5:00 AM
•••
The beeping was a knife through the dark.
Every morning, it cut the same way. Sharp. Clinical. Unforgiving.
My hand moved before my mind did, slapping the alarm into silence. For a moment, I just lay there, breathing in the expensive silence of our Gangnam apartment. The kind of silence that costs fifteen billion won. The kind you're supposed to be grateful for.
Min-jae slept beside me, a solid mountain of a man, his breathing steady and deep. In sleep, he looked younger. Softer. Not like the man who would, in exactly forty-seven minutes, ask me where I'd moved his blue towel.
I swung my legs out of bed. The routine began.
Slippers. Stand. Walk.
Through the darkened hallway, past Seo-yeon's door—closed, like it always was these days. My daughter, who used to crawl into our bed during thunderstorms, now barricaded herself behind textbooks and earbuds.
The bathroom light clicked on, harsh against my tired eyes.
I looked in the mirror.
Kang Eun-ji. Forty-two. Wife. Mother. Professional keeper of things running smoothly.
Sometimes I didn't recognize her.
My hand reached for the shower knob. A twist, and steam billowed out, hot and immediate. It fogged the glass, then the mirror, swallowing my reflection whole.
I didn't get in.
Not yet.
I just stood there, fully clothed in my simple cotton pajamas, watching the steam roll. In that white cloud, I wasn't anyone's wife. Wasn't anyone's mother. Wasn't the woman who remembered to buy more toothpaste but somehow always forgot her own coffee in the microwave.
I was just a shape. A breath. A ghost in my own home.
This was my secret. These three minutes of being nobody. These stolen moments before the world remembered I existed and started asking me for things.
The water beat down, a steady rhythm for my daily disappearing act.
•••
The kitchen was my battlefield at 5:23 AM.
Rice cooker humming. Pan warming. Banchan dishes lined up like little soldiers in their ceramic bowls. My hands moved with a precision born of twenty years of practice. Spinach seasoned just right. Bean sprouts with the perfect amount of sesame oil. Kimchi that was exactly fermented enough for Min-jae's taste.
This was what my Harvard economics degree had prepared me for. The strategic allocation of household resources. The optimization of morning routines. The management of three separate human schedules with conflicting priorities.
I was pouring seaweed soup into bowls when the first demand of the day shattered my quiet.
"Eun-ji!"
Min-jae's voice, rough with sleep, carried from the bathroom. "Where's my towel? The blue one!"
My shoulders tensed, just slightly. The blue towel was in the wash. He'd used it after the gym yesterday and left it in a damp heap on the floor. I'd put it in the laundry at midnight, along with seventeen other things everyone else had forgotten about.
I didn't say any of that.
I just wiped my hands on my apron and went to the linen closet. The grey towel was the same quality. Same softness. Same absorbency. But it wasn't blue.
When I handed it to him in the bathroom, he took it without looking at me.
"You always move things," he grumbled, running a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. "I left it right on the rack."
The words sat on my tongue, bitter and ready.
The rack was wet.
The blue one smelled like mildew.
I am not your personal tracking device.
But twenty years of marriage had sanded down my edges. The words dissolved into nothing. Into a small, tight smile that didn't reach my eyes.
"I'll find the blue one later," I said, my voice perfectly neutral. The approved wife voice. Pleasant. Helpful. Empty.
He grunted, already turning to the mirror, examining his jawline. I slipped away, back to my kitchen kingdom.
•••
Seo-yeon's room was a different kind of battlefield.
I knocked softly before entering. "Seo-yeon-ah?"
No answer.
Her room smelled of stress and strawberry chapstick. Textbooks formed precarious towers on every surface. Highlighters lay scattered like casualties of the academic war she'd been fighting since she was six.
My daughter was a lump under her duvet, only a shock of black hair visible. One earbud dangled from her ear, leaking the tinny sound of some American pop song.
My heart did that complicated thing it always did when I looked at her—swelled with love, ached with worry, tightened with fear. She was so tired. All the time. We'd paid for tutors, for academies, for the best private university in Seoul, and all it had given us was a ghost of a girl who jumped at sudden noises and cried over B+ grades.
"Seo-yeon," I murmured, sitting on the edge of her bed. "Time to get up."
A groan from the lump. "Ten more minutes, Eomma."
"You said that yesterday," I said, brushing her hair back. It was the same shade as mine. The same texture. Sometimes when I looked at her, I saw myself at twenty-one—all ambition and fear and desperate hope. "You missed your economics lecture."
"Professor Kim's voice puts me to sleep anyway," she mumbled, but she was sitting up now, rubbing her eyes. She looked so young in the morning light. Too young for the dark circles under her eyes.
"I made kimchi-jjigae," I said. "The spicy kind you like."
That got a half-smile. A small victory.
As she shuffled toward the bathroom, I straightened her duvet. My fingers brushed against something hard under her pillow. A notebook. Small, black, leather-bound.
I shouldn't have.
I know I shouldn't have.
But my hands moved anyway, flipping it open to the most recent page. The handwriting was rushed, angry, slanting across the paper:
"Sometimes I want to scream so loud the whole apartment building shakes. Sometimes I want to disappear into the Han River and let the current take me somewhere no one knows my name or my GPA. Sometimes I look at Eomma and wonder when she stopped being a person and became just... a function. A machine that makes breakfast. Is that what happens? Is that what's waiting for me?"
I snapped the journal shut, my breath catching in my throat. The words burned behind my eyes.
A machine that makes breakfast.
Is that what I was?
The door to the bathroom opened, and I quickly slid the journal back under the pillow, my heart pounding like I'd been caught committing a crime.
•••
Breakfast was a quiet affair.
Min-jae scrolled through stock prices on his tablet, occasionally making a satisfied "hm" sound. Seo-yeon picked at her rice, her phone propped against her water glass, watching a lecture video with the sound off.
I moved between them, refilling water glasses, offering more kimchi, wiping a spill before it could stain the expensive oak table.
"Don't forget the department dinner tonight," Min-jae said without looking up. "Seven at the Maple Tree House. The new VP will be there."
"I have a study group until eight," Seo-yeon said, her eyes not leaving her phone.
"You can skip it," Min-jae said, finally looking up. His voice left no room for argument. "This is important. Director Park's son just got into SNU Law. He'll be there."
Seo-yeon's jaw tightened. I saw the protest forming on her lips. Saw her swallow it down. Saw her become smaller in her chair.
"I'll reschedule the study group," she whispered.
I stood there with the water pitcher in my hand, watching my daughter shrink. Watching my husband return to his stocks. The words from Seo-yeon's journal echoed in my head.
A machine that makes breakfast.
"Actually," I heard myself say.
Both of them looked at me. Surprised. I rarely spoke during breakfast unless it was to offer more food.
"Seo-yeon's midterm is next week," I continued, my voice strangely calm. "The study group is important. She should go."
The silence that followed was heavy. Min-jae blinked, his fork halfway to his mouth. Seo-yeon stared at me like she'd never seen me before.
Min-jae recovered first. "Eun-ji, this dinner—"
"Director Park will have many dinners," I said, refilling his water glass. My hand didn't shake. "Seo-yeon only has one chance at this midterm."
For a long moment, no one spoke. The only sound was the hum of the refrigerator.
Finally, Min-jae shrugged, going back to his tablet. "Fine. But next time, we all go."
It wasn't a victory. Not really. But Seo-yeon looked at me across the table, and for the first time in months, her eyes weren't dull with exhaustion. They were sharp. Clear. Seeing me.
Really seeing me.
She gave me the smallest nod. So slight I might have imagined it.
•••
After they left—Min-jae with a perfunctory kiss on my cheek, Seo-yeon with a hesitant squeeze of my hand—the apartment settled into its daytime silence.
I stood at the sink, washing dishes. The steam from the hot water fogged the window overlooking the city. Out there, Seoul was waking up—a city of ten million people, all with their own silent battles, their own quiet desperations.
My phone buzzed on the counter. A message from my sister in Busan.
"Did you decide about Mom's birthday? Are you coming down this weekend?"
Another message from the building manager.
"Mrs. Kang, the board meeting about the new gym equipment is next Tuesday. You'll be there, yes? You always take such good notes."
Another from the dry cleaner.
"Your husband's suits are ready. Shall we deliver as usual?"
I looked at my reflection in the dark screen of my phone. At the woman who was a daughter, a wife, a mother, a note-taker, a schedule-keeper, a machine that made breakfast.
Then I looked out at the foggy window. At my own ghostly reflection superimposed over the city skyline.
Two women. One real. One imagined.
I didn't know which was which anymore.
The water in the sink ran hot over my hands, turning my skin pink. I watched it for a long time, until my phone buzzed again, pulling me back.
Back to the quiet apartment.
Back to the life I had built.
Back to being everyone's everything.
And no one's anything at all.