Chapter 13: What Go-eun Carries

His name was Bak Sung-jae.

He was twenty-three years old. He was the third son of a minor noble family of adequate but unremarkable standing. He had a pleasant face, a good tailor, and opinions about his own significance that outpaced the evidence by a considerable margin.

Go-eun had known all of this when she married him.

She had been twenty years old and her mother had been practical and her father had been gone two years by then and the match was — reasonable. Adequate. The kind of marriage that Joseon produced in great quantities for women of her station, which was comfortable but not distinguished, which meant the options were limited and the timeline was not.

She had told herself: reasonable is enough.

She had believed it.

For a while.

The trouble with watching your sister fall in love — really fall in love, the kind that built itself brick by careful brick out of philosophy and margin notes and a man who said you are right like it cost him nothing — was that it recalibrated things.

Quietly. Without permission.

Like a compass that has been pointed at magnetic north for so long it has forgotten true north exists, and then something shifts and suddenly it knows the difference and cannot un-know it.

Go-eun had been un-knowing it for months.

She was very tired of un-knowing it.

It was a Tuesday in January when it happened.

Not dramatically. Nothing in Go-eun’s actual life happened dramatically — all the drama, she had come to understand, she channeled into other people’s stories because her own had not given her much to work with.

She was in the kitchen discussing the week’s accounts with her head servant when Sung-jae came in.

He was in good spirits. He had been at a gathering the previous evening — one she had not attended, a men’s affair, scholars and officials — and had apparently acquitted himself well in some discussion and was still warm with the pleasure of it.

She was glad for him. She was.

“Choi’s widow was there,” he said, accepting tea from the servant with the automatic ease of a man who had never fetched his own tea in his life. “The one who’s been making eyes at young Hwang. She came to the winter gathering apparently.”

Go-eun’s hands stilled on the account book.

“Lady Im,” she said carefully.

“Mm. Wore red. Talked scholarship at his father for an hour apparently.” Sung-jae sipped his tea with the expression of someone relaying mildly interesting gossip. “Bit much if you ask me. A widow her age making such a — production of herself.”

The kitchen was very quiet.

Go-eun looked at the account book.

At the columns of numbers that needed checking, at the week’s household in neat rows, at the ordinary Tuesday morning life of a woman who had been telling herself for three years that reasonable was enough.

“Her age,” she said.

“Thirty-eight,” Sung-jae said, with the dismissive authority of a twenty-three year old who has not yet understood that dismissing people is a form of poverty. “Hwang could have anyone. Lady Choi’s daughter — now there’s a suitable—”

“Sung-jae.”

Something in her voice.

He looked at her.

Go-eun looked at her husband — at the pleasant face and the good tailor and the opinions that outpaced the evidence — and felt something she had been carefully not feeling for a long time arrive with the quiet finality of water finding its level.

Not anger. Not quite.

Grief, maybe. The clean simple grief of a woman who has finally stopped pretending.

“Lady Im Seo-yeon,” she said, very quietly, “is my sister.”

A beat.

“I know that—”

“She survived twenty years,” Go-eun said, “of a man who did not see her. Who looked through her every day for twenty years as though she were furniture. Who spent their household’s money on other women and came home smelling of wine and did not once — not once in twenty years — ask her what she thought about anything.”