Hee-joo’s excited tone jolts In-hye out of these memories.

“What can we do about Yeong-hye? They’re saying she might die.”

To In-hye, Hee-joo’s words sounded like the deafening roar of a plane taking off.

—

There is one memory that In-hye has never been able to tell anyone else about, and probably never will.

April two years ago. The spring of the year when her husband made that video of Yeong-hye. In-hye had bled from her vagina for close on a month, on and off. She’d never been able to understand why, but for some reason every time she washed her blood-soaked pants she would recall the way in which the blood from Yeong-hye’s wrist had spurted out into the air. Every day she decided she would go for a medical examination the next day, then when the next day came she would postpone it again. She was afraid of going to the hospital. If it was a serious disease, how much time might she have left? A year. Six months. Or three months. For the first time, she became vividly aware of how much of her life she had spent with her husband. It had been a period of time utterly devoid of happiness and spontaneity. A time that she’d so far managed to get through only by using up every last reserve of perseverance and consideration. All of it self-inflicted.

On the morning when she’d finally mustered the courage to go to the obstetrics and gynecology department, the one where Ji-woo had been born, she’d stood on the open-air platform at Wangsimni Station and waited for the train, which was taking an unusually long time to arrive. Opposite the platform was a row of temporary buildings, their steel structures now decaying, and wild grasses straggling up between the sleepers on the edges over which no trains passed. The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her success had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn’t understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.

She’d fought down her feeling of shame and managed to stop trembling before getting up onto the bed. The middle-aged male doctor then pushed a cold abdominal scope deep into her vagina and removed a tongue-like polyp that had been stuck to the vaginal wall. Her body flinched away from the sharp pain.

“So this is why you’ve been bleeding. Well, it came away cleanly, so the bleeding should start to lessen in a few days, and then stop altogether. Your ovaries are completely fine, so there’s nothing for you to worry about there.”