Overnight, Everything Broke
I like to think my life hadn't been all that bad.
I lost my parents young, but I still made it through high school in one piece, more or less. Senior year I got careless and got a girl pregnant, and yet even after the baby came, luck—or something like it—held. With help from my father-in-law's house, I managed to raise her properly.
I had nothing you could call credentials, but a reasonably decent company paid me to show up and do the work. We never lived well, exactly, and we never lived so poorly that poverty had us by the throat. I raised my daughter. The house stayed peaceful enough.
Every day of bringing up a child wore me out. Still, whenever I looked at my only daughter's face, the same thought came back: I was glad—truly glad—that I'd gotten to raise her. In my own way, I believed I was living a life that wasn't so bad.
Then, overnight, that life came apart.
It started with something trivial. I happened to catch my wife talking with an old friend, and there I ran straight into a truth I could not make myself believe. Taking that as my lead—telling myself it couldn't be, it couldn't possibly be—I ordered a paternity test for my daughter.
The result was astonishing. My daughter was not my daughter.
Which meant my wife had not stopped at a single night with me in our senior year of high school. She had spent a night with another man as well, and the girl I called mine had been born from his genes, not from mine.
Struck dumb by a truth I still couldn't accept, I demanded an explanation. The moment I put the papers in her hands, she dropped her head without a word and started to cry. I was so far past disbelief that I said it anyway.
"Since when have you been lying to me."
"I never meant to lie..."
"Then what. Who's Jia's real father. And why the hell did you make her call me Dad."
"He was just... some upperclassman I didn't even care about. I don't really remember the details. I was in high school. I drank because I was young and stupid, and when I came to, we'd already had sex."
"So Jia is that bastard's daughter?"
"I guess so..."
"Don't give me I guess so. Say it properly."
"I don't know... I didn't know either, I'm telling you. Sleeping with that guy was only a little while before I slept with you. Of course when I got pregnant I thought it was your sperm, honey."
"When did you find out."
"When Jia started elementary school."
"Fuck. You're really something, Jung Yuna. You knew that, and you still managed to lie to me for fifteen years?"
"Honey... I'm sorry. I am sorry. But don't swear. What if Jia hears?"
"Shut up. You're bringing up Jia's name in the middle of this?"
"She's still your daughter, no matter what. You know how much Jia loves you. If you tell her now that you're not her dad, how do you think she's going to react?"
With the most shameless face in the world, my wife was dragging Jia into it. Rage climbed all the way to the top of my head. My skull felt like it was about to split, and I dropped my gaze. If I didn't get hold of myself, I was going to hit her. I could feel it.
"Hey. Jung Yuna."
"Yeah... honey."
"I loved you. Sincerely. From the moment I heard you'd gotten pregnant back in high school, straight through to now—not a single second missing."
"Me too, honey..."
"But fuck—even you can see how serious this is, can't you?"
"I... I didn't know what to do, okay? Rather than coming clean now, I just wanted to live the rest of my life lying, all by myself. Living a lie toward you for the rest of my life... you have no idea how sorry I've been."
"Then you should have told me honestly from the start."
"If I had, you would've divorced me, cut ties, and left ages ago."
"I sold my entire life to you and Jia and lived like that. And now you think being this shameless is fine?"
"Sold? Isn't that too much...? You've lived happily too, honey. And you know it. I grew up loving you so much. If I just kept the secret by myself, you and Jia and I could all have stayed happy. How was I supposed to just come out and say it? If I had, none of the three of us would have made it this far the way we have..."
It was a truly rotten feeling. Rage had packed itself to the crown of my head, and still I couldn't look her in the face and deny it. Because the truth was, the moment I learned Jia was someone else's child, I would have abandoned my wife and my daughter and divorced them—and from then on, their lives, and mine, would not have been particularly happy either.
I thought back over the eighteen years I had spent with my wife. So much had happened. We had married and started living together before either of us was fully grown, and after that we had endured every kind of hardship side by side, all the way to the edge of forty. I had lived this life with a daughter I would not have grudged everything I owned. And then, truly overnight, all of it was ruined.
I squeezed my eyes shut and held out the papers I had prepared in advance. The moment she saw them, her eyes went wide.
"Honey... no, wait."
"You're really going to do this...? At least until Jia gets into college. Let's keep living together that long, honey... please?"
"If you were me, could you? From now on, every time I'm with Jia she won't even look like my daughter. We stay like this and Jia breaks, I break, you break. All of us. No way around it."
"Even so... please? I'm begging you, honey... I'm really sorry... I am sorry, so..."
If only she had been shameless through and through. A real piece of shit. If she had worn a dozen faces and laughed at me cold, mocked me, then I could have walked out of that house without a single regret.
She had done something this unthinkable, this garbage—and still the woman in front of me was, beyond any doubt, the same person as my wife, Jung Yuna. A little foolish, maybe, but deep in her feelings. She got into trouble often enough, and yet somehow she was a woman I couldn't bring myself to hate. Back in the newlywed days, when I was hopelessly lovestruck, that went without saying, and even now I might have found that side of her tiresome, but I didn't dislike it. Which was exactly why this moment felt so goddamn awful.
"I'm stepping out. When you've sorted your head out, tell me. I'll be packing quietly. When you're done, call me back in."
She had both hands pressed to her face, crying. I looked at her with a spite I didn't even need, and then, blank-faced, I left the room.
It was a truly rotten feeling.
When I came out to pack in silence, what I found was Jia—wide awake.
As if she had heard every word. She was looking at my face with the saddest expression in the world, and something dropped in my chest with a heavy thud.
What had I just said in front of my daughter? Talking with my wife about whether or not to stamp the papers. Mixing curses into lines you would only hear in a cheap drama. I didn't want to know—not even a little—how my daughter, a girl just stepping into her second year of high school, had taken every single one of those words.
"Jia."
"Did you and Mom fight, Dad?"
"Yeah... we just didn't see eye to eye for a minute. It wasn't really a fight. We just talked. I'm sorry, Jia. Did I wake you?"
Looking at that innocent face, I felt the fire that had been burning in my head—the one that had wanted both daughter and wife gone—cool off in a single breath. Please. Let her not have understood a word of it.
"You're lying."
That hope of mine was crushed without mercy. Of course it was. My daughter wasn't an idiot. She was at an age where she understood everything there was to understand.
"Dad, I'm grown up now. Do you really think I'd fall for a lie like that?"
Jia took my hand, her face sad. Ever since she was little, she had loved touching my hands, playing with them. When she started elementary school, that hand had been smaller than my index finger. Now it had grown until it wasn't much different in size from my wife's—the back of it soft, the fingers slender, the hand of a quiet, gentle young woman, obvious to anyone who looked.
Feeling it, a rush of thoughts came up again. This daughter I had raised through so much hardship. The thought that she was no longer mine. Questions started tumbling through my head: is this really right?
"I'm sorry, Jia."
Nothing else would come to me. I couldn't have said what I was sorry for. Was it wrong of me to have run a paternity test on my own daughter, meaning to blow the family apart? Or was it wrong of me to have played Dad for Jia like a fool from the very beginning, knowing nothing? If I had to pick, it was the first. If I had never known, I could have stayed happy with her as father and daughter forever.
"Dad."
"Yeah."
"Are you going to divorce Mom?"
It was a question like a knife between the ribs, and I missed the moment to answer. When I looked into her eyes without a word, Jia dropped her head and let the strength go out of both hands that had been holding mine.
"After you divorce... at least keep in touch with me. Often."
"...Of course I will. Whose daughter do you think you are."
The answer came out on its own, and only afterward did I realize that the words themselves were agreeing with what she had just said. I stared at her with a stupid look on my face, and I watched tears gather, little by little, at the corners of her eyes.
"If I asked you now to just keep living together... you wouldn't listen, would you, Dad?"
She was nothing like some fragile little girl. I hadn't seen my daughter cry once since kindergarten. And yet the moment she understood that I was leaving her mother, she was already on the verge of tears. A bitter ache started up in my chest again—remembering that the divorce was no longer a problem between my wife and me alone, and, even so, turning over the fact that I didn't have it in me to take any of it back.
"I'm sorry, Jia."
In the end, apologizing again was all I could do.
The moment she heard it, Jia threw herself into my arms. Held against me, I felt her crying—sobbing, hitching for breath. My clothes grew wet. I couldn't have cared less.
The thought that the child crying in front of me was not my own flesh and blood simply would not come. She had grown up following me devotedly since she was small, a girl I had told myself over and over was more precious than my own life, a girl I had wanted to see happier than anyone. And I was going to have to break that bond with my own hands.