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Rather Tread Thorn Island Than Love Pond Moon
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완결
My wife, eight months pregnant, was arguing with me when she suddenly lost the baby. Her childhood sweetheart screamed that I had to pay with my life. My mother threw herself in front of me, shielding me. "If a life has to answer for this, then take mine." Not long after, my mother swallowed pills and died in the bathroom. I was devastated. Sadie came back from recovering abroad, and settled down too.
챕터 (4)
第1章
My wife was eight months pregnant, and during a fight with me she suddenly lost the baby.
Her childhood sweetheart screamed for me to pay with my life.
My mother threw herself in front of me.
"If a life has to be paid, then take mine."
Not long after, my mother swallowed pills and died in the bathroom.
I was destroyed by grief. Sadie Marsh came back from recovering abroad, and she settled down too.
She never mentioned her childhood sweetheart Aiden Abbott again.
A year later, sunk in severe depression, I went abroad to clear my head without telling my wife.
And ran straight into my mother, the one who was supposed to be dead, carrying a baby, walking beside Aiden.
In front of her stood my wife, Sadie, the same wife who'd told me she was away on business.
"This year's been hard on you. Divorce Peter Gilbert soon, and go be happy with Aiden."
My wife was quiet. "But Mom, isn't this too unfair to Peter?"
My mother sighed.
"They're both my flesh and blood. Aiden just happens to be the illegitimate son I left out there all those years."
"Peter's already gotten more than enough. Since Aiden loves you, and you're carrying his child."
"He should give some of it up."
That was when I understood. A year ago the miscarriage was a lie. The story about recovering overseas was so she could quietly carry the baby to term.
And my mother paying a life for a life.
Was nothing but a con they'd all cooked up together to bring me down.
1
Hearing that, Aiden gripped my mother's hand, moved.
"Mom, I always knew you were the best to me."
"All I said was that I wanted to spend my life with Sadie, and you came up with such a perfect scheme. That idiot Peter actually believed it!"
In the corner they couldn't see.
I leaned against the wall, shaking all over and unable to stop.
In my whole life, the one person I never doubted was my mother.
And she was the one who'd woven the biggest lie of all around me, with her own hands.
Right now she stroked Aiden's face, tenderness pouring off her.
"Silly boy, Mom wronged you before, letting you live as an illegitimate son all those years."
"Of course I have to do everything I can to make it up to you now."
"If Sadie hadn't lost the baby by accident last year while pretending to fight with Peter, then seized the chance to go abroad and give birth, how would Peter ever have let you two keep your child?"
Back when I found out Aiden existed.
I really did fight him to the death.
Put him in the hospital more than once.
Threw a check in his face, forced him to leave Sadie.
I tried everything, gentle and hard.
But he clung on like something you couldn't peel off, wedged dead between me and Sadie.
"Peter, Sadie just likes my face. I'm not leaving. What are you going to do about it?"
He was baiting me on purpose, and I couldn't hold it in. I slapped him.
I didn't expect Sadie to come rushing over to shield him.
She cried out in pain and dropped to the floor right there.
Then the bleeding started.
"Peter, look what you've done!"
"If Sadie and I lose this baby, I will never let you off!"
Aiden got her to the hospital in time.
I waited outside, frantic. When they told me it was a miscarriage, I was standing in that hospital, and my whole mind went blank.
"Miscarriage? It was just one slap. How could she lose the baby?"
But Aiden was furious.
"Peter, that's a human life!"
"Even if the baby is mine, you had no right to be this vicious, making your own wife lose a baby at eight months!"
He was making a scene, demanding the police take me away.
"I already told you, I'm not the one who made her lose the baby."
I set my jaw, refusing to back down.
"If you've got the nerve, let them haul me off. A life for a life."
Later Sadie really did call the police, and they took me into the station.
Three months later, I was released.
Only to find my mother's suicide note.
"If a life truly has to be paid back, then let it be mine."
"Sadie, let my son go, and have a good life with him."
I clutched that note and wept until I could barely breathe, asking Sadie where my mother was.
"She's already been cremated."
She held me in silence. "This ends here."
After that storm, we had a brief stretch of peace.
Once the baby was lost,
Sadie made up her mind to cut things off with Aiden.
But a human life now lay between us.
It was no longer as simple as forgiving her affair.
However deep our love had once been, there was no going back.
I couldn't even accept my mother's death, and slowly sank into severe depression.
Countless times I stood on the rooftop, imagining myself turning into a bird and flying off the edge.
But I never once imagined this.
My mother, who had faked her death, had gone abroad to look after this illegitimate son Aiden's baby, cooking for him, tending to his every need.
Right now my mother's hand patted the back of his newborn, over and over.
The way she used to soothe me to sleep when I was small.
"There, sweet baby. You like it when Grandma holds you, don't you?"
To keep from making a sound, I bit down hard on my wrist, until blood seeped from it.
I got depression over people like this.
Countless nights I couldn't sleep, countless times I tore myself apart.
What was the point?
The three of them were still laughing and talking, one happy little family.
And I couldn't watch anymore. I hurried to buy a ticket and fled back home.
第2章
Standing on a street back home, I still felt like I was in a daze.
As if it had only been a dream.
Then my phone buzzed. A text from Sadie.
"Peter, remember to take your medicine on time."
"Don't do anything that puts your life in danger again and make me worry."
I looked down at my watch. Sure enough, it was eight in the evening.
She was like an alarm clock.
Every night at eight, right on schedule, she reminded me to take my medicine.
Because only if I took it on time could my mind and moods stay stable.
Then the next message popped up.
"Be good. I'll be back from my business trip tomorrow, and once I'm home I'll go with you to your treatments."
If I hadn't seen her abroad with her childhood sweetheart with my own eyes, I might really have believed her lies.
After I got home, I said nothing.
I didn't even confront anyone.
I just went through the same life as before, step by step, like a walking corpse.
Sadie noticed nothing off, and kept going on trips every few days.
Every time she came back she carried the milky smell of a baby.
She explained it was a work dinner, and partway through she'd thought the client's kid was cute and picked it up for a bit.
I didn't expose her lie.
At the dinner table, Sadie looked at me, surprised.
"Peter, how did you get so quiet lately?"
"What is it? You're not making scenes like you used to anymore."
In the past, this house had a scene playing out every single day.
Me, sobbing in front of my mother's memorial photo, blowing up into a huge fight, then forcing Sadie to her knees to apologize.
Blaming her, because if she hadn't gone and gotten herself tangled up with someone outside our marriage,
my mother wouldn't have swallowed those pills.
In the end it always became a farce where neither of us would back down, with nothing to show for it but broken dishes all over the floor.
"There's no point anymore."
I shook my head with a bitter smile.
"Even if I made you kneel and apologize every day, would it bring my mother back?"
Something eased in Sadie's eyes, and she came over to sit down beside me.
"Peter, I'm glad you can let it go."
"Forget the past. Let's call it even and wipe the slate clean."
She wanted to be close to me. She even offered to share a room with me that night.
But I drove her off with one cold line. "I don't like having someone next to me."
So she took her pillow and went to the study.
I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling.
My mother's memorial photo still stood in the living room.
In the picture she smiled so kindly. Really, what a joke.
The next day I pulled out the box from under the bed, the one I'd treasured, meaning to throw it away.
The box held all of my mother's belongings.
After she swallowed the pills in the bathroom and killed herself,
I fell into enormous guilt and self-blame.
At the worst of the severe depression, only looking at those keepsakes made me feel a little better.
After my mother died, Sadie was full of guilt too, falling silent every now and then.
But more often she simply vanished.
Off drinking alone somewhere.
Or away on some far-off business trip, gone for ten days, half a month at a stretch.
Back then the reason she gave me was this:
"Peter, I can't bear to look at your face, or I'll think of your mother, and of the baby in my belly that you got killed."
So we'd start fighting again, going cold on each other, our relationship getting worse and worse.
But it never once occurred to me that those days she disappeared had nothing to do with any silent standoff with me.
She'd gone abroad, reuniting with Aiden and their child.
The baby had never been miscarried at all. She'd run off overseas and delivered it safely.
While I carried every bitter consequence.
That day, I came home from the hospital.
When I pushed open the door, Sadie was sitting on the living room couch.
"You're back?"
She stood up and pointed at the gift box on the coffee table.
"Brought this back from abroad this trip. It's for you."
I said nothing, changed into my slippers, and set my medical file down on the entryway cabinet without thinking.
"You went for a checkup?"
She came over and picked up the report to read it. "What did the doctor say? Is it any better?"
I said nothing. She read it for a long time.
Long enough that I came back out in my house clothes,
and she was still standing at the entryway, her brow drawn tight.
"Severe depression, eating disorder, insomnia…"
Her voice was strained.
"Peter, aren't you taking your medicine on time? How did it get worse again?"
I walked into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water.
"I'm fine."
She grabbed my wrist. "You've lost this much weight, and you call that fine?"
I gently pulled free and didn't answer.
She followed me into the kitchen and looked at the scars on my wrist, the ones left from cutting myself.
She was quiet for a long time.
"I… won't go on trips anymore. I'll stay home with you this whole time."
"Peter, your health is so bad right now."
Her heart suddenly softened and she threw herself into my arms.
Breathing in the familiar smell of her, my face must have been numb.
So what if she was tender now?
Their betrayal was real.
It could never be erased.
I gently pushed her away. "I have to go take my medicine."
第3章
While I was taking my medication, Sadie slipped out to the balcony to take a call.
"Can't it wait a little longer?"
"Peter's in a really bad way right now. I'm afraid that the moment I bring up divorce, he won't hold together..."
I couldn't hear what the other side said.
Sadie's voice sank into a sigh.
"All right. I'll tell him as soon as I can."
I didn't have to guess. It had to be my mother and Aiden, calling from abroad, pushing her to finish the divorce with me.
What Sadie didn't know was this.
Today, besides going to the hospital, I had also gone to a café to meet my brother.
My wealthy sworn brother, Tristram Simmons, had sent a private investigator overseas to follow them.
He'd sent me a video.
In it, my mother was praying before the shrine.
"It truly isn't that I'm a heartless mother, that I set out to wreck Peter's marriage."
"It's only that, compared to Peter, Aiden needs Sadie so much more. Sadie even bore his child. They're the ones who should be a family."
"It was one wrong turn of mine back then that made Aiden an illegitimate son and left him to suffer all these years."
"I can't let his child repeat the same fate."
"Making Peter let go really is the best choice."
"And with my death standing between them, Peter and Sadie had already fought their way to divorce. I only nudged it along, wanting to set them free. Buddha will forgive me, won't he?"
When I saw it, I said nothing.
So it turned out she wasn't blind to the wrong she was doing.
She simply believed Buddha would forgive her.
My brother was hopping mad.
"I've had it. Is this really your birth mother? How can there be a mother in this world so ruthless to her own son?"
"Even playing favorites, no one takes it this far. Ruining her own son to the bone just for an illegitimate one."
"I honestly suspect there's some blood feud between you two. You're basically a kid your mother picked up off the street!"
When I first learned she'd faked her death, I couldn't sleep for nights on end, unable to work it out.
Why would my own mother do this to me,
even help that illegitimate son of hers take everything I had, and hand over my wife to him too.
But I understand now.
In her heart, her only son is Aiden. She'd fake her own death,
and even if it meant never seeing me again as long as she lived, she'd reunite with Aiden.
"She wants me to divorce. Then I'll give her what she wants."
I thought back to how, ever since Aiden went abroad after the miscarriage,
Sadie had kept trying to force me into a divorce.
"Rather than torment each other like this, better to end it cleanly and part on good terms."
But I refused, again and again.
"This marriage was bought with my mother's life. What right do you have to force me out of it?"
My eyes red, I hated Sadie with everything in me.
"If you hadn't gone out and taken up with Aiden, if it weren't for the debt you ran up carrying on with him,"
"none of this would ever have come to this point."
So I meant to drag it out with her, even if it dragged me to death, so we'd both go down together.
That's why I threw out that vicious threat: "If you want a divorce, then we die together."
I can understand, too, why she hesitated for so long.
However urgently they pressed her from abroad, she never once brought up divorce.
She was afraid of truly pushing me over the edge, of another death.
But lately, the calls from abroad came more and more often.
At first she still hid on the balcony to take them.
Later she just took them in the living room.
"Mom, I know, but he can't sleep at night, he can't even walk straight anymore."
"I can't just, right now..."
"Aiden's side... tell him to wait a little longer."
"What do you mean I can't bear to let go? I'm human. I have a conscience."
"Mom, you used to love Peter so much. How can you now..."
She stopped short and drove a fist into the wall.
After hanging up, Sadie sat on the couch, weighed down and utterly still.
In my pajamas, I watched her through the crack of the bedroom door.
She was smoking.
But she'd quit three years ago.
The moment she saw me, she stubbed out the cigarette fast, panic flooding her eyes.
"Peter, when did you get back?"
"Or did you... never leave at all today?"
Sadie had thought I wasn't home. That was why she'd taken the call so freely in the living room.
"Sadie, let's get divorced."
This time I'd made up my mind.
Since not one person in this world loves me, all the more reason I should love myself.
Dragging it out forever was no answer.
So let it come from me.
The timing was just right.
第4章
Sadie looked at how understanding I was being, and something in her seemed to twist with pity.
"Why bring up divorce all of a sudden?"
I lowered my head, thinking of Sadie's screen glowing the night before.
One text after another had popped up, all of them from Aiden.
"Mom's so anxious back home she can't sleep."
"When exactly are you going to tell him?"
"If we wait any longer the kid will be calling for his mother. Are you trying to make me a single dad?"
"How much longer do you expect us to hide out overseas?"
"My mother faked her own death for us. Don't tell me you've gone soft on him."
One after another.
All of them pushing her to move.
If this was the ending everyone was so happy to see, why shouldn't I give it to them?
"Sadie, there's no point dragging this out."
"Let's just let each other go."
Her eyes reddened, and she suddenly threw her arms around me, hard.
"No. I'm not divorcing you."
"Peter, if I hadn't handled the thing with Aiden and me so badly back then, you never would have fallen into severe depression, and you'd never have ended up like this."
"You're at your most fragile right now. How could I possibly let go of you?"
She soothed me for a long time, gentle, telling me a bedtime story,
just like when we first fell in love.
She even said that as long as she tried hard enough, cared enough, we could get back to the way we used to be.
Eyes closed, I laughed bitterly inside.
But she already had a child with Aiden.
How could a person like that ever come back to me clean, the way we used to be?
Since Sadie wouldn't agree to the divorce, I would take action myself.
Set her free, and set myself free too.
But ever since she turned down the divorce I proposed,
Sadie really did start to soften, more thoughtful in everything she did.
She'd even bring me an iced dessert I loved after work.
Doing everything she could to make me happy.
"Peter, I know things are hard right now."
"Your condition is serious, but I'll always be here with you."
"Once this stretch is behind us, everything will get better."
She coaxed me, gentle and patient.
"Peter, I love you."
But looking at that familiar face, I only smiled on the surface.
When she couldn't see, my stomach heaved, and I bolted to the bathroom and threw up over the toilet.
If she really loved me, how could she have gone behind my back and had a child with Aiden overseas?
Seeing that my condition had improved a lot these past days,
Sadie ventured carefully, "The company's sending me on a work trip again tomorrow. I promise it'll only take two or three days, then I'll rush back to be with you."
My eyes stayed on the book in my hands. I didn't look up.
"Go ahead. I'll be fine."
I knew the day after tomorrow was Aiden's birthday.
He'd texted three times to hurry her along. Sadie was going, no question.
While Sadie was overseas throwing a birthday for her precious first love,
I sent for my brother, Tristram.
Tristram looked at me like he wanted to speak but held it back.
"Peter, are you sure you want to do this? Once it's done, there's no going back."
My eyes went to the props on the table, and I dragged out a pale smile.
"I'm sure. There was never a way back for me."
"Since I've decided to leave, I'll give them a surprise."
By then, Sadie had already arrived overseas and bought a huge cake.
The whole family, the baby included, gathered around it.
Aiden made his wish, happy. "I hope the three of us can be together forever."
Only Sadie, hearing that, went blank for an instant.
And just as Aiden was happily about to blow out the candles,
Sadie suddenly got a phone call.
The color drained from her face, and the knife and fork she was cutting the cake with clattered to the floor.
"What? You're saying Peter slit his wrists?!"