EBT Chapter 1.1

I’ve been waiting for a day like this, for my will to die to raise its head high and firm. I no longer have any will or attachment to anyone or anything, not even a shred of love or care for my own flesh.

My thirty-second winter was bitingly cold. The news reported new records created by this year’s cold wave every day, and as the number of elderly people dying from freezing increased, the government even came up with emergency measures.

On the day of the first snow, I became a cancer patient. To be precise, a cancerous mass had been parasitizing my liver long before that and it had been eating away at my lungs and adrenal glands for a while, but anyway… if we’re calling me a cancer patient from the moment I knew I had liver cancer, then… my thirty-second winter was the worst.

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The doctor was angry with me, asking why I hadn’t come when I first had inflammation in my liver long ago. Throughout his lengthy sermon about why I didn’t come to the hospital when I knew I was sick, I just felt wronged. ‘I knew I was sick’? That was just wrong.

I didn’t even know I was sick. I thought I was tired from stress and my body was numb from guilt. Even when my cough got worse, I thought it was just a cold. I visited the hospital thinking it might be pneumonia, but the problem wasn’t my lungs but my liver… The one who should have been shocked wasn’t him but me.

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Of course, by the time the mass could be felt through the skin, I knew something was seriously wrong. There’s no room for excuse about that. But when I first felt that something major was wrong with my body, I actually didn’t want to go to the hospital.

I wanted to postpone it as much as possible. I wanted to postpone finding out what was wrong with me.

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I wasn’t curious about what my life would be like going forward. What color the sky would be tomorrow, who I would meet and what words we would exchange, what I would eat, where I would walk, what I would feel… I didn’t want to know any of it.

When I returned home in just one day with a fourteen-page diagnosis, I was greeted by a single dog in an empty house. After filling its bowl with plenty of food, my first thought was,

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‘I haven’t even told Mr. Taerim that I decided to keep a dog.’

It had been almost four months since I brought home the white dog, who didn’t have a collar or an ID chip, and whose breed—mixed with Jindo—I couldn’t identify.

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Four months ago, I impulsively decided to try a domestic cruise, thinking it might help with my depression. As they often do in dramas, depressed people often go on trips to change their mood. But of course, dramas are just dramas. Seeing the ocean and being on a cruise didn’t make me feel better. The food was tasteless, and I just felt seasick.

I met this dog when we temporarily docked at an island due to the rough waves. It was so thin that all its ribs were visible, and it was the first time in my life seeing a dog in such a state. The creature seemed desperately in need of help, and its gray fur was quite stylish.

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On the cruise, all I had to do was point at it and request to bring it aboard. I could feed it well, and I had been wanting a friend to return home with anyway.

Of course, the stylish gray fur was a scam. After having it washed at a pet hotel, the fur turned out to be white, its legs were shorter than I thought, and it drooled excessively during the car ride home. It was far from stylish, but what could I do?

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Anyway… for four months since then, Mr. Cheon Taerim never came back home. Even when he visited Seoul, he seemed to stay at my in-laws’ place or a hotel.

That’s why the dog still had no name. If Mr. Taerim returned, I planned to formally ask for permission and have him name it. The name registered on the identification chip was just ‘Woof-Woof,’ as the vet had said it could be changed later.

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‘…When should I tell him that I’m sick?’

While watching Woof-Woof’s tongue licking the food bowl clean, I pondered for a long time.

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‘How do I tell Mr. Taerim that I’m going to die soon? What if he’s happy to hear that? What if he can’t hide his smile? What if he asks exactly when I’m going to die?’

No, no. Let’s think calmly. Mr. Taerim is an objective and cold person, so he won’t do that.

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Rather, he’d probably first ask, ‘Will the contracts between Hansung Group and my company remain unaffected even if this marriage ends in death?’ Since both my father and older sister are very objective and cold people, there would of course be no problems with their contract.

‘That’s a relief.’

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As soon as I got home, I took out all the unopened makeup I had. My face had turned yellow and my hands and feet often turned bluish, so I had bought these things thinking I might apply something when Mr. Taerim returned. Concealer, foundation, and lip balm that they say even men use these days – I threw them all in the trash.

After that, I felt nothing. I painfully swallowed a cup of coffee using the diagnosis papers as a coaster.

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Only after wasting about three hours did I pick up my phone. I decided to leave everything to Mr. Cheon Taerim’s answer.

The reason was simple. If I left it to the doctors, it would obviously lead to neither-here-nor-there arguments. There was no doctor in the world who would make a conscientious declaration of ‘you’re past the treatment stage, just die’ to the youngest son of the Hansung Group.

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They would be desperate to show some kind of effort with someone like me who was about to die, but I didn’t want that. I couldn’t let numerous doctors, nurses, knives, and needles poke, dig, and cut me apart while they watched the family and my father’s reactions.

Only Mr. Cheon Taerim had the right to decide the direction of my life. Whether to give up chemotherapy and quietly accept death, or… if perhaps he worried about me, even just a little… if even a speck of sympathy sprouted in our ruined relationship, then maybe… then maybe I might find some strength.

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At what was probably late night in America, I called Mr. Taerim.

The call rang for a long time but was ignored once. When I persistently held onto the phone for a second try, instead of a ‘hello,’ I heard a sigh.

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— …

Mr. Taerim’s wordless breathing pressed down on my heart like a stone.

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“Uhm, Mr. Taerim… I have something to tell you…”

Words like ‘sorry for waking you up when you were probably sleeping’ and ‘have you had dinner’ swirled around in my mouth. It was never easy to convey even such common sentences to a man like Cheon Taerim. Mr. Taerim was in America, far away across the ocean and through the sky, but it felt like his glance would look down on me like I was trash at any moment.

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“Uh, so…”

— …What is it.

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“So…”

After much contemplation, what finally came out of my mouth was just,

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“When you come back home… should I… should I prepare something? Like something you want to do… or something you want to eat, things like that…”

It was just an unreasonable question for waking him up late at night,

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— …I’d like it to be quiet.

Mr. Cheon Taerim’s answer was brief and concise.

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— That’s all I need.

And then he hung up.

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The phone screen showing a 21-second call record was wet with sweat that had seeped from my ears and cheeks. I quietly savored Mr. Taerim’s voice that had deeply permeated my mind in that short time. It echoed, over and over, his low voice returning again and again.

And I realized.

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I had finally found the courage to close the door on the devastating six years of marriage.

That this was exactly the moment I had been waiting for.

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A moment I felt so empty I no longer had any will or attachment left for anyone or anything, and didn’t love or cherish even a piece of myself…

I decided to die.

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***

Looking back, I, Kang Hae-ah, had made mistakes from the very moment I was born. In most unfortunate childbirth stories, people often comfort the child with words like, ‘What sin could a baby possibly have?’ But in my case, I doubt anyone even said that about me.

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‘It would have been better if I hadn’t been born at all.’

That’s what I thought as I scrubbed the bathtub walls with a cleaning brush.

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‘My arm hurts.’

By the time I was rinsing off the detergent bubbles all over the bathroom with the shower head, I was dripping with sweat. Even if it was exhausting, cleaning was always beneficial. Nothing helps organize thoughts like cleaning.

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Isn’t there a saying like that? “A beautiful person leaves behind beauty in the places they’ve been”? Those kinds of phrases you often see stuck on bathroom doors.

My existence is similar to a toilet. Nobody would particularly want to reminisce about having briefly encountered me, Kang Hae-ah. Since I had already become like a toilet, my life was beyond fixable. Instead, I thought I’d at least try to make the places I’d been clean.

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That thought was the root of this madness. The insane act of trying to clean an entire two-story house all by myself.

‘Maybe I should have called someone.’

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Only the robot vacuum, busily moving back and forth across the floor, was assisting me.

After the bathroom, my next destination was the study. It was time to sort and organize all the scattered books and files.

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What was I thinking about again? Ah, right, from the beginning. Problems started on the day of my birth.

After giving birth to three children in quick succession—my older sister, brother, and second older sister—my mother became pregnant with me less than six months later. Mother didn’t want any more children by then, so she was terrified. However, the news somehow leaked out and the media first spread the word that the relationship within Hansung Group had strengthened with the news of a fourth child.

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While the Hansung Group family is still a subject of interest in the media these days, the attention they received back then was different in nature.

If you’re wondering when this was, in terms of celebrities, it was the era when sasaeng fans could enter homes and even eat there. Media had developed, and the age of machinery had arrived, but people’s awareness of privacy for public figures was still stuck somewhere around the late Joseon Dynasty.

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Even back then, Hansung was a large company, but its reputation was closer to the public than it is now. As a result, the flood of articles and news reports were unpolished and rough.

For the sake of the company’s reputation and the family’s image, my father insisted that my mother must give birth to the fourth child, even if it killed her. My mother cried throughout her pregnancy, couldn’t fully endure labor, and gave birth to me prematurely. A week later, her postpartum depression worsened to the point of suicide.

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From that day on, I was a baby that had committed a sin. Would it have been better if my sin had been lighter? Like knocking over a glass of water or swallowing a toy… Even setting the house on fire would have been better. Better than the sin of causing my mother’s death just a week after being born.

Twisting my lips, I glared at the corridor floor. The lost robot vacuum cleaner was circling the same spot, going thump, thump, thump… hitting the study door.

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‘Seriously, nothing ever works out for me.’

Everything I touch falls apart. Machines, people…

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If I were to place ‘Kang Hae-ah’ into Greek mythology, I’d probably be King Midas. Hmm, no… even that’s too generous. At least Midas could avoid disaster by not touching things. For me, my very existence is destruction itself.

Life would’ve been better if my family were at least normal…. Like they say, ‘You reap what you sow,’ and the family I was born into was just like me.

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32 years ago, the news of my mother’s death did reach the media, but the cause wasn’t reported as suicide. They said she passed away due to complications during childbirth. To cover up the date of her passing, the funeral was held quietly.

Whether influenced by that or not, I was a strange baby. Though I could barely walk while holding onto walls, I would apparently come out to the corridor and wait for the sitters or staff passing through the house to notice me until they patted my head or held me.

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When I was fond of fairy tales, my eldest sister would whisper stories about mother every night, like telling ghost stories. Back then, neither my sister who whispered these stories nor I who listened blankly understood the magnitude of this tragedy. But now, things were different.

I think I was around fifteen when I realized just how horribly I had been born. During those eight months in my mother’s womb, my wriggling life force deepened her depression. Reflecting on myself as the demon who made my mother miserable, I felt so terrified and chilled to the bone.

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Thinking back now,

‘I guess I really do take after my mother.’

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That’s right.

‘I think I can understand you a little now.’

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Mother would probably understand me too, if she were alive. She wouldn’t blame me when we meet in the afterlife. That would be enough.

After I leave this world like mother did, father would likely prepare a new scenario. My father, Kang Joon-il, the face of Hansung Group, was that kind of person. A businessman who checked the Alpha manifestation rate of his youngest child who hadn’t even turned one yet; the director who designed my life; a Korean-style noble whose blood might run blue if pricked with a knife.

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Father would probably wrap up the story of my death in a plausible and warm way too. After all, he still holds charity events in my mother’s name on my birthday.

Let’s see… he might hold a retrospective exhibition with my unsold paintings. He’ll probably donate the money from the sold paintings to make himself look good… I hope my unfinished sketches don’t end up being displayed. Surely the gallery curators will know to filter those out, right?

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Well, geniuses are said to die young in every era, aren’t they? I’d like my death to be remembered under some glittering title too—like the dramatic death that teenage rebels and hipster artists covered in tattoos dream of.

When my portrait is hung in the exhibition hall lined with white flower wreaths, I wonder if my sisters will cry for me. Or will they feel relieved that, as my brother often says, their ‘dumb younger brother’ is gone?

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‘Then, what will Mr. Taerim do?’

Mr. Taerim. Mr. Cheon Taerim. That’s my husband’s name. The name I think about most often but feels so strange whenever I speak it.

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Sitting in front of the spinning washing machine, coughing continuously for several minutes, I thought about those two words: Cheon Taerim.

Getting involved with that name was my life’s second mistake. A massive mistake created by the accumulation of various smaller mistakes. They say when many stars die, they create a black hole. When too many stars die, a black hole forms, right? Our marriage was exactly like that—a monstrous void created by countless wrongs.

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The wrongs I’ve done to Mr. Cheon Taerim are endless, I can’t name them all even if I stayed up all night listing them. It was wrong to believe Father’s words that I was an Omega, just that I’d have a late manifestation, and it was wrong to consider Mr. Cheon Taerim and I were compatible just because we had good chemistry at our first meeting.

The worst part was my incompetence. I couldn’t provide any compensation while watching Mr. Taerim’s life fall apart because of me.

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After that, there were so many things that felt unfair and infuriating…

“Ah…”

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I must have passed out for a moment. I came to my senses at the beeping sound of the washing machine finishing its cycle. Woof-Woof was licking the cold floor. I barely stopped it from eating the blood I had spit up. As I shook out the wet laundry, the dog kept barking.

“Stop it, Woof-Woof. Hyung is tired…”

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After finishing the laundry, I went to the kitchen. Since I hadn’t eaten anything, there were no dishes to wash. As I hated seeing the fridge empty, I decided to make some side dishes. I made loads of stir-fried mushrooms, which Taerim used to eat relatively well.

‘This is all I know how to make.’

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The married life of the Alpha Cheon Taerim and Beta Kang Hae-ah was truly hell. The root cause lay with me. I tried taking medicine, getting shots, having moxibustion, and even acupuncture, but I never manifested as an Omega.

Only Mr. Taerim, I, and Mr. Taerim’s family didn’t know. We didn’t know that Mr. Cheon Taerim had married a Beta.

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Naturally, Mr. Taerim’s heart grew distant. At first, he seemed to believe and try to understand when I said ‘I really didn’t know,’ but later that wasn’t the case. While I was looking for doctors to possibly get surgery, Taerim was investigating the legitimacy of a fraudulent marriage.

Mr. Taerim must have found out around then. Deceiving about one’s status – whether Alpha, Omega, or Beta – in marriage doesn’t constitute fraud. That there was no legitimate way to nullify a marriage conducted through a contract between families.

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To divorce me, he’d have to hand over his business entirely to Hansung Group, and the Hansung Group family had already completed all the necessary investigations beforehand. What did Mr. Taerim think when he discovered these two things simultaneously?

I remember that look when he stared down at me with disgust. Cold eyes, tightly closed lips. The silence hurt more than cursing would have. Even my defense that I had been deceived too didn’t come out by then.

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Out of four cards, three were Alphas, and one a Beta who might become an Omega. Father decided to raise three of them and exchange one. When trading with Mr. Cheon Taerim’s prosecutor family for what they could offer, a Beta child who couldn’t even inherit the family business was a cheap price.

There was no way to explain my circumstances to Mr. Taerim. He had closed his heart, and life didn’t flow as if we were in the movie Frozen.

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The first time Mr. Taerim hit me was an accident. It was also the day I got an indirect glimpse of what kind of person Mr. Cheon Taerim was as an Alpha. The day Mr. Taerim suddenly told me he was on a break, he locked himself in the bedroom. That day, his rut came.

The rut of an Alpha without a proper Omega contact and without the stability they needed was truly bestial. Mr. Taerim wasn’t in his right mind, and I started looking for shots to calm him down.

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I didn’t know then what an Alpha’s instincts were like in rut. They want to destroy not only the suppressant shots but also the Beta holding them.

Taerim pushed me away and punched me. I’ve never experienced anything more painful than being hit by that fist. After getting hit by him on the second floor, I was surprised and tried to run away, only to get a concussion from falling down the stairs.

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“Ah…”

‘Ding dong’, ‘ding dong’… The doorbell announcing a visitor pulled me out of my thoughts. I hurriedly ran out to the garden and opened the door myself. I should have known Mr. Taerim wouldn’t come, but I couldn’t hide my disappointment when I saw it was someone I didn’t know instead.

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‘What if’ is always the problem. The expectations born from ‘what if’ are always wrong. ‘What if Taerim came?’ ‘What if he noticed something was off during the call?’

‘Get it together, Kang Hae-ah.’

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As I stood there blankly, the visiting lady bowed deeply. She seemed quick-witted and good-natured.

“You were looking for someone, right? I came to introduce myself, but I hope I’m not intruding.”

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It was just that I couldn’t get out of those old memories, but my expression seemed to have startled the lady. I waved off her deep apology. I let her in and showed her around the house, explaining how to manage it, the hidden rooms here and there, and the storage.

“I won’t be here when you start work next week.”

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I said that while leaving my bedroom door open.

“When you start working, please empty this room first. As for the furniture… handle it as you see fit. Feel free to hire people if needed. For essentials like gas and water… well, as you know, everything will be taken care of for the next few months.”

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“Understood.”

Mr. Taerim tended to dislike letting strangers into the house. Compared to him, I was the young master who even left driving to the chauffeur, so how incompatible we were was clearer than palm lines.

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That’s why I was even more particular in finding someone. Because it would obviously be difficult for Mr. Taerim to manage this big house after I die. Someone diligent enough to please him, with good reviews and proper certification.

Mr. Taerim is already busy with work and has many business trips. These days he practically lives in America, to the point where it’s confusing whether the headquarters is in America or Seoul. On top of that, I felt sorry for making him handle his husband’s funeral. I was worried he wouldn’t have time to clean or prepare meals.

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‘Well, maybe Shi Euncheol will take care of him…’

Even as a preventive measure, I needed to find someone to put my mind at ease.

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‘It’s kind of funny that a helper will replace my absence.’

A chuckle kept slipping out despite myself. Seeing me off with a smile, the woman left with a brighter expression.

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I scanned the house to see if there was anything else left to do. Looking around at the perfectly tidy space brought a sense of calm.

Finally, I tore off a page from a notebook. There weren’t any long farewells to write but…

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