“Jin,” I interrupt, shaking my head. “Please don’t call me that anymore. It… it makes it really confusing for me when you do. It… it hurts now.”
His stoic face shutters as he gives another tight swallow, and the wall he hides behind so well slides back into place.
“Alright,” he says simply. “Goodnight, Monroe.”
Then he turns and disappears down the hall. I pause long enough to watch him go, my body still thrumming with the aftershocks of what we did. But my heart still aches from the painful realization that we’ll never be what we once were.
This is the way things must be.
Since my miscarriage and breakup with Jin, I’ve struggled to find a purpose, or some sense of meaning. I’ve felt adrift and aimless, with no desire to fill up my time with anything but grieving and going through the motions.
But over the next few days, I finally find a distraction that works. That has me up early in the morning and awake late at night.
I throw myself into the investigation involving Jin’s family and the mysterious Black Shell with a fervor that borders on obsession.
It’s easier than thinking about Jin and our relationship. Certainly easier than replaying what happened between us on that rooftop in my head, analyzing every touch and tremor of pleasure he gave me.
Andthe tense and awkward uncertainty that followed.
If I keep my mind occupied with research and leads and unanswered questions, I don’t have time to dwell on the mess that’s become my personal life.
I spend hours hunched over my laptop, digging through online archives of old Korean newspapers, searching for anything related to the Seo family massacre. The articles I find are sparse and faded, digitized copies of print editions from over thirty years ago, but they paint a grisly picture that makes my blood run cold.
A family slaughtered in their home. No one was spared except for the small, mute boy discovered hiding in the wardrobe days later.
A four-year-old traumatized Jin.
He’d witnessed his parents and grandmother, among others, slaughtered and left to soak in their own blood.
Jin’s told me about what happened. But it’s different reading the facts of the case; reading about how he was found forty-eight hours later in his own waste, so terrified he hadn’t moved from his hiding spot.
It makes me ache for him and the boy he once was to see the mentions of how he had no family left to claim him and was instead placed in an orphanage.
The articles speculate about gang involvement. A few even outright mention that the long-fabled Hyeonmudan were possibly involved, but there has never been any credibleevidence that the gang was real and not some tall tale from the local underworld.
Eventually, the case went cold. No arrests were ever made. The detective in charge—a man named Im Tae-sung—is quoted saying they had “exhausted all leads” and were “unable to identify the perpetrators.”
Except now I know that’s not true.
Dok-su told me Black Shell was involved. The same Black Shell he says has ties to the Hyeonmudan and who left Jin and I flowers on our doorstep.
Jin himself has admitted Black Shell is an unknown threat from his past.
It seems to all come back to what happened thirty years ago with his family, and Detective Im Tae-sung could be the missing link needed to uncover the truth.
I track him down through a combination of public records and sheer stubbornness.
He’s retired now, living quietly in a modest neighborhood on the outskirts of Busan, far from the precinct where he spent decades solving crimes—or in this case,burying them.
When I call him, posing as a journalist working on a cold case story for an American publication, he’s reluctant to meet. He hangs up the first time, promptly telling me he’s not interested. It takes a second phone call where I’m able to plead with him a little more and appeal to his sense of justice for him to agree to a meet up.
He insists on his neighborhood, making me travel to him, and we settle on a local coffeeshop. He’s exactly as expected when I turn up, a man in his seventies who once must’ve been strong and stocky but has softened into a frailer, rounder, older version of himself.
His eyes seem permanently tired, crinkled at the corners with deep bags under them, and he quickly establishes himself as a man of few words as I take my seat.
He’s already sipping from a cup of black coffee, his fingers drumming restlessly on the table.
“Thank you for meeting me,” I say as I slide into the chair across from him. “I know this isn’t easy.”
