“Mom. I keep having dreams where I die.”
Madam Hwang gazed quietly at her son speaking of death. The boy, newly a middle-schooler, was markedly smaller than his peers.
“…A dream?”
“To be honest, I’m not even sure it’s really a dream. It feels too real… like I’m actually dying every single day.”
Young Hwanghon lowered his eyes as he spoke. Only after he woke, he said, did relief come—ah, so it wasn’t real.
Madam Hwang stepped in and cupped her son’s cheek. When she brushed aside his shaggy bangs, there was a scratch on his eyelid that hadn’t healed.
“Did Grandpa hit you again?”
“…No. I’m okay.”
“Hwanghon-ah, why are you lying even to Mom? You don’t have to. No matter what happens, Mom is always on our Hon’s side.”
“…Because I don’t want you to get hurt.”
A brat who sees ghosts, a jinx of a child, the family’s disgrace…
He’d been born this way, made this way—what could he do about his fate?
He’d grown used to the adults hating and despising him because of it; he could take that all he wanted.
But his mother—who had done nothing wrong—being…