The past ten or so years’ worth of work was quietly turning its back on him. It wasn’t his anymore. It belonged to a person he used to know, or thought he’d known—once upon a time.

—

His sister-in-law was silent on the other end of the phone. He knew she was there, though; he could hear a faint sighing sound, like breathing, overlaid with a kind of rattling that he guessed was coming from the line.

“Hello?” He was finding it difficult to force the words out. “Sister-in-law, it’s me. Ji-woo’s mum is…” He despised himself, all his hypocrisy and trickery, but fought this down and continued speaking. “Well, she’s worried, you know.”

Still no answer. He sighed into the receiver. She would be standing there barefoot, he knew, like always. When her time at the psychiatric hospital, where she’d spent several months, had come to a close, she’d come to stay with them while his wife and the rest of the family all went to try to persuade her husband to take her back. The month she’d spent with them, before moving out into a rented studio apartment, had caused none of them even the slightest strain. Partly this was because he had yet to hear about the Mongolian mark, and thus regarded her as nothing more than an object of pity, albeit a faintly inscrutable one.

She’d never been much of a talker, and had spent the majority of her time out on their veranda, sunning herself in the late-autumn sunshine. She would occupy herself in picking up the dried leaves that had fallen from the flowerpots and crumbling them into a fine powder, or in stretching out the palm of her hand to cast shadows over the floor. When his wife was busy with something she would lend a hand with Ji-woo, taking him to the bathroom and helping him wash, her bare feet kissing the cold tiles.

It was difficult to believe that such a woman had once tried to kill herself, or that she’d sat topless in front of a crowd of strangers, perfectly composed, which had apparently been a symptom of some kind of post-suicide-attempt dementia. That he had run to the hospital with her bleeding on his back, and that the experience had had such a profound effect on him, seemed like something that had happened with a different woman, or perhaps in a different time.

The only thing that was especially unusual about her was that she didn’t eat meat. This had been a source of friction with her family from the start, and since her behavior after this initial change had grown increasingly strange—culminating in her wandering around topless—her husband had decided that her vegetarianism was proof that she would never be “normal” again.

“She was always so submissive—outwardly, at any rate. And for a woman who wasn’t quite all there to start with to be taking medication every day, well, she’s bound to get worse, and that’s all there is to it.”