Healing Haven 소설 – Chapter 67: The Weight of Unburned Things

# Chapter 67: The Weight of Unburned Things

The phone has been ringing for three days.

Sohyun knows this because she’s been counting—not consciously, but the way her body counts things it wants to forget. Three days since she found Minsoo’s business card. Three days since her grandfather came home from the hospital with discharge papers and a prescription for medication she’s still not sure he understands. Three days since Jihun’s last message, the one she’s read so many times the words have stopped meaning anything and started meaning everything simultaneously.

The phone is on the counter beside the espresso machine, and every time it rings—which is every four to six hours with the consistency of something that’s learned a pattern and intends to keep it—she looks at the screen and sees her mother’s name, and then she doesn’t answer.

This is what she tells herself about not answering: her mother doesn’t understand Jeju. Her mother left Jeju thirty years ago and decided in her leaving that it was a place people escaped from rather than a place people stayed in. Her mother, who lives in Seoul in an apartment that costs more per month than Sohyun’s café makes, who has never once asked what it feels like to stand in a mandarin grove at dawn, who measures success in ways that require you to move away from where you’re from.

The truth, which is harder, is that Sohyun doesn’t have the energy to lie to her mother about whether everything is fine.

The café is closed today—Monday, which is always closed, though closing feels like a luxury now, like she’s being given permission to stop pretending that normalcy is still a thing that exists. She’s in the kitchen instead, standing in front of the oven with her hands shaking in a way that reminds her of her grandfather’s hands in the hospital room, and she’s trying to remember the recipe for hotteoks because doing something with her hands is the only thing that stops her from doing something with her phone.

But the phone keeps ringing.

She doesn’t answer it the first time. She doesn’t answer it the second time, either. By the third call, she’s mixed the filling—brown sugar, cinnamon, a pinch of salt because her grandfather always said that salt is what makes sweet things actually taste like something instead of just sugar with delusions—and she’s standing in the kitchen with dough that needs to rest and a phone that won’t stop insisting on her attention, and she thinks about her mother in Seoul, probably eating a lunch that costs more than Sohyun’s daily café expenses, probably sitting at a desk that faces a window showing a view of other buildings, probably wondering why her daughter won’t answer the phone.

The fourth call comes at 2:47 PM, which is an unusual time for her mother to call. Her mother usually calls between 7 and 8 PM, that window when she’s finished work and remembered that she has a daughter, that window when the guilt is manageable and time-limited. 2:47 PM suggests something has happened. 2:47 PM suggests urgency. 2:47 PM suggests the kind of call that doesn’t wait for convenient hours.

Sohyun answers.

“Where have you been?” her mother says, and her voice has that edge to it, the one that makes Sohyun feel like she’s fourteen years old again, like she’s done something wrong by existing in a way her mother finds inconvenient. “I’ve been calling you since Friday. Since Friday, Sohyun. Do you know how that feels?”

The hotteoks are in the final stages of resting, and Sohyun is standing in the kitchen with flour dust on her apron and her hair falling out of the bun she put it in this morning, and she’s thinking about how “how that feels” is a question designed to make her responsible for her mother’s feelings, which is a trap she’s been stepping into her entire life without ever quite figuring out how to avoid it.

“I’m sorry,” Sohyun says, which is the thing you say when you’re trying to end a conversation rather than have it. “I’ve been busy. Appa had to come home from the hospital, and—”

“I know about your grandfather.” Her mother’s voice cuts through, sharp as the knife Sohyun uses to cut the hotteok dough. “That’s why I’m calling. The hospital called me. Did you know that? They called me because you’re listed as secondary contact, which apparently means they get to tell me that my father is having neurological issues and my daughter isn’t answering her phone and I’m supposed to just sit here in Seoul and pretend that’s fine.”

Sohyun sits down at the kitchen table, not because she needs to sit but because her legs have suddenly remembered that standing is something that requires energy, and energy is something she doesn’t have in the quantities her mother seems to be demanding.

“The doctors said he’s stable,” Sohyun says, which is not exactly a lie. The neurologist used the word “stable” in the context of “stable but requiring monitoring,” which is a different thing entirely, but her mother is in Seoul and her mother left Jeju thirty years ago, and Sohyun is tired of being the person who translates other people’s medical crises into language that makes them sound manageable.

“Stable.” Her mother repeats the word like it’s offensive. “He’s having memory problems, Sohyun. The hospital said he was ‘searching for a deceased family member’ during his stay. That’s not stable. That’s a sign of—” She stops, and in the stopping, Sohyun can hear her mother trying to find the words that won’t make this real. “That’s a sign of something serious.”

Outside the kitchen window, the wind is picking up the way it does in late November, when Jeju decides that autumn is officially over and it’s time to move on to the part where the weather stops asking permission. The mandarin trees are bending slightly, and Sohyun is thinking about her grandfather standing in that grove this morning, running his hands along the branches the way he always does, and how he stopped halfway through and couldn’t remember what he was looking for.

“I know,” Sohyun says quietly. “I’m taking care of him.”

“You’re taking care of him.” Her mother’s laugh is not a laugh, exactly. It’s the sound of someone who’s just realized something she’s been avoiding. “You’re twenty-eight years old, Sohyun. You own a café. You’re supposed to be building a life, not taking care of an elderly man in a house that’s falling apart on an island that has nothing to offer you except guilt.”

The hotteoks need to be fried now, and Sohyun is aware that she’s going to fry them because frying them is a thing she can control, a thing that follows rules and responds to her actions in predictable ways. She stands up from the table and moves to the stove, turning on the gas, waiting for the oil to heat.

“Is that what you think I’m doing?” Sohyun asks, and her voice sounds strange to her, like it’s coming from somewhere else, somewhere outside her body. “Is that what you think happened when I came to Jeju? That I came here to take care of Appa?”

“Isn’t that why you left Seoul?”

The oil is beginning to shimmer now, that specific moment before it’s hot enough, that moment of potential. Sohyun places the first hotteok into the oil, and it hisses like it’s angry at her.

“I left Seoul because I needed to leave Seoul,” Sohyun says. “Appa needed someone here, and I needed to be somewhere, and those things happened to be true at the same time. But I didn’t leave Seoul to come take care of him. I left Seoul because I couldn’t stay there anymore.”

“Because of what happened with Minsoo.”

It’s not a question. It’s a statement of fact, said in the way her mother says things when she’s decided she understands something without actually asking what it is. Sohyun has never told her mother what happened with Minsoo. She’s never told anyone. But her mother is good at filling in blanks with the stories she’s already decided are true, and Sohyun is too tired to correct her.

“That’s part of it,” Sohyun says, which is not a lie, exactly, but it’s not the truth either. The truth is more complicated. The truth is that Minsoo was a symptom of something larger, a way of being in Seoul that required her to be smaller than she actually was, quieter, more accommodating, more willing to accept that the shape she was taking was the only shape she was allowed to keep. But the truth is difficult to translate across the phone, difficult to make someone in Seoul understand when they’ve already decided that Jeju is a place you leave from, not a place you stay in.

“Listen to me,” her mother says, and her voice has shifted now, has become the voice she uses when she’s about to say something she thinks is important. “Your grandfather is old. He’s going to keep getting older, and he’s going to keep needing more, and eventually he’s going to die. I know that sounds harsh, but it’s true. And when that happens, you’re going to be standing in that house alone, and you’re going to have spent the best years of your life taking care of someone who can’t be saved. Is that really what you want?”

The hotteok is golden now, perfect, the kind of thing that people would pay money for and feel lucky to get. Sohyun flips it carefully, watching the other side brown.

“I don’t think about it that way,” Sohyun says.

“Then how do you think about it?”

Sohyun doesn’t answer immediately because the answer requires her to say something she’s never quite articulated, something that lives in the space between her ribs and only comes out when she’s standing in a mandarin grove at dawn or sitting in her kitchen with her hands in bread dough. She’s standing in her kitchen now, and her hands are about to touch the hotteoks, and maybe that’s close enough.

“I think about what Appa taught me,” Sohyun says. “About how you can’t rush bone broth. About how some things take time, and you can’t make them faster without ruining them. And I think about how I don’t know how many more mornings I get to stand in that grove with him, and I think that’s enough.”

There’s a long silence on the other end of the line. The kind of silence that sounds like her mother is reconsidering something, or deciding something, or recognizing something in her daughter that she’s been refusing to see.

“The business card,” her mother says finally. “Did he give you a business card? Minsoo? Did he reach out?”

Sohyun places the second hotteok into the oil. It hisses again.

“He left it in Appa’s coat pocket,” Sohyun says. “I found it when I was gathering his things from the hospital.”

“What does it say?”

“He’s a development director. For Haneul Construction.”

Another silence. This one feels different. This one feels like her mother is putting pieces together, like she’s seeing a picture that Sohyun has been looking at but hasn’t quite been able to focus on clearly.

“Sohyun,” her mother says slowly. “The development company that’s been trying to buy Appa’s land. Is that—is Minsoo involved in that?”

Sohyun doesn’t answer because the answer feels like an admission of something she’s not ready to admit. She plates the hotteoks instead, arranging them on a ceramic plate that her grandfather brought back from somewhere—Korea or Japan or somewhere that required travel, somewhere that mattered. The hotteoks steam slightly, and the cinnamon smell rises up, and for a moment, the kitchen smells like something warm and good and simple.

“I don’t know yet,” Sohyun says. “But I’m going to find out.”

She hangs up before her mother can say anything else, and then she stands in her kitchen with two hotteoks cooling on a plate and the phone in her hand and the terrible, clear knowledge that everything is about to change in ways she can’t control and can’t prepare for. She thinks about her grandfather in the hospital, searching for her grandmother. She thinks about Jihun’s voicemail, the one she’s listened to so many times that she could recite it even though she’s never actually let herself understand it. She thinks about Minsoo, standing somewhere in Seoul or Jeju, probably in an office that costs money to maintain, probably thinking about acquisition timelines and profit margins and the specific monetary value of her grandfather’s land.

She thinks about hotteoks, and bone broth, and the things that can’t be rushed.

And then she picks up her phone and calls Jihun, because if the world is going to fall apart, she wants to know if he’s going to be there when it does.

The phone rings four times before he answers, and his voice is rough in a way that suggests he’s either just woken up or hasn’t slept at all. “Sohyun?”

“I need to ask you something,” she says, and she can hear in her own voice the person she becomes when she’s not performing for anyone—no warmth, no accommodation, no effort to make things smaller or easier for the person on the other end of the line. “Why did you burn those documents?”

There’s a sound on the other end that might be him breathing, or might be the wind, or might be the distance between them finally becoming something that has weight.

“How did you—”

“Just tell me,” she says. “Please.”

And in the pause that follows, in the silence that stretches between them like something alive and waiting, Sohyun understands that this moment is the hinge on which everything else will turn, that whatever he says next will determine whether she stays or whether she runs, whether she fights or whether she accepts, whether she believes that some things are worth holding onto or whether her mother has been right all along—that Jeju is a place you leave from, that love is a luxury you can’t afford, that the only smart thing to do when something is falling apart is to leave before you fall with it.

Jihun takes a breath, and Sohyun waits, and the hotteoks cool on the plate, and the wind outside picks up, and everything that happens next begins with the words he’s about to say.