Chapter 65
Chapter 65
The three girls sitting in the café couldn't say a word.
Yu Ha-neul, Shin So-hee, and Lee Su-a had each believed they were doing their best for Sara in their own way. Not that any of them had taken decisive action. None of the three had ever crossed the line of friendship with Sara, after all. Whether they admitted it to themselves or not, deep down they all wanted to.
Some of the ways they kept glued to Sara's side, they'd genuinely done because they liked it. But they'd justified those actions with the excuse that Sara had asked for it. Even when they stepped right up to the line, or maybe put one foot past it, Sara never really complained.
Sure, she looked a little uncomfortable sometimes, or gave them a questioning glance, but—
—What had I said to her at times like that?
Yu Ha-neul thought about it.
I'd glossed over it and made excuses. I'd warped the distance of being "friends", something Sara didn't fully understand, to suit myself. I'd clung to her as if competing with the others and let my own desires run loose.
It had all been so incredibly careless.
She knew about Sara's situation, of course. No, she'd thought she was aware of it.
The princess in a cage, shut away from the world for so long. The princess who finally opened the cage door and found the courage to step outside at last.
Yes, she'd understood it in her head.
But the emotion was far too shallow for her to claim she'd felt it in her heart.
Simply because she liked it. Because it was half a game.
Because holding Sara close felt good. Because Sara was pretty right in front of her, and her flustered reactions were cute. Because every time Sara narrowed those eyes and smiled, she seemed so very much like A-reum.
But while she'd been enjoying school life that way, what had Sara been thinking?
Sara hadn't simply resolved to step out into the world.
Every single thing Sara did was already a desperate struggle.
Only after reading this despairing letter Sara had left behind could Yu Ha-neul begin to glimpse the true feelings buried beneath her own sense of enjoyment.
Sara, who had never been able to hold a proper conversation with people—how much courage must it have taken for her to reach out and talk?
It wasn't just talking, either.
The cheerful image Sara had shown at school—each step she took had been her staking everything and barely holding herself together.
Which meant that, from Sara's perspective, none of those actions had been a game.
"......."
Even though she was bundled up warmly, sitting in a café with the heat running, Yu Ha-neul felt a chill.
"Sara......."
Lee Su-a murmured the name. She was probably thinking along the same lines. She, too, must have gained some sense of how harsh Sara's life had been until now, and how desperately she'd wanted to escape it.
The feelings of someone who had been willing to throw her life away to run—this letter, no, this farewell note, had captured them in full.
"......."
Shin So-hee was glaring at the letter on the table, her eyes wide. Her slender jaw was set rigidly, as if she'd been clenching her teeth.
Yang Hye-in, who had been quietly watching the three of them react, reached into her coat once more.
She pulled out a white plastic pill bottle. A rattling sound came from inside.
Yang Hye-in placed the bottle carefully on the table.
Even without reading the label, Yu Ha-neul could roughly guess what kind of pills were inside.
The sleeping pills the farewell note had mentioned, the ones acquired through illegal channels. The note said they contained an ingredient no longer prescribed.
"It's a sleeping medication containing barbital. Because of the risk of misuse, it is no longer prescribed as a sleep aid today."
Yang Hye-in paused, as if debating whether she should even say this. But then, as if she'd steeled herself, she spoke with a hardened expression.
"......If you increase the dosage, it is a drug that can also be used for euthanasia."
"......Did Sara take these?"
Yang Hye-in shook her head.
"I can't be certain."
She paused again, then added:
"However, I believe she did."
Yang Hye-in picked up the pill bottle from the table and opened the lid. The bottle was about half full. That must have been the source of the rattling sound earlier.
"But it's still a sleeping pill, no matter what, right? She might have just used it for insomnia......."
"......."
Yang Hye-in considered Yu Ha-neul's words for a moment, then shook her head.
"......There's a day I suspect."
Yang Hye-in told them about the time Sara had screamed and thrashed in agony. When they took her to the hospital, her back was covered in dark purple bruises, so severe that both the doctor and the police assumed the marks were from child abuse.
......Looking back on it now, they were right.
"But still, taking sleeping pills wouldn't leave bruises on her back......."
"Perhaps she was in despair because she had failed."
Though her status no longer permitted her to be called a maid, Yang Hye-in still used formal speech when she talked about Sara, despite the considerable age gap between them.
"The final hope she'd been clinging to was shattered into pieces...... When she opened her eyes in that bed, how much pain must she have felt?"
Yang Hye-in didn't actually know what effect barbital had on the body. She'd had no choice but to believe the doctor, who'd said there was nothing seriously wrong with Sara.
Perhaps she'd already taken the pills before that day. It was the day she was supposed to meet Yoon Da-ho, after all. Sara had been horribly uncomfortable around Yoon Da-ho. And Yoon Da-ho hadn't bothered to hide his dislike for Sara, either, enough to make you wonder why the chairwoman had arranged the engagement in the first place.
So maybe she'd taken the pills in anticipation of that meeting. But the attempt had failed, and in the end, she'd met him.
Yes, Sara had changed somehow from that point onward. Perhaps she had already let go of everything that day. Perhaps everything Sara was doing now was a consequence of that.
Despairing at having failed to die, abusing herself until her back was raw with bruises, screaming and twisting her whole body in the middle of the night.
That was all Yang Hye-in could think.
......Even after three years at her side, Yang Hye-in hadn't known anything about Sara.
"......."
A brief silence.
It was a terribly suffocating silence. A silence that seemed to rebuke Yang Hye-in for her past indifference, and at the same time seemed to scold the three girls for never trying to think more deeply. One thing was certain: nobody in this room was blaming them. They were blaming themselves. Whether or not it was truly their fault in anyone else's eyes, they believed they had to blame themselves.
"Why are you showing us this letter?"
Yu Ha-neul, who had been staring fixedly at the open pill bottle, spoke. A faint trace of anger edged her voice. Her heart felt troubled, as if she'd been forced to hear something she really hadn't wanted to hear.
Anger at the people who had left Sara alone for so long, until she'd broken down that way. Disappointment in herself for turning away from truths she could have learned at any moment if she'd only tried a little harder to look. Resentment toward Yang Hye-in, who had deliberately chosen this exact moment to tell them all of this.
Then again, the very thought that she could just keep having fun with Sara without knowing any of this—that had already been an incredibly selfish thought.
In that case, how was she any different from Chairwoman Choi Na-kyung?
How was she any different from that woman, who had kept her adoptive daughter locked away in the mansion because she wanted to possess her, slowly breaking her down until she knew no one but her? And how was she herself any different, taking advantage of the heart of a girl who'd been kept so pure by that warped environment, just to satisfy her own desires?
Only then did chills run down her spine, and Yu Ha-neul felt a fresh wave of disappointment in herself.
"......I can no longer remain at the young lady's side."
Yang Hye-in's voice was heavy.
"Being dismissed from that place also means I am barred from any further access. Even if I tried to approach the young lady by some other means, the Yujin Group would most likely intervene to stop me."
Yu Ha-neul, no, all three girls sitting across from Yang Hye-in, dimly grasped, from those words, the intention behind her reaching out to them.
She wanted to ask them to look after Sara in her place, since she could no longer be beside her.
The first to react was Shin So-hee.
"Aren't we in the same boat?"
Shin So-hee, who had kept her mouth shut for a long while, asked fiercely.
"What do you think we are, exactly? What kind of power do we have that makes us any better than you?"
Maybe it wasn't simply about a difference in power. Shin So-hee was clearly feeling the same thing Yu Ha-neul had just felt about herself.
"If people from way up high decide to block us, what exactly can we do about it?"
She bared her teeth fiercely, but it was more like a small, frightened dog barking aggressively at a person. No, not even barking at a person. Barking at a ghost. Yang Hye-in was no longer one of those people, after all.
"......I can no longer reach the young lady. If the Yujin Group were to seriously try to block all of you, the same would hold true."
Yang Hye-in said it with her head bowed, as if she felt guilty. But then she lifted her head again.
A single resolution was written on her face.
"However, there is one significant difference between me and all of you."
"What is it?"
At Yu Ha-neul's question, Yang Hye-in drew a soft breath and answered.
"The young lady will not try to come to me. But the opposite is true for you. Because the young lady will willingly come to you first."
"......."
"And because of that, if you do not give up on the young lady, then perhaps the young lady, too, will no longer...... give up on anything."
"......."
Once again, silence fell over the table.
"......That is what I wanted to say to all of you."
Yang Hye-in bowed her head respectfully toward the three of them once more.
"......."
The three of them looked at one another wordlessly for a moment.
No one asked, "What do you want to do?" or anything like that.
There was no need to ask in the first place.
Because the truth was, all three of them, even before they'd seen the letter, even before they'd seen Sara meeting the chairwoman—
No, maybe from the very first moment they met Sara, they'd never had any intention of giving up on her anyway.
All this letter had done was make them rethink and reflect on everything that had happened until now.
......I just wanted to live an ordinary life, like everyone else, even if only for a single week of my short existence......
It had already been a week since they first met Sara. If that week, the happy, joyful time they'd spent together, was what Sara had meant. And if she tried to give up on life once more—
......In truth, even without weighing any of that, their answer had been decided from the start.
They had no intention of letting Sara go.
The point was, from the very beginning, before they'd ever seen any of this, they hadn't had the slightest thought of giving up.