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# Chapter 84: The Path to Finding Her Voice
Dohyun’s voice came through the phone line thin and fragile. Not the voice itself—it was the weight behind it that felt so small. A sixteen-year-old boy’s voice, yet it carried something far more childlike. Fear. Loneliness. The hollow ache of losing a sister.
“Noona, where are you? Really. I just asked Mom and she only said Jeju. Jeju? Why Jeju? Are you crazy?”
Dohyun was doing that thing he always did when anxious—tapping his fingers rhythmically against the desk. The sound wasn’t unfamiliar to Sae-ah. She used to do the same thing as a child. When nervous, when decisions pressed down on her, she’d create rhythms with her fingers while thinking.
“I needed some time,” Sae-ah began, but her voice cracked mid-sentence. Her throat ached. Kang Ri-u’s fingerprints seemed to reach deep inside her neck. As if his fingers were still wrapped around it.
“Time? Noona, what are you talking about? What about me? What about Mom?”
Dohyun’s voice rose—that trembling pitch children use when emotion overwhelms them. Sae-ah knew that voice. She’d created it. It was the scar tissue of her own negligence.
“Dohyun, I’m sorry. I really am.”
Sae-ah spoke without holding back her tears this time. They fell, tracing her left cheek, sliding down her neck, landing on the tattoo beneath her collarbone. The one with the sky drawn on it. She felt the coldness of the tears meeting the warmth of her skin.
“Sorry doesn’t mean anything. What does that even—”
Dohyun stopped mid-sentence. Only silence flowed through the phone line, but that silence held everything—his anger, his hurt, and beneath it all, something deeper. Fear. The fear of losing his sister too.
“Do you go to school?” Sae-ah asked.
“What? You’re not dealing with your own problems, but you’re asking about my school? You’re really insane.”
But his voice had softened. The edge of his anger had dulled.
“You should. You need to study,” Sae-ah said, using that old, worn tone of the older sister she used to be.
“What are you doing? Telling me to study? What are you doing?”
Sae-ah didn’t answer. What could she say? I’m having breakfast with Mom? I’ve escaped a man named Kang Ri-u? I’m trying to find out who I am again?
“Noona, you’re not—” Dohyun’s voice changed completely. From anger to genuine concern. “You’re not hurting yourself, are you?”
Her breath caught. How well he knew her. What she’d been doing. How close to the edge she’d been standing.
“No, Dohyun. I didn’t disappear—”
But even as she said it, she knew it was a lie. She had disappeared. Inside that relationship with Kang Ri-u, she’d been burning slowly away, like a matchstick consuming itself.
“What are we to you? What am I? What about Mom? Are we not important?”
His voice carried a sadness far older than sixteen years. The sadness of a child left behind after losing his father. The desperation of someone terrified of losing another.
Sae-ah couldn’t put down the phone. But she couldn’t speak either. Her throat was completely blocked, as if someone’s fingers were still closing around it.
Her mother looked at her from across the room, reading her face. Yes, her mother understood. Who was calling. What Dohyun had said. She seemed to know it all already—like a haenyeo who can sense everything happening beneath the water’s surface.
“Let me talk to him,” her mother said.
Sae-ah handed over the phone with trembling hands, as if they belonged to someone else.
“Yes, Dohyun. It’s Mom. Your sister is going through a difficult time right now. That’s why—”
“But Mom, why is Noona like this? What did she do?”
“She didn’t do anything. Something was done to her. And she came here to leave that person behind.”
Her mother’s voice was steady, accepting, without embellishment.
Sae-ah watched her mother’s back. It was curved—not from illness, but from carrying the weight of the world. Yet with that curved spine, her mother held Dohyun like a son. Through the phone, across the distance, her mother’s words wrapped around him. And Dohyun began to cry. Quietly, but unmistakably.
“It’s okay, Dohyun. It’s okay. Your sister will come back. It might take time, but she’ll come back. Mom promises.”
Her mother spoke, and Sae-ah suddenly understood—these words weren’t just for Dohyun. They were for her too. You will come back. You must.
After the call ended, Sae-ah moved to the living room. Jeju’s afternoon sunlight streamed through the windows. Strong, warm, honest light.
“What did that man do to you?” her mother asked suddenly.
Sae-ah didn’t answer at first. But her mother’s gaze pierced through her like a haenyeo searching the depths for seaweed.
“That Kang Ri-u. Why did you ever meet him?”
Sae-ah slowly opened her mouth. At first, her voice was small. But as she spoke, it grew. Like someone rising slowly from the depths of water toward the surface.
She told her everything. The night she first met Kang Ri-u. His warm hands. His sweet words. How it was all a lie. How he didn’t want to “save” her—he wanted to “own” her. What she understood when his fingers closed around her throat.
Her mother listened without interruption. Only when Sae-ah finished did she embrace her. Without words.
“What’s his name? Who is he?” her mother asked. Her voice was gentle, but something hard lay beneath it. The kind of solidity a haenyeo maintains even in the midst of waves.
“Kang Ri-u. He’s in the music industry—”
“Don’t see him again. Ever. Understand?”
It wasn’t a question. It was a command.
Sae-ah nodded, but anxiety bloomed in her chest. She’d left Kang Ri-u, but not completely. Like being underwater while thinking of the world above—she was on the surface now, but part of her remained in the depths.
“And what’s your job?” her mother asked.
“What… should I do?”
“Sing. That’s your work.”
Her mother said it simply.
“Mom, I can’t—” Sae-ah tried to protest. Her voice wasn’t hers anymore. She’d burned too much.
But her mother didn’t listen. Instead, she went to the kitchen and turned on an old radio. FM. Trot music poured out—the kind her mother always listened to on diving days. Warm, sad, yet somehow hopeful.
“Listen to this woman. See how hard she sings. Life is this difficult, and still she sings. We have to do the same. We have to live like that.”
Listening to the radio, Sae-ah understood what she had to do. Leaving Kang Ri-u wasn’t just leaving a man—it was leaving a life where she burned only for others.
Now she had to sing for herself. Not for Dohyun, not for her mother. For herself. And that song hadn’t begun yet.
Sae-ah rose slowly. Her body was still heavy. Her throat still hurt. But something had shifted. A small change, but a real one. Like that first movement when rising from the depths.
“Mom, can I do something?” she asked.
“What is it?”
“I want to call Haneul.”
Haneul. The friend she’d abandoned. The voice she’d ignored. She had things to tell her. That she was sorry. That she’d come back. That she was ready to begin again.
Her mother handed her the phone. Jeju’s sunlight illuminated the screen. Sae-ah’s fingers moved to find Haneul’s number.
Before pressing the call button, she paused. She knew everything would change after this. Her life would flow in a completely different direction. And it terrified her. But she needed it.
She pressed the button.
In the basement tattoo shop in Hongdae, Haneul was inking letters onto someone’s back at 3 AM. “Alive.” Two characters. The customer’s request. His life had changed recently, he’d said. He wanted to mark it with these words.
His phone rang. When he saw the name on the screen, his fingers stopped. Sae-ah. A call after three weeks. From the woman who’d ignored him dozens of times.
“Hello?” he answered carefully.
“Haneul, I’m sorry. I really am.”
Her voice came through—low and hoarse, but unmistakable. Like someone surfacing from water, breathing air for the first time.
Haneul didn’t answer. Instead, tears came. In the basement tattoo shop, above his customer’s back, he wept.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Jeju. With Mom.”
The weight of that single sentence. Sae-ah trusting someone. Depending on someone. Being with someone. For Haneul, it was the greatest relief.
“Jeju? Really? Alone?”
“With Mom,” she repeated.
Haneul cried again.
“When are you coming back to Seoul?” His voice was desperate.
“I don’t know yet. But…” Her voice grew stronger.
“But what?”
“I think I have something I need to do. And to do it, I need to come back to life first.”
The Jeju sunlight remained strong. Sae-ah sat by the window, phone to her ear, watching outside. The ocean wasn’t visible, but she smelled it—salt-laden, her mother’s scent. The haenyeo’s scent.
And she understood. What she had to do. Why she’d come to Jeju. Why she had to leave Kang Ri-u.
She wasn’t a flame that burned and disappeared. She was the spark that lit other flames. It wasn’t about her being illuminated—it was about her illuminating others. And that was song. That was her flame.
To relight it, she had to rise completely from the water. Fully. Never returning.