“I can’t do this!” I snap at Greta for the fiftieth time as water sloshes all over me, and I lose my grip on the plate I am attempting to wash and send it skidding across the huge steel tub before it smashes to smithereens. Cursing myself for first scalding my own hands with hot water and then managing to crack three glasses that I dropped in the sink before I realized I should place them in carefully. I’m losing my last nerve. How is this so hard to master when it seems a relatively straightforward task? Everything is so slippery, and this sink is like a bathtub; it’s vast. I’m soaked all over, even through my apron, because of the way water slops up anytime I dip crockery into it.
“You’re such a quitter. Can you stop being such a drama queen and pipe down? We have a dinner party out there to impress.” Greta flicks bubbles at me as she leans in to grab a plate I successfully stack on the rack. The first that didn’t immediately slide off right back into this water and delivered me a face slap of foam. She’s jumping between cooking and serving today for a rare booking, leaving me unsupervised. It’s someone’s birthday in the village, and we got the honor of being the venue.
“I hate this.” I moan for the umpteenth time, unhappy with all of the manual tasks I have been doing these past few days. Nothing challenges me mentally, yet I feel like a useless idiot for not knowing how to vacuum or wring out a mop. I didn’t even know dusting was a daily thing or that laundry was such a complicated process of separating items. God forbid I try to cook again after setting the eggs on fire when I tried to scramble some in my first-ever culinary lesson. I’ve always been a high achiever in everything, but this shit right here has me tearing my hair out.
“Can’t half tell you were a princess in your previous life. Do you ever stop complaining? Suck it up, wench. If you continue to whine, I’ll make you clean the grease traps.” She warns me, then bats me on the head with the plate as she walks off, and I throw a fistful of bubbles after her. Scowling her way and stamping my foot like a child.
Two weeks, two God-damned long and challenging weeks of an aching body and shattered temper daily, and I’m wondering what the fuck I was thinking. This is hell. All we do is clean, repair, cook, and run around like idiots, doing what seem like menial and pointless tasks, all in the name of living. I’ve never wanted my mansion and housekeeper and my cushy office job more in my life. I can’t believe I ever viewed them as unimportant things and lived ignorant of how ordinary people survive. I’ve never lived without money and watching Greta be frugal and stretch out her earnings has blown my mind.
It’s insane that there’s such a divide between the classes, and I was brought up oblivious to it. People can get by on a measly income and spend minimal dollars on luxuries. One piece of my old clothing costs more than everything Greta owns.
It’s not the picnic I thought it would be, but I don’t want to leave. I’m still not ready, and the longer it goes on, the more I feel panicky and incapable of returning to face my old life. The responsibilities of everything, now absent, made me realize how weighed down and suffocated I was. How little my feelings mattered, and it was expected that I take care of every problem and detail without question. The blame was always on my head, no matter what it was, and I was the one always to fix everything. I’m not constantly suffocated with responsibility for so many people. This taste of freedom, although physically tiring, is a hundred times easier to deal with mentally.
“You drive me crazy,” I yell after her and know it’s not her but my inability to adjust, and I feel inferior because of it. I watch these people come in and out of their fishing boats. Stack up at the harbor and work their asses off all day without one single complaint. A grandmother of ninety-two, shelling seafood on the coldest days for hours, yet I stood for ten minutes and wanted to leave.
They’re a different breed of people entirely. They don’t feel the cold or blink at standing in the rain, oblivious to gale-force winds. They spend all their time carrying things, fixing things, or looking for stuff to be doing to fill up any hours of daylight they have. It’s exhausting. They make it look like endless and brutal work yet call it happiness. I have seen genuine contentment among them, something I never saw in my world.
“Hmmm. I don’t have time to care.” She blows me a kiss, heads back to the stove, and places her dish among the twenty others before sharing the clam stew with them all, and I turn back to my task and slap my hands into the sudsy pool with a vengeance. My temper has been yoyoing crazily since I left the hospital, and I know partly I’m still suffering from delayed shock and complications from my head injury, but it doesn’t ease my mood. I’m only now getting rid of the severe cold virus while recovering from hypothermia.
“I used to have two hundred dollar manicures and moisturizing glove treatments, and I’m reduced to putting my hands into pink rubber and scraping other people’s food off dinnerware,” I mutter, but she hears me.
“You’re a snob. If you miss it that much, the doors over there. Don’t let me stop you, and don’t let it hit you on the ass on the way out. I’ll tell the village you ran away because you’re a giant ungrateful wuss who’s afraid of dishwater!” She threatens me, and I eyeroll at her and go back to scrubbing like a maniac and slamming crockery on the rack.
“I’m not washing the floors today. It’s your turn.’ I snap at her and catch the fleeting little smile on her face because she knows I’m all hot air, and her threats are empty too. We’ve developed this bickering, married couple aura these past two weeks.
“You’re shit at it anyway. You can clean the toilets instead.” She adds with an airy tone, and I blanche and spin back to stare at her in wide-eyed disgust.
“I’ll wash every floor. I’ll try harder.” I backtrack and return to silently cleaning, eyeing her up, and murmuring instead. She’s a slave laborer and a scary bitch sometimes, and she would make me clean a toilet bowl. I can’t think of anything worse. I’m not putting my hands down in any of the restaurant lavatories, not even to save my life.
“Hmmm……Take those off and help me serve.” She calls over to me, and I obediently pull off my rubber gloves and dry my hands on my apron before walking over and holding my arms out. She’s been teaching me how to stack plates along my arms to carry four or six at a time, depending on size, and I’ve managed it twice without dropping any today. It’s the little goals that keep me going.
She balances them on me to help me out, three on each arm, overlapped precariously, and I move with the graceful walking speed of a snail as I inch my way toward the kitchen door.
“If you can master doing it before it gets cold, before the end of today, I’ll give you a gold star.” She laughs at my slow progress, and I frown.
“Shut up. I’m concentrating!” I hiss at her and turn to use my butt to get outside the swing door which separates us from the restaurant; being so careful, it’s like I’m carrying a sensitive bomb. Edging backward, eyes locked onto the steaming bowls on my outstretched limbs.
A sudden abrupt lower body impact hits me like a donkey kicking my butt, makes me scream out loud, and I throw my hands in the air as a small child collides with me dramatically.
There’s a crashing, banging, showering of clam chowder, and hysterical squeal as I’m completely drenched in hot, lumpy, fishy, disgusting liquid, and everything smashes around my ankles on the floor. Bouncing up at me and spattering my trouser legs and all the walls and doors around me. An explosion of seafood and soup manages to get in my eye and up my nose simultaneously.
“Sadie!!!! NO!! I told you to stop running around.” One of the village women who run a tiny grocery store yells at her devil child and offers no help at all to my pathetic figure, standing here wearing six servings of their food. The scalding food soaked through my thin attire and made my skin itch in reaction. I am open-mouthed, shocked, and building to the worst kind of angry reaction.
“Ughhhh, Sadie, baby. Kitchens are not for playing.” Greta appears at the door, soothing, looking me up and down with sympathy and dismay, and hands me a towel like it will have any effect on this mess or me. I yank it out of her hand and turn sternly to the feral little brat—Seething, covered in a slurry of liquids, and aware of half the restaurant staring at us.
“Don’t you know what sorry is? Or how to behave? Are you just going to cause all this and say nothing to me? Do you know how dangerous running about in a restaurant is, let alone right for the kitchen door?” I snap at her, cold and furious, in a manner that I would address an adult employee who had pissed me off, uncaring about the crumpling of a small face and big watery eyes. I see Greta in the corner of my eye, sigh, and rub her temple.
Tiny terror bursts into instant tears, and her mother glares at me as though I’m the most horrible human being on the planet. She is shielding her child from this monstrous lady and pulling her away like I’m the wicked witch of the north. She says nothing, but the silent judging from her and all the customers looking this way speaks volumes.
“She’s a kid, and it was an accident. No harm, no foul. Let’s all cool down and clean up.” Greta bends down and pats her on the head, smiling gently before wiping her tears, making me rage all the more. She’s trying to diffuse the situation, but I’m not having any of it. I’m incensed.
“Teach kids to be responsible for their actions and not encourage crying every time she’s bad to get away with it. It’s an act. If you pander to it, she learns nothing.” I slam my hand on the countertop, scaring her half to death, and then storm back into the kitchen without a backward glance. Full-on rage is blowing out of me. I kick things out of the way as I march back to the sink to clean myself up, leaving the mess to them, seeing as it’s no big deal in their eyes, and I’m taking nothing to do with scraping it off every surface.
“Sometimes, I struggle to like you; you know that.” Greta comes up behind me, and as furious as I am and caught up in my rage, her words hurt me, and tears fill my eyes instantly. She’s never one to mean it when she says things like this, but my lip trembles, and I bite it to stop it from showing. My feeble idiot feelings regarding my only real friend in this place.
“I don’t care. I never asked you to like me.” Greta has this magic ability to make me an emotional and vulnerable mess with the click of her fingers. I spit it out like a child sulking and keep my head turned away so she doesn’t see how easily she brings this on nowadays.
“Whoever taught you that it was okay to be this way was wrong. Whoever told you that you weren’t allowed to make mistakes, cry because you're hurt, sad, angry, or scared, or know you messed up…. they did wrong. Mistakes are a part of life, and we all make them.”
“Don’t, okay? I don’t need this today.” I slam my hands in the water, hating that she does this. She sees behavior in me she deems problematic, and she looks for the reasons and tries to talk it out. Constantly pushing me to open up, let things go, or face them head-on. Always critical of how I was raised and what my stand-in mother molded me into.
“The kid was in the wrong. Why is no one yelling at her? Why am I the bad bitch, like always?”
“She’s five. She’s excited because it’s a party, and she gets carried away and runs into places she shouldn't. Yeah, she did wrong, but that’s not how to deal with her, Anna. If you have to tell her off, do it with kindness, so her mom at least won’t maim you. Kids don’t need anger to learn a lesson. She shouldn’t be scared of the wrath of the adults in her world.”
“So let her get burned or hurt, let me get covered in scolding stew, and yet…. don’t yell at the kid. Got it. Understood.” I snark, avoiding her eye, and flinch when she puts her hand on my arm to soothe my ruffled feathers. A gentle squeeze to cool my temper. I hate that she has already learned how to handle me in such a short time.
“You want to learn to live with everyone here; you must be more relaxed and forgiving. Adopt their way of living and doing things. Try to be more considerate of the bigger picture. Hell, if it were my kid, I would yell at her. She’s not. She’s not yours either, and it’s not our place to embarrass her mom like that in front of everyone out there. We have to get along with everyone.”
I don’t answer, and after a few minutes of watching me wipe myself down with angry motions, she wanders off to serve the plates and replace the six I broke while giving me cooling down space. Tears start rolling down my cheeks, and I sniff them back and try to reel them in.
It’s hard. Being here, doing these things, missing home and everyone there, thinking about Jyeon until I feel like I’m going insane and not dealing all that well with it. Yet, I can’t face going back either, and a part of me is becoming so dependent on the friendship and support that Greta gives me that I’ve never known that I can’t say I want to go back there at all anymore. As much as I miss all of them, and it feels like a knife in my chest most of the time, I can’t get my head around seeing them. It’s like I’m developing a weird phobia and the thought of reaching out to them starts a panic attack.
Greta and I bicker, argue, and sometimes yell at each other, but it feels more like home than back in the city ever did. I feel loved and seen for the first time since my parents died. I’ve cried more in the last two weeks here than in my entire two decades and some of life, yet she doesn’t use it like something I should be ashamed of. She doesn’t make me feel weak for harboring emotions and showing them.
I’m trying so hard to be this other person and fit in here, but I see all the glances my way, the side-eye looks. The whispering from the villagers who call me ‘Miss high and mighty’ behind my back. I feel like a freak show and an outsider, and it’s driving me crazy in a way it never used to when employees at OLO did the same thing. This feels different and worse, and I hate that I’m reduced to feeling utter shit over yelling at a clumsy kid who was one hundred percent in the fucking wrong.
“I’m going upstairs to change.” I don’t wait for her to acknowledge it but dump down the cloth I was using and yank my apron off before throwing it in the laundry we keep to one side. I head for the stairs that lead up from the privacy of the kitchen to our shared apartment and take a moment to calm down. I want time out and the solitude of up there while I thoroughly simmer.
I switch on the lights because we have limited windows in our loft conversion and turn on the radio for background noise even though it's daytime. I yank out the chest where we keep the clothes we share. It’s jeans, jeans, or jeans….and a choice of color of flannel shirt in fifteen shades. I don’t have much choice as everything she owns is tailored to living in a working village by the sea and spending too much time in cold and crappy weather.
“The long three-week search for missing heiress Sohla Kim ended today when her family announced that a body has been recovered. It’s been confirmed that the remains washed up on the Drythe river are said to be that of the ex-Vice President of OLO Enterprises. A huge name in the corporate world. A sad and tragic accident that has shaken the investment world and finally comes to an end.”
I spin and stare at the radio with an open-mouthed gawp, shocked by what I just heard, and lose all ounces of breath as I blur out the words the announcer is continuing to say and try to replay what I just heard. My brain is stammering, and my body is running cold as though I’ve just been delivered horrific news.
“A body? How can they have …… I’m not dead. How can they have remains? How can they call off a search when I’m standing right here?”
I scurry on hands and knees to the radio and turn it up, crumbling down to lean my crossed arms on my legs to support my weight and listen intently. My heart is racing, and my palms are clammy as I shake with adrenalin and convince myself I misheard it.
“Sohla Kim, married for five years to President Jyeon Park at OLO enterprises, is said to have suffered from mild depression, and thus, this tragic event is being treated as suicide. Company employees shared that Miss Kim was a cold and closed-off person who never seemed to build bonds or friendships, and the marriage, although publicly stable seemed to have its issues.”
“What? Why would they say that? They know I’d never…….. why would they lie? Why are they saying these things? Why is Jyeon letting them?” My emotion breaks, and tears fill my eyes, finding it hard to breathe as I rack my brains and try to make sense of this. Arguing with the radio out loud because I’m in such disbelief.
“His stupid fucking car…. it’s not my fault it had no brakes. What fucking body? I’m the fucking body!!!! I never did this to myself. His car did.” I rant at it, clutching my hair by the temples and leaning down to try and catch my breath to cool my shuddering gasps. Shaking so violently that I don’t know how to calm myself down. They’re making me disappear, blaming me, and making out it’s something it wasn’t.
“That’s you, huh?” Greta’s voice startles me from behind, and I fall over in fright as I turn and catch sight of her in the open doorway of the staircase. She’s carrying a fresh shirt she knows I like, and she drops it on the bed, her expression blank as though she is not surprised by what she just heard.
“So, you’re the Sohla Park they keep talking about on the radio. I kind of figure you might be. It sort of added up.” She walks to me, kneels beside me, catches my hand, and pulls me to her. Nothing in her manner says she’s angry or disappointed in finding out this way. I forget I’ve kept all this a secret from her when I’m this shell-shocked.
“They said they found my body. How?” A silent tear rolls down my nose, and she impulsively wipes it away. Her gentle expression and focus on my eyes keeping me steady.
“Money can do a lot of things; maybe they wanted closure. Maybe it’s messing with their stocks or some shit, so they’re wrapping it up. It’s been three weeks; they can’t have the public be negative about giving up so soon if they have an excuse.” She slides an arm around me and hugs me. Patting me on the back as I gulp in air and can’t seem to inflate my tight lungs.
“I know I shouldn’t be angry; this was my choice, but it’s only been three weeks, and they’re giving up. I know I should have reached out, but …….”
“I get it. Don’t explain.” She continues to rock and pat me, soothing me with a hug that starts helping me slow my breaths.
“It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t suicide. The car was tampered with …. there were no brakes, the steering….”
“Wait, what?” She sits up suddenly, hands on my upper arms, and stares me flat in the face with a look of shock.
“Are you saying someone deliberately tried to kill you?”
Her question is like a slap in the face that sobers me instantly, and something I have tried not to think about all this time is dangling there in front of me. I have deliberately fought it rising in my brain in any way because I don’t want to face it head-on. Something I wouldn’t let my mind ponder on when I wasn’t mentally strong enough to dissect it.
“It wasn’t my car. It was Jyeon’s…. he left the keys on the….” As I say the words, the blood runs cold in my stomach, and I think back to the fact that it’s precisely what he did. He placed the keys right there that night, in full view and within reach of temptation. Not in his pocket, not on the rack where his range rover keys were hung, but right in front of me like a taunting symbol he knew I couldn't resist. He knew I would take them to hurt him by hurting his pride and joy after confronting me like that.
“No…no…. I’m being stupid.” Shaking my head and using my fist to hit myself in the temple. I force it out of my skull, freezing up and running away from such illogical thoughts, refusing to believe it of him. Jyeon just wouldn’t.
“What, talk to me. Tell me.” Greta grabs my hands and pins them down, pulling me in close. I hesitate, mind scrambled, but it falls out of my mouth anyway.
“He knew I would do something petty…. he knows me like the back of his hand. When hurt, he knows I’m a knee-jerk, fiery, and stupidly immature person. If he messed with the car and left the keys….. did he know I would take it? Is that what he hoped? Is that why he put them right there before me and walked away?”
I can't process it or get my head around it because it’s not who he is. Not Jyeon, not like that. Not the boy I knew and loved. He wouldn’t hurt me that way, no matter how bad things got between us or how hard it was. I only survived these years because, under it all, I trusted him.
“What’s the motive?” Greta asks, her expression severe and her tone strained as though she’s thinking about this. And as much as my heart is saying no, the inner cold Sohla Park stands up inside me and lays it bare. Cutting through my bullshit, weak, ass self, the ice queen finds her voice.
“I threatened to destroy him and take OLO away. We were getting divorced, he was having an affair, and I could have ruined him over it. Him and his bitch. I own twenty-eight percent of OLO. I could have easily taken control.”
Even as the broken-hearted side battles to convince me otherwise, it falls out of my mouth—young Sohla, enamored by the boy she always loved, whimpering in disbelief.
“Rich people kill for less, Anna. Do you know for sure your husband didn’t look for the quickest solution to get you out of his life where you wouldn’t cause a problem anymore?”