Let's Bury It
Ji Hye-in's eyes were slightly vacant. She couldn't quite meet her husband Yoo Kang-soo's gaze, instead fixing her stare somewhere around his throat, and in that dazed stillness she spoke, her voice quiet and even.
"………"
Yoo Kang-soo said nothing for a moment. He simply sat there, his expression blank.
In more than twenty years as a military police investigator, he had learned one thing. There wasn't a grave in this world without an excuse, and there wasn't a single bastard who'd committed a crime without pinning it on someone else.
A faint smile touched his mouth, and he spoke.
"You know... would you rather I didn't ask you anything at all?"
Hye-in, her head still slightly bowed, gave a small nod.
"So it wasn't just Yeom Seong-bong. That's why you're like this."
"Yeom Seong-bong's already out in the open. The sub life, Ko Dong-seok — it's not even those things. You've got a lot you want to hide from me, don't you."
"………."
At her husband's words, Ji Hye-in sat like she'd been struck dumb, unable to open her mouth.
"Huuuuh...."
Yoo Kang-soo let out a sigh so long that, with only a little exaggeration, it could have caved in the floor.
"Yeah. I shouldn't do this. It'll ruin the soju."
He knocked back a shot, poured another, and downed that one too — two in a row. Then he picked up a couple of slices of fatty pork head meat, dragged them through the salted shrimp, and started chewing, slow and methodical.
When he'd finished the side dish, his voice came out slightly deflated, as if the fight had gone out of him.
"Our Hye-in used to be so innocent. Twenty-two years old and she'd never even kissed a man. She met me at twenty-two, had her first kiss with me. She wouldn't go to a motel, so I got her wasted and took her anyway. Her hymen tore. Blood all over the sheets and the blanket. She bawled her eyes out. Feels like it was just yesterday. Met at twenty-two, married at twenty-three — that feels like yesterday too. And now the boy's already eighteen. Time really flies."
"But you know... I thought even if every other woman in the world cheated, you never would. You were so timid. Couldn't even tell people you didn't like something. Introverted. I was sure you'd never do it. I was a fucking idiot. I've been living with a wife I didn't even know."
"Honestly, I still want to believe it isn't true. But I saw the video. What evidence could be more certain than that. It's a done deal now. It's really, truly certain."
"I'm sorry. If I could ask for one thing... if we bury it all here, I'll look only at you for the rest of my life. I mean it."
"Okay. Then let me ask just one last thing."
"You said it was two years with that bastard Yeom Seong-bong. Besides him — whatever it was, you fooling around with other bums besides me — that was after I got out of the service, right? So it hasn't been more than four years? Because when I was still in the military, no matter how I turn it over, you wouldn't have had time to cheat."
"Th-that's right. About... three years. I'm sorry."
"Alright. Thanks for at least being honest about that. So Yeom Seong-bong was telling the truth. There was someone else besides him. A woman... really making those looks count, huh. You were so gentle I thought our Hye-in would die before she'd ever do something like that. Turns out you're living up to that pretty face."
"When I think about it, after I joined the insurance company I was away from home constantly. Three or four provincial trips a month at the very least. Plenty of nights I couldn't come home. Some months I slept out half the time. I've got nothing to say either."
"I worked several times harder than anyone else just to survive. So of course you had all the time in the world."
"I'm sorry."
Yoo Kang-soo swallowed the bitter soju, then spoke.
It was a sports-related incorporated association. Ji Hye-in was the only full-time employee in the office. But with dozens of directors and a membership in the hundreds, it was a large organization, and the phones rang constantly.
The office had plenty of desks, yet she was the only one who actually worked there day in and day out. Now and then the older men who held the association's titles and figurehead positions would drop by, linger at their desks for a little while, and leave. Almost none of them ever stayed for a full day's work.
The phone rang. As she always did, Hye-in answered in a warm, professional voice.
The moment she finished speaking, Ji Hye-in hung up on him. It was a far cry from how she usually conducted herself.
Yeom Seong-bong had vanished without a trace — as if the earth itself had swallowed him. He couldn't be reached. His phone signal had gone completely dead.
Yoo Kang-soo found it hard to make sense of. But as a former military police investigator, he knew all too well about people who erased themselves from the world overnight. When someone was truly desperate, they shut off their phone and disappeared into the deep countryside. And he knew, realistically, that finding them was next to impossible.
Yeom Seong-bong was gone. Kang-soo was beginning to think he had no choice but to accept it.
The only way he was watching his wife was a GPS tracker he'd mounted on the compact car she drove. That was it. And then, one day, the car that had followed the same pattern almost every day — home to the office, office to home — started going somewhere else.
Kang-soo found it strange that Ji Hye-in was heading to a third location, neither the house nor the office, and he watched closely. What he didn't expect was where her compact car arrived: a spot in the heart of downtown. The destination itself left him more stunned than anything else.
A sixty-six-year-old grandmother.
No — sixty-six was far too young now to be called a grandmother. In an era when living past sixty had become the norm for nearly everyone, sixty-six had become a young age. The world had changed a great deal from how it used to be.
A kind impression. A gentle-looking face.
But that woman had told an enormous lie.