Excavations by Hannah Michell

Author:Hannah Michell [Michell, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

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Later that afternoon, Tae-kyu drove her back to the L&S offices, and she ran with her jacket over her head against the downpour to the stairwell, pausing at the door after she had unlocked it, searching for signs that someone had been there since her last visit. Everything was as she had left it.

When Tae-kyu entered the office, his glasses steamed up and he looked around the small studio blindly before wiping them clean.

“It certainly is a small operation, isn’t it?” he remarked. “I guess some companies celebrate their humble origins. Isn’t there some legend about the chairman of Taehan Group operating out of an insect-infested shoebox just after the war?”

She shrugged, disinterested, already absorbed in the papers on the desk. Earlier that day, they had made some calls and discovered that a company called SM Health had put in a bid to run the leisure center at the top of Aspiration Tower after the pool had been completed. But further inquiries into SM Health revealed no previous projects or operations. Sae wanted to see if she could find any references or agreements between SM Health and L&S Engineering.

When she looked up again, she saw that hours had passed. Neither of them had moved.

“So you’re really not expected at home at some point?” she asked Tae-kyu after a while.

Tae-kyu let out a soft laugh. “They stopped expecting me at home years ago. I’ve been told not to come back.”

“What did you do?” she asked, trying to be lighthearted. Immediately she regretted this, recalling how Jae had chided her tendency to interrogate others, burrowing into places of their pain to satisfy her own curiosity.

“It’s as I was saying before. I stopped paying attention. We pay the least attention to those closest to us. I was focused on all the wrong things. I neglected my family. I regret it now.”

Sae felt her cheek grow warm at this unexpected openness in Tae-kyu. He had struck her as a man who was without regret, who had the wisdom to never take a misstep.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“How are the boys?” he asked.

“They’re fine,” she said, brushing him off, trying to mask the fact that in truth she had not allowed herself to think truly of how they were. It was easier to dive headfirst into the investigation, to keep a sense of forward momentum if she didn’t think about them or, worse, think about how she might tell them of Jae’s disappearance.

“It’s important to be there with them, I think,” he said. “It’s not that you can’t relate to them later; it’s more that you don’t know what questions to ask them after a certain point. You don’t know what’s relevant to them anymore.”

Sae thought of how assured Jae was as a parent in knowing what they needed. At times, his assurance about what was best for the boys, his bond with them, had filled her with jealousy. She remembered coming home after interviewing survivors of the Gwangju massacre for a commemorative piece, and being unable to fully shed the darkness of those stories at the front door.

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