Even If It's Not Love

Upon arriving at the hospital, Woo-hyun instructed Jun-kyung and the driver to stay here, and quickly entered the emergency room. Walking in the direction indicated by the nurse, Woo-hyun saw his stepmother looking at the ceiling with blank eyes. Letting out a low sigh, Woo-hyun stood next to his stepmother.

“Why did you do that?”

Greetings and regards were all omitted, and Woo-hyun asked dryly. Quite a few days have passed since Eun-soo died. It was the time to dully think that, at this point, the timing for taking her own life wasn’t ambiguous. His mother’s tearful eyes quickly turned towards Woo-hyun.

“Woo-hyun.”

At his mother’s unfamiliar call, Woo-hyun tried not to frown. His stepmother had never called him so earnestly except when she asked him to leave the house. With an ominous feeling, Woo-hyun looked down instead of answering.

“That bastard… Please kill that bastard. No, just catch him and bring him to me. I will kill him myself. Okay?”

Tears fell from his mother’s wrinkled eyes. Woo-hyun, who was quick-witted, quickly realized who ‘that bastard’ was. Before he could say that he was looking for him, his mother quickly spoke in a rough voice.

“That bastard… did that. Our… Eun-soo… Eun-soo wasn’t madly in love with him, but that damn jerk… our Eun-soo…”

“What are you talking about?”

Woo-hyun’s eyes turned sharp. The words that barely came out were not words that he could easily ignore.

His mother spewed the story while sobbing like a madman. Woo-hyun heard a situation in which the truth he knew was so brutally overturned that he didn’t even think about calming her down.

She said that not long after Eun-soo’s funeral, the police came to see her. She said that the motel owner belatedly handed over Eun-soo’s diary, saying that he had found it in the trash, and that she read it all in her seat and it tore her heart apart.

According to the contents of the diary, it was true that Eun-soo had been in love with Yi-woon for a while, who was acting pitifully, but it was not because of love that she abandoned her mother and ran away with him.

She did not have the courage to erase the child who was wriggling in her belly, and most of all, she did not want to make the child fatherless like herself. And so, she followed him with the thought that he would take responsibility for the family.

She believed that he could do it if he tried hard.

Eun-soo’s life there was hell. Yi-woon ordered Eun-soo to act like ‘someone’ and wanted her to dress like ‘someone’.

And then one day, he demanded that she change her name. Like an idiot, Eun-soo tried to keep up with his ridiculous orders.

She thought that if she did so, he would love the child in her belly. She hoped that even if he didn’t love her, he would love and protect the child as their father.

However, Yi-woon’s actions went too far, and in the end, he ran away with everything she needed, including all her possessions. Eun-soo searched everywhere for Yi-woon, lost the child in her belly and strangled herself in a sense of guilt.

She said that all of this was explicitly written in the diary. His mother beat her chest, saying that the pain, frustration, and despair that Eun-soo felt had been transmitted to her in its entirety. A horrible cry erupted from her parted lips.

The diary Eun-soo wrote while saying that her insides would melt away if she didn’t tell someone, was obviously thrown away in case someone saw it.

“She could put up with everything else… But she couldn’t stand thinking it was her fault that she lost the baby. Sob. As it became too much, she made that choice… If that bastard hadn’t abandoned our Eun-soo… She wouldn’t have lost her child…! Sob, sob.”

As he heard all of that, the violence that Yi-woon inflicted on Eun-soo flashed through Woo-hyun’s mind. Even Eun-soo’s behavior of trying to accept the violence without thinking about it. At the end, when the child she had cherished left her, she seemed to have struggled with guilt.

When he thought of Eun-soo, who used to say that she was living because she had hope, and all the frustration and pain she must have suffered until she made the most hopeless choice, all the expression disappeared from Woo-hyun’s face. Blood completely drained from his fingertips.

“That bastard… Please kill him. Please, Woo-hyun… I beg of you. How distressing it must have been for that poor child. Hm? Please. Sob, sob.”

His mother sobbed and passed out as if she had run out of breath. The nurse and the doctor rushed in. In all those moments, Woo-hyun stood there without moving.

The sound felt vague and far away, and everything flowed slowly. Amid that, he remembered the young Eun-soo, smiling at him innocently.

“Later on, I’ll get married to a wonderful prince and have beautiful children. A son who resembles the prince, and a daughter who resembles me.”

In her thorny life, Eun-soo always dreamed of a happy family. She was strangely obsessed with family, so it was natural for her to go out of her mind.

However, to him, it wasn’t natural that Eun-soo had died like this.