On the day she drove me back to Seoul in her red car, Umma handed me a note.

Leviticus 20:13. If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.

—I hope you’re feeling much better.

—Apparently you’re the one who’s sick, not me. The doctor said so.

Things with the science-track student had cooled off by the time I got back. My old cell phone had been thrown away and the new cell had only my mother’s number stored. “It’s been handled,” was all she said to me, her office-speak matched by her businesslike manner.

After two sessions, Umma refused to undergo further consultations or to take any medication. She turned down the hospital’s offer to change her therapist. She said there was no need. She had already been redeemed by Jesus, and therefore the situation had been handled. When I heard this from the doctor, I had to ask Umma a question.

—Are you sure you won’t regret it later on?

She gave me a blank, nonjudgmental look, like she would give to a bit of empty air in front of her. But then:

—Don’t tell anyone. It’s a shameful thing.

Kissing a boy two years older than me? Spending my summer vacation imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital because of it? Surviving sixteen years with a mother like her? I didn’t know which was supposed to be so shameful, and so I ended up keeping all these secrets to myself.

Having learned to give up and accept things in silence, I went back to my routine college-prep life after the end of summer vacation. I’m sure I looked ordinary and unremarkable to others, but I was keeping to myself a dark, toxic promise I’d made to the sixteen-year-old boy I was in that psychiatric hospital: when that woman I lived with under the same roof was old and weak, I would leave her out in some neglected forest of Gyeonggi Province so she’d be eaten by starving wild animals. And the only reason I survived those years was because I had repeated that same promise to myself, over and over.

I never should have abandoned that promise.

I guess she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep or something. Her marriage lament this time around was especially long and tedious. Umma was an expert at latching onto the tiniest thing and spinning it into an endless, irritating rant.

—How can you be in your thirties already and never have brought home a girl?

—I’m not seeing anyone.

—You said you were, before.

—That was five years ago, Umma. There’s no one now.

The “before” Umma referred to was him. The man who had been by my side but was now completely gone from my life. Except for this sudden reappearance in my letterbox, as if Umma had something to do with bringing him back from oblivion.