Acts We Shouldn't Do (Completed Main Story) - Chapter 77

The end of waiting was devastating. Because she’d loved that brief smile, that fleeting kiss brushing her forehead, she’d drunk the milk even though she knew it was laced with drugs.

She’d even suppressed her curiosity about what kind of drug it was. While she slept, her mother died—and Tae Seo was left shivering alone in front of the bathroom door for half a day straight.

Even looking back on it later, she couldn’t understand her mother.

Tae Seo had grown up always watching the elders in the household, never throwing tantrums or acting willful. So why had her mother, raising such a child with hired help no less, felt so desperate that she resorted to drugging her?

But even to young Tae Seo, it was clear her birth mother hadn’t been sane.

With a mind as fragile as glass thread, she’d surely struggled just to hold herself together—how could she not have found keeping a child by her side overwhelming? Yet she couldn’t pretend not to know, because that child represented her only tiny hope that her husband might look her way again.

“Maybe… maybe Mom wished I’d die back then.”

Tae Seo, long lost in old memories, whispered softly, still holding Jae In tightly in his arms.

He was beginning to suspect that his mother had tried to kill him and then take her own life.

Since his birth mother hadn’t calculated the lethal dose of sleeping pills precisely enough, he’d woken up after just thirty hours—that’s how he saw it. And honestly, that suspicion was entirely reasonable.

Once she realized her child wouldn’t even serve as a means to gain her husband’s attention anymore, she must have deemed him useless.

That’s why, from then on, no matter how much pain he felt, Tae Seo wasn’t allowed to take even an ordinary painkiller without a doctor’s prescription.

He’d thought that was the extent of his trauma. Yet he’d hidden his festering wounds for so long, pretending to be fine—only to discover they’d rotted far deeper than he realized.

Jae In, who’d said “I like you first,” hadn’t pressed Tae Seo for an answer. In fact, she hadn’t expected one at all—it was simply something she’d wanted to say. And Tae Seo had ultimately given her no reply.

“Guess I’ll have to carry you around every day now.”

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