Chapter 32

During my first winter on Hwaryeong-do, each day had crawled past like molasses, yet over the past six months, whole weeks had evaporated in the blink of an eye until the turning of the calendar pages felt like a blade inching toward my throat.

Sitting alone at the dining table in the quiet afternoon, I leaned forward until my forehead rested with a dull thud against the wall calendar hanging beside the wainscot. Beneath my brow, the thin paper smelling of cheap printer ink crumpled slightly around the date circled in bold red marker: Day 616.

There was nowhere left to run, and no way to ask for an extension.

How do you tell a fifteen-year-old boy who has finally learned to smile that you’re walking out of his life forever? If I told him I was just leaving on another long expedition gig, he would sit by the front door every night waiting for my footsteps until his heart rotted away. No—if I was going to be ripped out of this world and leave him behind, I had to sever the cord cleanly in a single stroke. Better an absolute, undeniable grief he could mourn and recover from than a cruel sliver of false hope that would chain him to a ghost for the rest of his youth.

For that exact reason, throughout our final week together, I had deliberately refrained from taking him to any fancy restaurants, amusement parks, or new places. If I turned our last days into a special event, every time he ate that food or visited that street in the future, the memory would ambush him like a landmine.

Instead, after sending him off to school that morning just like any other weekday, I sat at the kitchen table with a fresh legal pad and wrote out a comprehensive manual for the years ahead:

Below those rules, I listed the exact hiding spots of the cash envelopes I had stashed inside the bedroom closet lining, step-by-step instructions for managing his utility bills and tax forms until he turned nineteen, and the terms of the updated lease I had quietly signed with the landlady—raising the cash security deposit and prepaying a full twelve months of rent up front so no one could evict him.

When I set my pen down at the bottom of the third page, the letter read less like a tragic farewell and more like the nagging checklist of an overprotective older brother. Losing my own family overnight at eighteen had taught me the hard way just how sheltered I had been; even if I couldn’t spare Ji Gyu-hwa the pain of losing me today, I was determined to leave enough armor behind that the world couldn’t break him afterward.

Because I hadn’t texted him to come home early, the front door lock didn’t click open until nearly seven that evening, after varsity shooting practice wrapped up.

“Hyung,” Gyu-hwa called out, a bright, unguarded smile lighting up his face as he stepped into the foyer and neatly aligned his sneakers on the rack.

From the entryway, he couldn’t possibly read the handwriting on the legal pad sitting before me on the table. Was it the rigid posture of my shoulders? The fact that the kitchen stove wasn’t lit? Or had the two of us simply lived so closely under one roof that a single look into my eyes told him the sky had fallen?

In the four strides it took him to walk from the shoe rack to the edge of the living room, every drop of color drained from Ji Gyu-hwa’s face, leaving his skin stark white as an untouched snowfield—a snowfield my muddy boots were about to trample into black slush.

“…Is it today?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

“You remember me telling you that I’d have to leave this island someday, right?”

“I asked you if it’s today.”

“Yeah.”

His hands balled into white-knuckled fists at his sides. “Why? Where the hell is this place you have to go all of a sudden?”

“I’m turning myself in to the authorities.”

Out of a hundred lies I had rehearsed—I’m fleeing overseas on a smuggling boat, I caught a terminal illness, Wait for me and maybe we’ll meet again in ten years—that was the cruelest and cleanest blade I owned. I needed to carve into his bones that there was zero chance of me ever walking back through that door, and more than that, I needed him to think me cold enough that he wouldn’t waste his youth pining after me.

“Do you expect me to buy a lie that pathetic?!” Gyu-hwa’s voice tore across the room as his chest heaved violently. “You hid out in this backwater village wearing a mask for over a year so you wouldn’t get caught, and now out of nowhere you’re turning yourself in?!”

“That’s right.”

“Even if you go to prison, families get visitation rights! Tell me which penitentiary they’re sending you to—I’ll come see you every weekend!”

“Consider me dead the second I walk out that door, Gyu-hwa,” I said, forcing my voice into a flat, arctic monotone. “You won’t ever see me again.”

His pupils dilated in sheer terror. “Are you saying… they’re going to give you the death penalty? You don’t know that until the trial! Why are you talking like you’re walking to an execution ground?! This is suicide—if this isn’t suicide, what the hell is it?!”

“Ji Gyu-hwa.”

“Is it because the police tracked you to this island?!” Driven frantic, he lunged across the room and seized both of my forearms, his hands shaking like dry leaves. “Then let’s run away together tonight! I don’t give a damn about school or the shooting team—we can take the cash and hide in the mountains or stow away on a boat! I’ll work, I won’t be dead weight, I swear to God, hyung! As long as I’m with you—if I just have you—!”

Every clumsy, desperate plea tearing out of the fifteen-year-old boy’s throat felt like a saw blade dragging across my windpipe.

“You didn’t say a single word yesterday at breakfast, and now you sit here like you received some divine revelation and tell me it’s over?!” he shouted, hot tears spilling over his lower lashes. “Just I’m turning myself in, consider me dead, and that’s the end of us?! Do you really expect me to accept that?!”

“…Yeah,” I rasped, my throat constricting so hard I could barely force the words past my teeth. “That’s all there is.”

“Stop doing this to me…” Burying his face in both hands, his tall frame folded inward as a ragged sob tore from his chest. “Please don’t do this to me, hyung. Why are you being so cruel?”

Because I’m a selfish bastard who couldn’t keep his hands to himself. I should have stayed a stranger across the street; I never should have let him learn what warmth felt like if I was only going to rip the roof off over his head.

“Say something to me!” he screamed, tearing his hands from his face to grab my collar. “Tell me the real reason! Why are you throwing me away like this?!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Hyung!”

“Ji Gyu-hwa, listen to yourself!” I barked, locking my jaw to keep my own voice from breaking. “You’ve known me for less than two years! I’m not your father, I’m not your blood—I was just a soft-hearted sucker who paid the rent and bought you rice for a few months! You’re going to live to be a hundred years old. How big a deal do you think twenty months out of an entire century really is? It’s nothing. I’m nothing to you.”

“We lived together! You saved my life!”

Unable to draw a full breath through the agony crushing his lungs, the boy dropped to both knees on the linoleum and clawed at the front of his school shirt as if his heart were physically rupturing inside his ribs.

“If you’re nothing…” Pressing his forehead flat against the floor between my feet, he gasped for air through hitching sobs. “If two years with you was nothing, then why does it hurt like I’m dying right now?!”

When he finally dragged in one last shuddering breath and lifted his head from the floorboards, the raw plea in his bloodshot eyes had curdled into sheer, black resentment.

“Fine! If your own life means so little to you that you’re itching to throw it in the gutter and drop dead, then do whatever the hell you want!” he spat, his voice trembling with venom. “Walk out that door and die like a stray dog in a ditch without even leaving a corpse to—!”

Before the last word could leave his teeth, I lunged down and clamped my hand around his wrist.

I couldn’t let him finish that sentence. If those became the final words he ever spoke to me before I vanished into thin air, Ji Gyu-hwa would spend the rest of his life eating himself alive with guilt.

“I know how badly it hurts, Gyu-hwa,” I whispered, dropping to my knees on the floor and hauling his rigid, trembling body straight into my chest. “And I know you don’t mean a word of that.”

Praying with everything in me that this wound would be the last tragedy he ever had to survive in his youth, I buried my face against his shoulder and held on as his nails dug into my back.

“You told me… you told me three days ago that you only watched your real family from across the street because you couldn’t bear to hurt them!” he wept against my neck, his voice breaking into pieces. “Then what about me, damn it?! What am I to you?! After making me need you like this, how can you just stand up and walk away?!”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, my own eyes burning hot. “Even so… I don’t regret a single second of the time I spent with you.”

It was the rawest confession of my selfishness. From the first day to the last, every choice had been for my own comfort, and the boy in my arms was paying the bill.

“You’re the one who’s starved for affection!” Gyu-hwa cried out against my collarbone.

He wasn’t wrong. Perhaps from the very first afternoon we met in the rain, this kid had seen right through me.

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