“Woah…. I expected a sad story, but that….. it’s a saga.” Greta eyes me over her cup of warm cocoa, illuminated by the dawn glow as we sit by the windows on the second floor. She was quiet and attentive and offered hugs and tissues as needed. I don’t know why I held off being honest with her about everything before now, as I did not feel like she was judging me once through my storytelling. I know she wouldn’t use who I am for personal gain, and it somehow feels like a huge weight has been lifted just by her knowing who I am.
We have an unadulterated view of the tiny village, streets up here, and the vast chaotic ocean as it tosses to and fro. Its immense power and size remind me how insignificant and vulnerable humans are, yet it can also instill a sense of peace inside me. Like the night of the accident, it’s misty in the distance of the dull morning light, and you can’t see the landscape, the mountains of the surrounding mainland, or the other smaller islands out there. We feel disconnected and alone. Somehow cocooned in our safe bubble.
Curled with blankets and using the cozy couches placed here for the sea view. We sat all night while I told her everything there was to know about who Sohla Park was and everything that led her to this moment. I held nothing back. Even the parts I’m ashamed of and why I took Jyeon’s car that night. I’m a little apprehensive after sharing every detail of my life; no holds barred, it changes how she sees me, but her non-reaction is comforting.
“They say you don’t quite grasp how bad your situation is until you see the horror on a person’s face who hears your story for the first time. I always thought we were normal and doing our best, but…. you looked pretty disgusted a few times.” I point out with a self-deprecating chuckle.
“Baby girl, what you were dragged up in, is the saddest elitist bullshit I have ever heard. You were objectified from the age of eleven and treated as a possession to elevate your husband’s family. They didn’t see you as a human, and they didn’t once stop to ask how you felt or what you needed.”
“I know.” I can’t exactly argue now it’s all there in black and white. Telling it without being part of it highlights how much Jyeon and I never controlled our own lives. We were puppets who did as we were told, and any hint of straying came with cruel consequences. Him, as much as I, was controlled to the point of not even being allowed to experience love without it carrying a heavy weight of responsibility. They drove a wedge between us, mistrust and competitiveness, even if that was never obvious.
“Do you think he did it?” She prods gently with her question, tensing a little because this topic is what started the spewing out of all my shame and secrets and started my hour-long sobbing fit early in the day. I still cannot get my head around it.
“Everything points to that when we lay it out and keep emotions out of it. Yet…….”
“Your heart says he never would, right?”
I nod, my chest aching once more as I swirl this around in my head and come up with the same hellish confusion as before. I know him. From birth to three weeks ago, I have barely spent time not connected to him in some way. No one knows him better than me.
“I love him. Jyeon isn’t a killer. He’s not manipulative or heartless. His mother maybe, but not him.” I swirl my cocoa in my mug and sigh as I tug the blankets around my shoulder. We’ve been up all night, watching the sun go down and come back again, yet I’m no further forward. I’m cold and exhausted, emotionally drained, but no clearer-headed. No less wounded to know I’m now legally dead. I cannot let that sink in at all. It doesn’t seem real.
“You said that Jyeon and his mother were holed up in her study when you left. Maybe he convinced her that it was over between you, and he’d never go back. Maybe she’s the one who decided you were excess to requirements and sided with him to get rid of you—seeing that as a controllable outcome. Didn’t you say she threatened you when you told him you would ruin him? That he’s obedient to a fault regarding his parent’s wishes and doing what’s best for OLO and his position there.” Greta has a sharp mind and evaluates all of this as an outsider looking in, taking out the feelings, and seeing only the players and the reasons. I know things are never that simple in life, and you must know all the characters to make an educated guess.
“I don’t know. She raised me since I was fifteen, she’s been my mother all that time, and before that, she was like an aunt.”
“But did she ever treat you like she loved you?”
I’m silenced as I think about it. Jogging back through thousands of memories and days between us. To her presence that was ever looming, even before my mother left me. It’s mixed and confusing because what I saw as love maybe was just her way of bringing me in, controlling me, and grooming me to be what she wanted me to be. I always respected her but also feared her.
When I was pregnant, she showed me another side of her that pushed me to do what I did. She was ruthless, cold, and annoyed that we screwed up the plans for OLO’s future by falling. Work had to come first. We had goals she set, still acting VP at the time and slowly receding to let me take over. I was her stand-in, so stopping to have a baby would have ruined everything. Her retirement, her letting go of OLO. Her helping her son in his new position.
Jyeon had to grieve. When my Park father passed away, she made it clear my physical condition was secondary to her son getting through his darkest days. When I bled, she told me it was nothing. I should wear flat shoes and sit more. Yet she’s the one who booked the flight to sign contracts when the hospital wanted to keep me in for observation. I was so conditioned never to question or argue, thinking she knew best, that I let her push me. I was fit and healthy and didn’t feel like my baby was struggling, so I allowed it. The blood spotting was light, and I had no pain. These are the things I repeated to myself as I boarded that flight, while deep down, I hesitated.
After I lost Tia, I guess the fact that she never once brought it up or treated me poorly like Jyeon did was a sign that my baby was of little concern to her. She was never maternal, not even when Yoonah and Jyeon were young, and I guess I never really saw it before then. In her head, it was the best option, and she has not tried to push me to have another in the last four years. Always, it was OLO, and our ten-year plan, before heirs played a role.
“Your silence sort of answers that question.” Greta’s face turns serious, bringing me back out of my daze, and she takes a sip of her drink. Her brows knitted together bitterly, visualizing what kind of life I led. It washes me with guilt that I allowed myself to be a puppet and that I was never honest with Jyeon about any of it. He, too, lived the same life, yet we never talked to one another like we should have. Always the invisible barrier created by his rebellion over our marriage. His distance as he internalized everything made him miserable too. He tried to be a good husband for a short time, but it was always clear he wasn’t there with me.
“With me dead…. everything that was mine goes to Jyeon. He’s still my husband. My shares, my inheritance, my property, cars, possessions…. It all goes to him.” It’s a blanket statement, a realization that I became broke and nothing in a world that only cares about power and wealth in the blink of an eye.
“If that’s not motive, then what is, Anna? You can say it a thousand times but look at what’s staring us right in the face. Maybe he’s not a killer, but he does what he’s told when it comes to his family, and he isn’t innocent in anything that you have been through.”
I lean forward, release my arms from the blanket, and rub my middle fingers on my temples simultaneously, trying to combat the headaches caused by hours of emotional outpouring. I’m so drained. My mind’s in chaos; my heart has shriveled and feels like a solid and cold lump of rock in my chest.
She’s right though. He can be strong, commanding, mature, and in control, if it doesn’t interfere with his parent’s wishes. It’s his Achilles heel and partly why I was so secure that he would never have an affair. Wasn’t I the same? It’s a form of brainwashing. It’s how we were raised, and neither of us ever realized we had the tiniest say in things.
“I could return. Make it public. I would get everything back and cause mayhem in the process over how they lied and produced a body. That’s a bunch of criminal charges on top of everything else. They falsified my death. That in itself would run Jyeon into ruin.”
“And yet you don’t think they can tamper with a car to off you? Do you think they’ll let you reappear now? If you show up in a swarm of ‘here I am,’ what realistically will they do? That thought scares me. They offed you for threatening his position. What will they do for creating a mass scandal and implicating more of them and damaging the entire company?”
“Arrgghhhhh.” I let out a strangled noise of despair and throw my blankets off. Exhaling heavily, getting up to pace while stretching out my arms and cracking my neck from side to side to work out the knots. I am frustrated, weighted with pressure, and so tired I can’t think straight.
This is my family, husband, and entire existence, even though what she’s saying makes perfect sense… It’s crazy and sounds like a movie plot. I just can’t.
“Let’s just say that IF, and it’s a big IF…..Jyeon did want me gone; then it’s pretty much a given that if I turn up alive to ruin their plans, they’ll make me disappear for a second time. As payback. To shut me up. The only way I could protect myself was to hand myself to the media and make it a big deal. I would only be making enemies, though, and they would use everything that happened to paint me as a crazy vindictive bitch who staged her own death after tormenting my husband for having an affair. I know how that world works. I won’t get out unscathed. And then …. maybe a real suicide, by their hands.”
Greta looks completely incensed that this twisted and horrid situation could be a reality and frowns as she thinks it through. She squeezes her mug half to death before slamming it down.
“What about your money? Can’t you just empty an account online to another, take it, and hide here? They might know you’re alive but haven’t found you this far. This place is so off the beaten track and backwoods that they would have no thought to look in this direction. Why go back at all? You don’t know if these people ever cared about you or if they’re the ones who did this. Let them sweat, knowing you took all your money and ran.”
“I’m dead, remember. All my accounts will be frozen while they go through the legal steps to transfer my equity to my next of kin. I won’t get access unless I go through the proper procedure of proving I’m alive and I’m me. That involves going back and doing everything we just figured could be my undoing.” I sigh it out. I know it’s hypothetical and might not be close to the truth, but she has me scared. Looking at the bigger picture, maybe I’ve been naïve all these years. After all, these people forced their children to wed to keep their money and company in their hands. There’s no telling what they are capable of, and I’ve been burying my head in the sand my whole life.
“They have you over a barrel and don’t even know you never died. How can these people call themselves your family? You deserve more than this bullshit.”
Greta pushes away from the table, leans back, abandoning her drink, and crosses her arms over her chest in a sulky fashion. A brow so low it’s scrunching up her entire face.
“If I’d let them know I was alive when I woke up in hospital….” I regret it now that everything is unraveling, and I feel like I’m losing my grip on what’s mine. Questioning my choice and knowing this is an outcome of my own doing—karma for hurting them by staying silent.
“You might be dead for real already. Who knows what they would have done to find out you didn’t die after they drove you off a cliff? You have to stop avoiding the detail right there, Anna. Someone….. either Jyeon, your mother, or someone related in that family with access to your garage intended for one of you to die. And I don’t think it was him.” Her tone is stern, and she scolds me.
“I know, okay, I know. You think I don’t want to face it and listen to you. It’s just hard. I love those people. I can’t process it. Even him, even now, I love him, and I don’t want to feel this way, knowing he might have hated me that much. I grew up with them. They raised me. I never in a million years thought Jyeon would have an affair and my life would come crashing down on top of me, so how am I supposed to swallow the fact he might have tried to kill me? I feel like I’ve lived in a solitary bubble and saw only what I wanted to see.” Tears blur my vision as the floodgates burst once more, and my voice rasps as my throat constricts. My chest and heart are aching again and tying my stomach in knots. We keep repeatedly going over it, and it’s making me dizzy with the utter lack of control of my emotions. Breaking that day I caught him with her seems to be the turning point in my ability to bottle everything up inside. Crying is becoming second nature now. He broke the dam, and now it won’t stop.
“You said there were more Park family members in OLO. Uncles, grandfather, and God knows who else…. what about any of them? Would they take the initiative, and yet Jyeon still obey them and put the key there, knowing it wasn’t safe?”
I know what she’s getting at. No matter who we find to blame and pinpoint, the certainty they would benefit from my death doesn’t take away one small, crucial fact. Jyeon laid the key right there, and it was his car. A car he knew I would target and be mad over because of what it symbolized to us.
He loaded the gun with his words that night and walked off to leave me with the opportunity to take it. His cell phone was a catalyst because he knew if I looked at it, the texts, calls, messages, and whatever else he had with that woman would push me over the edge. Maybe he thought I would look through it and then take the car in a rage. I was so stupid not to piece it together. When did he ever leave his phone lying around so carelessly?
“I had twenty-eight percent, and so did Jyeon. Between the two of us, we are both major shareholders, and the only reason he took the President position was that I let him. I didn’t contest it or ask the board to vote because I was raised to be his second-hand man. Even though I could run the entire company alone, it never crossed my mind to rise above him, as my purpose was to assist. His family all relies on Jyeon being the head. Their profits, their image, and their fat cushy lives. Keeping it in the family, they all have their finger in the pies he bakes up for them. They are all his blood relations, and all still do what their grandfather asks of them. Even at ninety, that old miser still whispers in mother’s ear and has a say in most things.”
“So, in the case of you two divorcing and you pulling out your bitch card and dethroning him, they would all suffer. You would be the queen bee, and there’s no telling what you would do about your ex’s family being a major part of your company while in the throes of revenge. They had to be worried that you would somehow separate the Parks from OLO.”
“Pretty much. I mean, it’s not an easy task, but with the right scandal, I could have made an impact that way.” I sigh, walking back to the window and staring at the fading orange glow as our winter sun climbs higher in the sky to signal a new day. A beautiful view that I can’t appreciate while feeling this way. It does nothing to warm the icy cold inside me or my heaviness and pain.
“It’s an entire family fucking conspiracy. You had to go… no matter what. In the hours you went to see her and your parents’ graves, it’s all the time they needed to talk it out. They couldn’t let you cause a scandal, and they couldn’t let you take control. Maybe it’s not just Jyeon or your mother-in-law at all, maybe it was a combined effort, and that entire family wanted to tie up loose ends.” Her words hang in the air between us. “For all you know, they tracked the car and followed you to be sure to finish you off if a crash failed. The possibilities are endless.’
Knowing how many wealthy families have politicians, officers, and such in their back pockets, it’s not hard to believe she might be onto something. Corruption, greed, and destructive power struggles. It's what’s gone on around me my whole life. Being sized up and treated like prime livestock with every daughter and son in our city. Young heirs were willing to seduce Jyeon or me to get in on the golden egg that OLO was. Our money, our status. Many have killed for less in our culture’s history. We’ve never been people.
“Please tell me your parents died of a real accident and not brake failure,” Greta adds as an afterthought, and I turn to her with a sad frown at their mention, knowing why her brain has gone there. I exhale with the weight of all of this.
“It was a genuine accident—a tragic pile-up occurred when a truck Jackknifed on a snowy night. My parents and many others lost their lives on that highway. My father-in-law saw my dad as his brother, and he never recovered from his death, so I know it’s not suspicious.”
It’s the one truth I can rely on. I saw It for myself. I felt the genuine love between my dad and Jyeon’s. Both when he was alive and in the aftermath of their accident. The two men who brought our families together and the reason we crumbled. My parents loved Jyeon and Yoonah like they were my real cousins.
“You can’t go back. You know that, right? We have talked it around in circles, knowing everything you lived through and what you’ll face if you do…… don’t go back. Please.” She pleads, losing all anger and frostiness, and instead, her eyes mist, and a wobble in her voice tugs at my heartstrings.
“Greta, … I ….”
“Please. I know it’s selfish, but I don’t want you to go there. What if we’re right, and it puts you in danger? What if everything goes to shit, and you end up dead for real. What do I do then? I’m crazy attached to you and would cry like crazy if anything happened to you. I’m scared for you. They never loved or appreciated you. You weren’t happy with them. You weren’t worth anything to them. That’s not true for me…you’re my family. You don’t need to go back anymore.”
Her words hit a sore note in my soul, and I have to bite my bottom lip to curb the urge to cry. I am warmed by her affection that feeds a craving I’ve had for so many years, unfulfilled. To feel seen and have someone care about me. To experience real familial love again. I know Yoonah cares, but it's always been a selfish love, where he wanted me romantically and clung to me while expecting me to solve all his life problems. Yoonha was needy and wanted a mother figure because his real one sucked.
“I’m not innocent. I’ve been an awful person and done so many things. I was hateful. If I do nothing, the money just disappears. With that, I could rebuild the village, buy you ten thousand of these shacks and start a chain. Make your life completely different so we’d never have to worry about money again. Pay my dues for being a cold, heartless bitch for so much of my life.” I point out and watch as her expression crumbles.
“I don’t want it. Money caused this, and money is why your life is in ruins. They made you that way. That money did. If we’re broke for the rest of our lives, but you get to stay, live, and find happiness, maybe even love, I don’t care about any of that. We don’t need it. We’ll get through without money like I always have.”
It’s weird to hear someone value me the person, coming with nothing at all, over everything that always symbolized my importance. Stripped away all of it, Sohla Park wouldn’t have been wanted by anyone in the world I come from. Here, Greta only sees the dirty, ragged girl she found on the road and has nothing to her name except scars and memories. It overwhelms me that I could hold value this way.
“The question is…. Can you live without what’s yours?” Greta calms down and asks with her maternal and severe tone, sniffing back her upset.
I sigh heavily and turn back to the ocean view. Watching the foamy waves lapping and moving up onto the sand, stretching out with every stroke as it starts to come in and cover the landscape. Washing it, hiding it away so that when it’s revealed again in a few hours, none of the pebbles and shells will be in the same place, and so much debris and seaweed will be washed into the vast ocean to settle elsewhere—making everything shiny, new, and fresh. It feels symbolic. Like Greta could be my sea.
“If you had asked me that three weeks ago, I would have said no. Maybe deep down, though, something in my gut told me not to reach out and go back to them, and I couldn’t understand why…… Now? If losing all of that means I get to stay healthy and safe and where I’m wanted ….. a place I might be able to let Jyeon out of my heart, then yes. I can live without it. All of it.”
My father’s legacy, my inheritance, my home, my marriage. It's all tied together in a big black ball of sodden string that has bound and suffocated me for years. I never stopped to look up at the sky the entire time I was wasting my life for the benefit of others. This village is nothing but sky, sea, and simplicity, which I think I want and need more than anything from here on in.
I don’t want to know if Jyeon tried to kill me because my heart can’t take that kind of a blow at all. It’s cowardly to run away from it, and I know Yoonie would never have been a part of it. It’s idiotic to suspect all of them without proof, but Greta is right. I need to face the reality that going back could be my end. Either physically or mentally, I was barely holding on as it was before all of this. I was tumbling towards a breaking point, and that accident might have saved me.
“If you do this, you can never go back. You’ll never be her again. You’ll let the name Sohla Park… Kim, die for real. That night, that accident, she left this world. It’s a line in the sand that you can’t cross back from. We’ll need to develop a story and some papers for you, so only Anna will be found if anyone comes looking. Anna Tarry.”
I stare at the waves and feel under my shirt by my collar for the chain Greta gave me at the hospital. I search out the metal ring I’ve kept hidden under my clothes, unable to throw it away as a connection to the me I was hiding from. I slide my hand around my platinum wedding band, the tiny diamonds dotted within in an inner ring, poking at my palm and squeezing it tight. My only link to the girl I was and a sentimental item that I know I shouldn’t keep close to my heart anymore. My connection to Jyeon.
“My only regret about letting Sohla go…..is that I’ll never be able to tell my parents or Tia that I’m sorry for abandoning them. Yoonah never deserved this either, and I’m leaving him to suffer.” It chokes me to say her name out loud, and I have a pang of regret knowing I won’t ever be able to venture near their graves or that city for a long, long while. I can’t show my face. If I died, I can’t be a ghost who wanders near their lives.
“Yoonah is a Park. You were forced to take care of him, be his sister, and be burdened by his love for you so that he never let go to find a life or a wife of his own. It may hurt for now, but you’re freeing him too. He can bury you in his heart and finally move on to find love. It’s better for him to be able to let you go. You said it yourself that he was obsessively reliant on you and never dated anyone while he looked to you for hope.”
I know she’s trying to comfort me and reinforce that my decision is correct, but it doesn’t move the heavy stick wedged in my soul. I'm confused about what’s true and what’s not and broken-hearted for what I know I’m choosing to let go of once and for all. It’s more than family and bonds. It’s an entire existence, a way of living, my own identity. My wealth has always been there. I’ve never known how to survive without it or learn to live as normal humans do.
I know that maybe I made this decision when I chose not to tell them I was alive three weeks ago. Possibly I just didn’t dare to admit it out loud. To examine the real reasons I couldn’t reach out to them. It’s a messy, tangled web of a million reasons and none stand out proud from the others. However, it all points to one answer. Stay.
My life strangled me and hurt me. It was a high-pressure pot waiting to pop, and it finally did. When that happens, it’s impossible to fit the contents back inside and put the lid back on the way it was before. Jyeon’s affair was the increase of heat that blew my cap off. My contents are shattered and expanded bits of chaos, and my pot got dented and can’t be used the same way.
My life will never return to what it was, even if I go back. I can’t undo the hurt. I can’t fix the unfixable, and I already lost Jyeon, my entire reason for existing in that world. I don’t know if he tried to kill me or if all of this is a freak act of fate in a bid to make me start over and find my wings, but I know one thing for sure. Sohla Park died that night. Everything about me that I accepted as my fate was ripped away.
“I’ll take one day at a time. Maybe I’ll change my mind. If I don’t make a solid decision, then maybe I’ll be clearer about it and rationally look at all this objectively. I need breathing space to let it sink in. I need some normality for just a little while. Is that okay? That I don’t decide right now? That I take time to let it all sink in?”
There’s a long pause while Greta regards me with a thoughtful frown. Pensively inhaling deeply, and then she finally nods, slow and exaggerated.
“Okay….. One day at a time. No pressure. We make no plans and see how we go. I’ll back you no matter what, you know that, right? You’re my sister now, and I won’t let anything happen to you. Whether you stay or go back, I’ll hold your hand and protect you every step. Whatever your decision, this is your home, and I’ll be right here.”