Chapter 60: The Brother He Left Behind

His father was a novelist, and his mother had been his junior in university.

After dating for four years, his parents got married.

Choi Young was born to them, and a few years later, he gained a younger brother five years his junior.

His mother was delighted, saying that this child too had turned out pretty, the spitting image of her husband.

She repeatedly showed the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes to someone who seemed uninterested in whom the child resembled, asking if he was not beautiful.

To Choi Young, the baby in his mother’s arms looked like a dandelion seed.

Small and white, as though he would fly away with a single breath.

“He’s pretty.”

Pressing his fingers into his younger brother’s soft cheeks became young Choi Young’s hobby.

Haesu found him extremely annoying.

Even though he could not crawl yet.

If he had not been so cute, Young might have felt hurt and taken revenge.

He might have pinched his cheeks or tickled the backs of his chubby knees.

By the time Haesu was four, Young realized it was simply in his nature.

Haesu had been sensitive and mean from the day he was born.

He was gentle only when he was in a good mood.

Otherwise, he avoided people as much as possible without quite crossing the line into hurting their feelings.

If Choi Young had not had such a gentle personality, always giving Haesu everything he liked, this house would have been noisy with fights between brothers every day.

Around the age of twelve, Young became so absorbed in putting things Haesu liked into his hands and watching him smile that he realized something only much later.

The peace that had tightly held their home together was loosening.

Little by little, it was losing its original form and rusting away.

Choi Young was the first to find out about his father’s affair.

Once, he saw his father passionately kissing someone who was not his mother in a parking lot.

They had probably tried to avoid places that were too open.

But there was nothing Young could do when the ball he had been playing with Haesu rolled into the parking lot.

[This is a lie, right?]

They said his father’s affair partner was a successful actress.

One day, Young turned on the television and saw the person his father had kissed screaming and crying on the screen.

[How could you do this to me…?]

She was playing someone betrayed by the husband she loved.

She cried, screamed, and threw things.

What she was acting out felt like his mother’s life.

In the next scene, a family that had lost everything and fallen apart appeared.

Young thought their family would soon become like that too.

That night, he could not calm his pounding heart, so he fell asleep holding Haesu.

Haesu whined until he fell asleep, apparently bothered by Young clinging to him.

But the baby-like scent coming from his younger brother calmed him down.

Around dawn, everything young Choi Young had feared happened.

From the room beyond, he heard sounds exactly like the ones that had come from the television earlier.

His father shouted, and his mother cried.

There were also sounds of things breaking and snapping.

Crash!

It had to be the ornament Haesu treasured breaking.

It was the only glass item that would have been in the living room.

“Even when everyone told me, I didn’t believe it, did I?”

“You should have just believed them.

Then we could have separated a long time ago.”

“…What did you just say?”

His mother seemed desperate to believe it was not true.

That her husband had fallen for an actress he worked with.

That the happiness they had built over the years had scattered because of it.

She seemed unwilling to accept it no matter what.

“Tell me it’s a lie…”

“Get a divorce.

That’s what I wanted to say.”

At that time, Young covered both of sleeping Haesu’s ears so he would not wake up.

But he could not cover his own ears.

So he absorbed every word he heard exactly as it was.

His mother was pitiful.

Young felt sorry for her.

He hoped she would live well, as if to show his father.

And he hoped Haesu, who had not heard any of it, would continue living without ever knowing.

Until Haesu became the target of her anger, Young pitied his mother.

When his seven-year-old brother came home from kindergarten after drawing his dream for the future, his mother slapped him.

What had their Haesu drawn as the thing he wanted to become when he grew up?

His mother’s weak, gentle voice asking that question changed into a scream that tore through the room.

Slap.

Slap!

The drawing Haesu had proudly shown his mother and Young was torn into pieces before his eyes.

On the torn paper, Haesu had drawn himself inside a television.

He had imagined himself becoming an actor.

The dream he had colored with his tiny hands and crayons collapsed helplessly beneath a cruel hand.

Haesu’s precious childhood dream was simply treated as something worthy of being beaten for.

Young wanted to think his mother had only lost her mind for a moment.

But he could not.

She raised her hand a second time.

A third time.

And she continued doing so afterward.

For the first time in his life, Young shoved his mother away and shouted.

Haesu, too shocked even to cry, hid in Young’s arms.

“Stop it!

Why are you hitting him?

Why?”

“……”

“I’ll kill everyone.

I really will.

So stop it.”

Around that time, Young had become sick of both his father, who saw immorality as freedom, and his mother, who could not let go of that father.

After their parents divorced, Young deliberately sent Haesu to live with their father and chose to live with their mother himself.

It was all because of Haesu.

Haesu might feel lonely living under a father who already had no affection for his children.

But Young thought it would still be better than growing up being beaten.

At least his father had never raised a hand against Haesu.

More than anything, Young was afraid Haesu would never be able to dream again.

He believed this was a choice made for Haesu.

And so, he had been separated from Haesu for ten years.

When Young finally found his father, who had long since cut contact and disappeared, he wanted to kill everyone just as he had said ten years earlier.

His father was barely in Korea.

He was not living with Haesu at all.

Then what about his younger brother, who would have been only seventeen?

Did he have no one to wake him up in the morning?

Did he return from school and turn on the lights in an empty living room by himself?

Young could not bear thinking about it.

His feet moved toward the place where Haesu lived on their own.

“Haesu.”

Haesu, it’s me.

It’s your brother.

No matter how many times he called, there was no response from inside the house.

Young assumed Haesu was asleep.

Or perhaps he was attending an academy after school, doing his best to live his own life despite being alone.

Young thought that was why he stayed out until late at night.

He only learned that he had been assuming everything in whatever way suited him after he went to Haesu’s school.

Haesu had been intentionally avoiding him.

He had refused to meet Choi Young.

That was what Haesu’s homeroom teacher told him.

It meant that family itself was a trauma for Haesu.

And even Choi Young, who had cherished him so dearly, was not an exception.

Young had thought those memories might not even remain inside Haesu.

He found it difficult to accept that, to Haesu, school teachers, community-center employees, and neighbors might now be better than Young, whose face he had not seen for all those years.

Haesu was always in the mirror Young had placed there to look at his own face.

Whenever he caught a glimpse of Haesu in the face he hated because it resembled their father, he became endlessly forgiving.

Young hoped that Haesu, too, might sometimes look in the mirror and remember Choi Young, who looked somewhat like him.

He wanted to tell Haesu that he had spent ten years missing him.

But he could not.

Young did not want to force himself into something Haesu did not want.

Greetings between him and his precious younger brother became something possible only through the mirror.

Are you doing well?

Are you not lonely or suffering?

Are you doing the things you said you wanted to do?

Still, Young occasionally heard news about Haesu.

From Haesu’s high-school homeroom teacher, he learned that Haesu had become a university student.

From the elderly couple next door, who had quietly looked after Haesu while he lived alone, he heard that Haesu had looked very happy when he left that house.

That was enough to keep him going.

After hearing those things, Young felt as though he could breathe a little easier.

He smiled for no reason, feeling both regretful and relieved that Haesu had grown up well even without someone beside him.

He wondered whom Haesu had taken after.

It took almost twenty years for them to reunite.

By then, they had long become worse than strangers.

Feelings like affection and tearful longing had gradually faded.

Young came to understand the saying that no news was good news.

Whenever he missed Haesu, he picked up his phone.

Sometimes, he even blamed himself for typing those three precious syllables into a search bar.

He saw Haesu again in a hospital room.

It was a time when Haesu had already exhausted both his body and mind after hearing that his lover had fallen into a coma, suffering a miscarriage, and dealing with the aftereffects of physical injuries.

Young found Choi Haesu through his agency.

It was an uncharacteristically reckless thing to do.

He did not hesitate over intruding into Haesu’s life.

When he heard that Haesu, at twenty-five, an age when he should have been able to do anything, was suspending all activities indefinitely, his blood turned cold.

Had he been hurt that badly?

Young was only an ordinary person.

What if Haesu was truly close to death, but it had not become public…?

Perhaps because it concerned Haesu, the anxiety that headed toward the worst possibilities became impossible to control in either speed or scale.

📚 Also on NHV Novels

Evil Organization Executive, Forced to Become a Magical Girl

ComedyGender BenderGirlsLove

Read Now →
Not interested