
Seeing So-hee hang her head, I waved my hand.
"No, it's just that we were short on staff."
The mansion was huge to begin with. Thinking I could get by with only two servants was the abnormal part.
No, more than that—it'd be more accurate to say I simply hadn't thought at all.
"She told me not to tell you..."
"...."
I dragged the hand down my forehead and rubbed my face.
"...Should we just move...?"
But moving would be its own problem.
Mansions big enough to need staff didn't come on the market that often, and you couldn't just buy and sell them easily.
There were probably houses in my name, but even if we moved to one, I wasn't sure it would be the kind of place that needed staff. So-hee, Su-a, and Ha-neul—you could say they were just staying over. But I didn't get the sense Yang Hye-in and I were on those kinds of terms.
And if I fired even Yang Hye-in...
How to put it.
I felt like something bad would happen.
There was no basis for it, but my instincts were telling me so.
And yet, leaving things as they were also felt like something would blow up. The Yang Hye-in I'd seen yesterday seemed a little more stable, but from what I'd learned, she wasn't in a normal state right now.
Standing in front of a restless So-hee, I spent a long time being restless myself.
Should I call the current situation fortunate?
I was glad to have learned about Yang Hye-in's condition, but at the same time, I regretted coming here...
Honestly, it'd be a lot easier to deal with someone who was just plain rotten.