“It might not be the right time to say this, but I really don’t understand what you’re thinking. I asked if you liked me, and I thought I’d been expressive enough, but you always…”

Barely crossing the line.

As long as Han Seo Yoon existed, he couldn’t make the first move.

Ji An, who had long debated confessing her feelings, let out her frustrations.

“If you’re asking if I like you again, then yes, I do.”

Kang Hyun provided a definitive answer to Ji An’s chaotic words.

His voice, making a choice that might eventually lead to losing her completely, trembled ever so slightly.

He would be lying if he said he wasn’t afraid of the day Seo Yoon’s memories returned.

That’s why he had been dragging his feet until now.

“…”

“And I know how you feel, too.”
Before the news of the marriage, Seo Yoon had willingly accepted a life overshadowed by her own shadow.

Living as a flower in Kang Hyun’s greenhouse, awaiting only the water he would give, the pure love in the eyes of a child was unmistakable.

The blind love that endured her broken self, often treated as a madwoman, was obvious.

Those eyes that only wanted her.

The smile that greeted her every day.

She desperately wanted to possess it forever, completely.

Gradually, she had started to sense it.

Ji An, busy being dragged around by unreasonable demands, looked at him with eyes reminiscent of those times.

Even if it was a remnant of unconscious memory, she was genuinely happy.

“Kang Hyun, right now…”

“I’m saying I like Seo Ji An for who she is, not as a replacement for Seo Yoon.”

Lifting his head, Kang Hyun locked eyes with Ji An, who was staring up at him.

A lie that was not a lie, and a lie born of a lie.

Despite self-mockery for deceiving her so effortlessly, Kang Hyun couldn’t stop.

He couldn’t let go of this warmth in his arms. Having lived as a selfish monster, his irrevocable past remained as shackles around his ankles, and the only answer on this pitch-black path was clear.

In the end, all that awaited at the end of this tiresome wait was regret.

Struggling in the grips of profound guilt, he finally reached a conclusion about something he hadn’t sorted out since Seo Yoon’s return.

There could be no worse ending than losing her, so he decided to pour out his ungiven love.

It was Kang Hyun’s grandfather, wielding immense power both inside and outside the SeoWon family, who first labeled him a mutant.

Since as long as he could remember, he had always been treated that way.

It might have been his unreadable, cold eyes.

There was no respect or fear towards elders, and unlike typical children, he neither laughed nor cried.

He didn’t laugh because he didn’t find things funny and didn’t cry because he wasn’t sad, but the people of the SeoWon family criticized him, pinning various diagnoses on him.

“I asked someone I know, and they said it might be something like antisocial personality disorder. The kid doesn’t have affection, you know, affection.”

“Brother, you can’t just leave Kang Hyun like this. These kinds of people don’t recognize their parents later and cause trouble!”

Half of what they said might have been true.

He didn’t particularly love the parents who bore him and felt no belonging to the so-called prestigious lineage.

While his cousins fawned over their grandfather, he devoted his energy to caring for tropical fish in a small aquarium.

That was until a cousin broke into his room and shattered the small fish tank.

He harshly pushed the intruding cousin in the garden, causing him to fall.

It was just bad luck that his cousin’s leg broke.
Kang Hyun tripped and fell into a pit because a large rock had been dislodged from its place.

Regardless of the outcome, it was a fair consequence for his actions.

So, he never admitted his wrongdoing in front of the adults.

It was the moment he evolved from being labeled a mutant to a psychopath.

His mother, overly emotional and sensitive, suffered from depression under the pressure of her in-laws.

However, that didn’t mean she didn’t play her role as a mother.

“Kang Hyun doesn’t seem like my son. How can a child have such an expression… He looks like a monster, really like a monster.”

“Can’t you keep quiet? I told you I would take him to the hospital myself.”

“If there’s something wrong with his brain, get surgery or something, please. I get goosebumps whenever our eyes meet!”

She didn’t consider her unsatisfactory son as a human being.

Sometimes I wondered if I was really that abnormal, but since they said so, I didn’t think deeply about it.

It was around the time I graduated from elementary school. My mother, tired of my emotionless gaze, lost her mind and beat me until I was covered in bruises.

Realizing what she had done, she panicked and fled, only to return dead.

She had taken pills and then drove.

My father, who remarried Gu Se Hee, saying he would find a woman resembling my deceased mother, seemed abnormal too.

Were there any normal people in the SeoWon family?

After that, my father became busy trying to ‘normalize’ his only son, driven by his single-minded determination.

Many praised his paternal love, but I never felt loved by him.

The one who loved me the most was…

“Hello, brother. I’m Seo Yoon, Han Seo Yoon.”

A very small child I met in an orphanage.