CHAPTER 01
“Get a hold of yourself, Woo Seolhee.”
Her hands gripping the steering wheel refused to obey her.
Her fingertips trembled with a tingling sensation, and cold sweat seeped across her palms.
When she tightened her grip on the wheel, the scars on her wrist stood out.
Holding her breath, Seolhee alternated between checking the rearview mirror and the side mirror.
Her eyes darted about relentlessly, checking whether any car was following her or whether a familiar license plate had flashed somewhere in her field of vision.
‘I can’t stop.’
The moment she stopped now, she felt as though they would drag her back to that house again.
Bzzzt—Bzzzt—
The cell phone she had tossed onto the passenger seat rang like crazy.
[Mother-in-law]
[Husband]
And one unfamiliar number.
She didn’t recognize it.
Yet strangely, the last few digits caught her eye.
She had seen that number somewhere before.
But she didn’t even have the luxury of searching her memory right now.
Seolhee gritted her teeth and pressed down on the accelerator.
The faster she drove, the more violently her hands trembled instead of calming down.
Where exactly had everything gone wrong?
Suddenly, she remembered the time right after her wedding.
Before leaving for their honeymoon, her mother-in-law had taken Seolhee to a shaman’s house.
Perplexed, she had stood before an old wooden gate.
Beyond the closed gate, faded five-colored flags swayed in the wind as if they were alive.
The strong, acrid smell of incense drifted all the way outside the gate.
A sudden sense of revulsion had washed over her.
‘She’s a very important person who looks after our family, so you must treat her well.’
At her mother-in-law’s words, her husband, Jin Dongchan, naturally walked inside.
But when Seolhee tried to enter the shrine, her mother-in-law stopped her.
‘You stay here.’
Seolhee had been left alone in the courtyard.
Standing at the edge of the wooden floor, she had stared suspiciously at the gap in the door through which incense smoke escaped.
‘Dear, come here for a moment.’
A little while later, her mother-in-law appeared and called her over in a gentle voice.
In her mother-in-law’s hands was a broken bowl.
It looked as though its cracked pieces had been forcibly fitted back together, a bowl that had already served its purpose.
‘You take care of this now, dear.’
After hesitating, Seolhee had nodded.
She had simply thought her mother-in-law was asking her to clean up a bowl that had accidentally broken.
Following the woman’s instructions, she had wrapped it tightly in newspaper and a designated garbage bag and thrown it away outside the shaman’s house.
Without knowing what kind of ritual it was.
She had never imagined that this one incident would completely change the course of the next ten years of her life.
‘I have to run away, and if I don’t do it now, I never will…’
Seolhee bit down on her trembling lower lip.
Something had always been wrong with her marriage.
Dongchan, who had once acted as though he would give her the whole world, constantly changed his attitude at a single word from his mother.
Every important decision was always left to his mother, and Dongchan simply stood behind her without ever objecting.
It had been a lonely and miserable marriage.
On top of that, whenever something important happened, her husband and mother-in-law would head to the shaman’s house.
Afterward, one accident after another began to happen to Seolhee.
She would inexplicably miss a step on the stairs, or spend entire nights awake because of sudden pain.
Even after visiting the hospital, no cause was ever found.
She learned the truth after losing her child.
It was a child she had conceived after ten years of marriage.
She had just passed the three-month mark of her pregnancy.
When sudden bleeding began, fear overwhelmed even the pain.
And inside the place where her child should have been safest, her baby was stillborn.
Seolhee cried so hard that she could barely breathe.
She cried in the hospital room, at home, and alone inside the bathroom.
But on her mother-in-law’s and husband’s faces, relief had appeared before sorrow.
Her suspicions about their strange behavior grew even stronger.
They had lost their child and grandchild, yet they weren’t sad?
Her suspicions branched out in another direction, and on the day they held the 49-day memorial rite to pray for her child’s peaceful passage into the afterlife, she finally came face-to-face with the truth.
‘You stay here.’
‘Stay in the courtyard.’
As always, the two of them left Seolhee behind and entered the shrine.
For the first time in ten years, Seolhee disobeyed them and followed them.
Something was definitely happening.
She was simply the only one who didn’t know what it was.
More than anything—
‘But that was my child.’
She couldn’t understand how she, the child’s mother, could be excluded from her own baby’s 49-day memorial rite.
Seolhee stepped toward the house where the shrine was located.
She wanted to speak to her child.
To tell the baby that she loved them and was sorry she hadn’t been able to protect them.
There wasn’t even the faintest sound of breathing coming from behind the door.
Just as she was about to knock, the shaman’s voice, filled with certainty, made her heart sink.
‘It worked out well, the child became a foundation stone so the father could rise to greater heights.’
Her breath caught in her throat.
The air itself seemed to freeze beneath the shaman’s cold tone.
After a brief silence, her mother-in-law and Dongchan let out relieved sighs and rejoiced.
‘It’s all thanks to the talisman you wrote for us, Shaman.’
‘Thanks to you, we were able to use the bowl properly, too.’
‘If you use a person as a scapegoat for misfortune, you’d better see results proportional to the sacrifice.’
Seolhee’s eyes trembled.
Those words connected one by one inside her head.
The broken bowl, her child, the foundation stone, the scapegoat.
All the misfortune that had fallen solely upon her.
And the two people smiling.
At that moment, Dongchan turned his head toward the open gap in the door.
Startled, Seolhee took a step backward.
Her heart pounded violently, and cold sweat trickled down her spine.
After that day, she was forbidden from leaving the house.
Her husband and mother-in-law watched her all day long.
For several days, Seolhee clutched her phone and searched for answers.
The search results were cruel.
Every single one of them matched her situation.
The more she read, the colder her fingertips and toes became.
She wasn’t a wife or a daughter-in-law to them.
They didn’t even regard her as an individual human being.
She was a scapegoat meant to take the misfortune that would otherwise befall Jin Dongchan.
That was her role and her purpose.
The thought that they had even used her child made her tremble with rage.
She didn’t want to spend another moment with them.
And next, her own life could be at risk.
She calmly assessed the situation and finally made up her mind.
Late that night, when everyone was asleep, Seolhee left the house.
She had no intention of ever going back.
The ground was still wet from the rain that had just stopped, and the air was heavy with moisture, making everything feel desolate.
They might have placed a tracker on her own car.
So Seolhee used her late father’s car, which had been parked in a nearby parking lot.
She had thought they wouldn’t realize she was gone until morning.
Her prediction had been completely wrong.
Bzzzt—
Her phone rang again.
[Father-in-law]
Jin Suseong was calling her too.
Could she trust him?
He was the only person in the family who had ever listened to her.
He was the one who comforted her when she secretly wiped away her tears and took her side in front of her mother-in-law and husband.
But she had no time to explain the situation now.
“First, I need to get out of Seoul.”
It wouldn’t be too late to call him afterward.
It was the moment she pressed down on the accelerator.
A massive tanker truck coming from the opposite lane suddenly swerved and crossed the centerline.
Just as Seolhee frowned against its glaring headlights, a motorcycle suddenly appeared, overtaking her vehicle with a shrieking engine.
Only then did Seolhee instinctively jerk the steering wheel.
CRASH—!
But it was too late.
The motorcycle was dragged underneath the tanker truck.
With a thunderous roar that shook the earth, a blinding flash—
The light swallowed her entire field of vision.
The next moment, the world turned upside down.
A piercing ringing filled her ears, numbing her senses from the shock of the accident.
Inside the overturned car, Seolhee was pinned by her seat belt, and through her fading vision, she saw a puddle of water on the pitch-black road.
The flames rising into the air were reflected perfectly in the puddle.
Through her wavering gaze, she caught sight of a person wearing a helmet, sprawled on the ground.
Then the voices of the men who had barely escaped from the tanker held her to this world for a brief moment as she tried to flee into death.
“Looks like he’s dead.”
“Fuck, we were told not to kill him.”
In that instant, the world flickered.
And that was how I died.
After being used as my husband’s scapegoat for misfortune.
—
Along with an intense dizziness, a familiar voice pierced her eardrums.
“Dear, Seolhee?”
She barely managed to regain consciousness.
Seolhee opened her stiff, dry eyes.
“Oh, my dear, you must have stayed up all night because it’s your wedding day.”
Her mother-in-law, Inok, suddenly leaned into view before Seolhee, whose expression was still dazed.
Seolhee inhaled sharply in surprise.
It was far too vivid to be a dream, and that realization sent a chill through her.
“Seolhee, look in the mirror.”
“There couldn’t be a bride more beautiful than you today.”
Seolhee slowly shifted her gaze toward the mirror Inok was pointing at.
Her startled eyes trembled.
The woman reflected in the mirror wearing a pure white wedding dress was none other than herself.
She looked exactly as she had ten years ago, a time that now felt impossibly distant.
Inok gently placed both hands on Seolhee’s shoulders and whispered.
“Now, all you have to do is listen to everything this mother tells you.”
“You understand what I mean, right?”
A chill ran down Seolhee’s spine.
Having lost her biological mother at an early age, Seolhee had allowed Inok to break down her defenses by telling her, ‘Think of me as your real mother.’
Twenty-four-year-old Seolhee had accepted those words with innocent sincerity.
She had never realized that Inok was telling her to obey her and become a submissive daughter-in-law who would never defy her fate.
Seolhee tightly clenched the calla lily bouquet in her hands.
“Wow, our Seolhee.”
“Why are you so beautiful?”
At that moment, the door to the bridal waiting room opened, and Jin Dongchan stuck his grinning face inside, a bow tie around his neck.
The chilly smile that had been on Inok’s face instantly brightened.
“My son, are you already admiring your wife in front of your mother?”
“Oh, come on, Mrs. Yeo Inok.”
“Why are you acting like this?”
“I love both my women.”
Her closed lips parted.
She let out a hollow breath.
She remembered.
Yes, that obnoxious line.
That trite, selfish bullshit about loving both women could go straight to hell.
This was far too vivid to be a mere montage of memories.
And far too clear to be a dream.
The moment she saw Dongchan’s face, everything suddenly became crystal clear.
Seolhee was certain.
As unbelievable as it was, she had returned ten years into the past.
Someone had brought her back in time so that instead of becoming the Jin family’s scapegoat for misfortune, she could tear this damned family apart.
Seolhee lowered her gaze to the calla lily bouquet in her hands.
‘Wasn’t the meaning of calla lilies a new beginning?’
She quietly swallowed.
A smile kept escaping the corners of her lips.
“A new beginning…”
Her pulse pounded as though new breath had filled her lungs and she had been given a new heart.
She slowly rose from her seat.
She pulled off the uncomfortable, cumbersome satin gloves.
She removed the tiara from her head and took out the pins securing her veil.
“Ah… Dear?”
“Seolhee?”
She faced the two of them with a steely gaze.
Then, in a clear voice, she made the first declaration that would change her fate.
“I can’t marry you.”
“I’m not going to be the Jin family’s fool!”
