The moment the door closed behind her, Rin had an idea of how this would all go down. Hye-jin took her time letting go of the rusty knob, her turned back giving more anxiety in his gut than the sight of her face when she showed up earlier at the gate.

Rin stepped forward, his bare feet skidding against the dusty floorboards in dire need of polishing. "Hye-jin, I—"

"Why are you here?" she asked. She still hasn't turned to face him. Her tone was quiet, resigned. It's like she was truly confused as to why her husband was in the same room as her.

When he failed to give a coherent answer, that's when Hye-jin whipped towards him. From there, everything became clear. Red-rimmed eyes, sunken cheeks, pale, chapped lips. Her hair stuck to the back of her head like a crown in disarray, held back only by a plastic hair clamp missing a tooth or two. The sleeves of her beige, baggy shirt hung from her shoulders. It never occurred to me she was still in her loungewear. Did she...did she get on the bus on those?

"Why are you here, Rin?" she echoed. Her hollow voice bounced against the wooden walls of the house. The sounds of mourners' feet thudding against the floorboards and the idle chatter of guests bled through the gaps between the planks.

Rin's words fought to surge out of his mouth, but he did his best to hold them down. Nothing he said would calm the silent, brewing storm in front of him that was Hye-jin. She was angry, and rightly so. He got why, but he couldn't reconcile it with the fact she was the one who pushed him to do what he did.

"I couldn't find you in the house. I can't contact your phone. I've reached out to all of your friends and they all don't know where you are," Rin balled his fists by his sides, the hell of the past few days coming back to his mind. The cold streets, the frantic begging, the anger curling at the base of his throat at having to disturb people to get them to help him solve his own problem. It's dehumanizing. It's...not Rin. "I did what any good husband would do. Can you blame me?"

Hye-jin's shoulders shook—the weakest quiver—but it wasn't lost on Rin. She was doing everything she could to hold it in, to never appear like what she was feeling inside. He had seen this sequence play out a number of times, but this was the first time where he was the one causing it himself. "Yes," she breathed out. Her hair bounced with the motion of her head. "I can blame you for a lot of things other than this. But let's focus on the topic at hand."

She tapped a hand to her chest. Her feet made scratching noises as she stalked towards me, her eyes flashing with untethered rage. "You have no right to show up here. Not toting those police cars with you. Not bearing that clueless look on your face, like you can't believe this was even happening," she sniffed. "Not at my mother's funeral."

A weight settled on his shoulders then. So, the commotion outside was as real as this conversation. When he burst into the gate of Hye-jin's ancestral home, he noticed the black hanboks, the white flowers, and the sticky smell of incense burning in the air. But all that faded when he saw Hye-jin peeking from the ante of the house, looking like she had just seen a ghost.

He had been shuffled through the motion, paying his respects into an open coffin with Hye-jin's mother's picture sitting above it. Then, he was shoved into this spare room, away from the unwanted ears listening in.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked. That was the only thing he was asking of Hye-jin, one she wasn't going to give him unless he begged for it. "When did you even leave? You could have just waited for me to come home so I could accompany you."

Hye-jin scoffed. Just the sound of it stabbed a pike in Rin's heart that he wouldn't be able to pull out any time soon. When she met his eyes, a fresh veil of tears made them glisten. "Are you seriously asking me that?" she seethed. She swiped at her cheeks when the first trails of tears streamed down. "If you've been there that time, you wouldn't even need to. But you're not, right?"

Rin knitted his eyebrows. "What are you talking about?"

"Don't play dumb with me, Rin," she said. "You know what I'm talking about."

Something snapped from inside Rin. He didn't know if it was because of the exhaustion settling in his nerves or from something else, but he stepped forward and got so close into Hye-jin's personal space. "Don't put thoughts in my head, Hye-jin," he said. "When I ask you, it's because I really don't know. If you insist on being cryptic and so high and mighty, I can't help you. I'll ask you one last time: what are you talking about?"

Hye-jin edged backwards, even though she hated that. She ran a hand down her face, sniffling. When she locked gazes with him, she was more than livid. "You want me to put it into simpler words for you?" she said. "You're not here, Rin. You stopped being here a long time ago. Even when you promised you wouldn't stoop to that."

"I didn't tell you anything because you don't care," Hye-jin continued before Rin could attempt to defend himself. What's there to defend anyway? "The only things you care about is work and your salary. You always come home late at night. You've left the house to me, even when you told me it's not going to be the case. Do you know how hard it was for me?"

"You can't pin that on me," Rin retorted. "I'm working in order to put food on the table. And if I don't come home late, if I don't do a fuck ton of work in the office, I won't even be considered for that promotion. I've done things I would have never done if I had a choice. I'll throw your question back at you: do you know how hard it was for me?"

Rin pushed the hair off his forehead even though it would just flop back down. "I care about my job and what money I would be bringing home because that's the only way we would survive," he said. "Nobody asked you to take care of my share in the house when I couldn't. You could have left it and I'd get around to it on the weekends or something. It's not like I forced you into doing it."

Hye-jin exhaled through her mouth, primed to say something else, but Rin pushed on. "So, I don't know. I don't understand why it was suddenly my fault that I wasn't with you all the time when I had to spend that much time having to work my ass off."

"It shouldn't have mattered this much," Hye-jin answered. "It shouldn't have come between us like this. Yes, I know we're dirt poor. I know we don't have much, but it would have been fine. We would learn to get by with what we have. If we have each other like before. We would have been fine, even if we didn't have a lot."

"Except we wouldn't," Rin answered.

This time, it was her turn to ask, "What do you mean?"

He closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose. "I know you, Hye-jin," he said. "The years I've spent with you told me nothing would be enough for you. You'd always want more, and then get pissed off when you can't have it. That's always been who you are. That's why I did it. It's to keep up with your demands. To make you happy, as I have always done."

"So, are you saying it's my fault?" Hye-jin shook her head in disbelief, bracing her hands on her hips. "I can't believe this. Do you think leaving me to deal with your shit while I'm dealing with mine would make me happy? Did you seriously think that?"

"What are you getting at this time?" Rin said. The weight on his shoulders seemed to have tripled in the few minutes he had been talking with Hye-jin. He wanted it to stop. Run. He had to run while he still could.

Hye-jin strode towards the shelf with cubical niches in it. The dusty surface of the figurines, books, and vintage electronics failed in reflecting the cold sunlight shining through the drawn curtains over the wide windows. "Do you know what would truly make me happy, huh, Rin?" she said. "Getting my own life back."

Words would fail to express whatever was going through his brain by the time those words left Hye-jin's mouth. Why...why would she want that? Hye-jin tapped a closed fist against the shelf's wooden walls. "All my life, I've thought myself to be lucky to be by your side," she said. "I thought it's for the best, that I have made the right choice. But look where we are now. I'm a mess, and my husband's sleeping in another woman's house."

The world slowed down around Rin. What... "Where did you get that from?" he asked. What was she talking about?

"I saw it happening with my own eyes," Hye-jin said. "That's why you come home so late in the night, right? You're down there, pleasing that woman."

Rin shook his head. "That's not—"

Hye-jin stalked towards him and shoved a finger into his shoulder. Her already puffy and red-rimmed eyes misted with more tears. "Then explain that necklace," she said. "Why does she have it? Why did you bring it home so I could see it? Are you rubbing it into my face, huh? Do you really want it that much? By all means, go to her!"

Dear God, this was wrong. They couldn't be more wrong. Somehow, without knowing it, they have two differing stories on their hands. Each one made sense to those who chose to believe it, but there could only be one truth, and Rin should be the one to tell it. "Trust me," he said, like those two words were the one thing that would fix all of this. "We didn't—"

" 'We'?" Hye-jin gasped. More tears slipped from her eyes which she violently swiped. "There's a 'we' now? Rin, do you know what this means? You're telling me what we have isn't enough anymore. You're telling me you've gone and looked for a way out, to get rid of me. Are you assuming I wouldn't be able to find out? How stupid can you be? I am your wife, for God's sake!"

Every word hurt, like a thousand barrage of knives carving their marks on his skin. None of them were true, but seeing how she held on to them might as well made them so. God. This was wrong. This was all wrong. He opened his mouth, stepped forward, mustered his courage to stop this once and for all.

Instead, Hye-jin beat him to it. "That's why I didn't tell you I left," she said. "To give you a taste of your own medicine. It doesn't feel good when people leave without saying a word, right?"

Another stake deep into his heart, widening the cracks already appearing in it. He reached out, trying to keep the one thing he should have protected from slipping from his fingers. "Hye-jin, I—"

"Because of this, because of you," Hye-jin's chest heaved up and down, her face crumpling into a mess of tears and sobs. "I can't go home when my family needs me. Do you know how many times I called you that night? I can't find you. Then, I get a call about Mom—"

Her arms found solace around her, the nails digging into the fabric of her sleeves. "It's all because of you that I didn't get to see Mom on her last breath," she said. She raised her head to stare out into the windows. She wouldn't see anything beyond the curtains though. "Do you know how that feels, Rin? I kept dreaming about it at night, how Mom called for me with her failing voice. But I wasn't there. I was never going to be there."

All the fight deflated Rin's muscles. The weight on his shoulders had quadrupled, but even that was lost on him. Hye-jin closed her eyes and rocked herself as she cried. This scene—with the silent hum of the wind rattling the loose window panes, the sharp tick of the wall clock above the door frame, the silence so thick he would need a sword to break through—would be here forever. It wouldn't live in the pictures, but seeing it happening before him—it's a different feeling. Like the world was not only slowing down.

It felt like it was ending. And there was nothing he could do to stop it.

"You are no saint, Rin," she said between sobs, looking at him with a gaze filled with fluid contempt. "And it's my fault for believing that you are."

The words hung between them, too full to dig deep into his heart but too empty to contain everything she wasn't saying.

"I'm sorry," he said, knowing full well it wouldn't do anything to alleviate their situation. His own eyes brimmed with tears, scalding a trail down his cheeks kissed by the cold. "Do you want me to stay here until the burial?"

"I want a divorce," came her reply.

Hye-jin raised her eyes to meet his once again. Narrowed and dripping with misery, they told him of a thousand different things words would never be able to describe. They belonged to a person who had lost the ability to see with them a long time ago. They never did contain all the answers to every question in the universe, like he had always thought. How had time passed to replace what danced in them when they first met to a strong glimmer of what he could only call hate?

Maybe Hye-jin was right. Maybe he had left and never said a word despite swearing to never do it as it was done to him. The stake was buried deep now. With one last yank, his heart audibly broke into a thousand pieces. He forced himself to see the truth laid bare in front of them but they'd been to blind to until now. "We are unhappy," he said, his words sounding foreign in his ears. "I never realized it then. But I know it now."

He nodded. "Fine," he looked at Hye-jin again as if it's the last time he would get to. "Let's do it."

Relief calmed Hye-jin's features down. She wiped the back of her hand against her cheek. Instead of drying her tears, more seemed to come. And more. It never stopped until she was down to her knees, clamping a hand over her mouth to silence the wails coming out of her mouth.

Rin's gut wrenched. He started crouching towards her, aiming to wrap his arm around her shoulders. Console her. Comfort her. But...why? It was over. Their world has ended right there. What more should be expected of him? Why should he stay at a place he's clearly unwanted?

Without sparing her a glance, he dragged his body out of the room. Towards the noise of reality in order to drown out the deadly silence that followed when the shards of his heart had finished falling.