Cursed Bunny(49)

Their livelihoods depended on their home. And to her, home meant something far more than just a monthly source of income. The place was everything she had, the only thing to show for years of smashing herself against the world. And during that entire time she had worked herself to the bone, carrying her husband on her back, he had never so much as lifted a finger to help her. In the midst of her anxiety over the twenty million won of debt he had spent without her knowledge, all of these facts were beginning to seem very clear to her now.

When he felt like it, her husband would occasionally go hiking at a nearby foothill. He was never away long enough for her to worry about him, but there was no consistent pattern to his hikes. Sometimes he left early in the morning, sometimes he took days off from his habit before setting off abruptly in the evening. Ever since his friend had run away with his money, he would spend hours on the phone in the office before tiring of it and going for a walk in the hills.

She received the phone call when he was out on one of these hikes. She had gone down to the office to retrieve him for lunch, but there was only his cell phone at his desk. And just as she stepped in the office, it began to ring as if it had been waiting for her.

Was there finally someone who wanted some of the health drink? There was a spark of hope in her heart as she picked up the phone. At the sound of her voice saying, “Hello,” whoever it was on the other end of the line went silent for a moment. The woman repeated her greeting and added, “Please speak up.”

—Is it you, bitch?

The woman was taken aback by the hostility of the female voice on the other end. “Excuse me?”

—Are you that asshole’s wife?

“What?”

The voice on the other end seethed with hate.

—Isn’t it your bastard husband who tricked my husband into selling that bullshit berry drink, before your husband took our money and cut off my husband?

Finally, the call was starting to make sense. And who was accusing whom of being in the wrong! “Now look here. About that business, I—

—You made my husband put the business in his name so he would take all the blame, but you and your despicable man held onto the stock and grabbed the sales money for yourselves, am I right? My husband was the one who brought in all of his connections, but you two just sucked him dry and tossed him over when you were done with him!

“We were the ones who were ripped off! How dare you—”

But her raised voice was countered by an even louder attack reinforced by harsh curses. When the woman told her to watch her tone, the caller gave out a contemptuous laugh.

—Look at her standing by her man. Do you still want to stand by him when he’s screwing some other woman? He hired some whore calling herself an interior designer when he was remodeling. Stealing other people’s money, and having an affair right under your nose. What a pathetic household you run.

“What!”

The woman’s agitated tone seemed to bring satisfaction to the caller, who began speaking in a more leisurely tone.

—I’ve got your husband’s texts and calls as evidence, he’s not going anywhere. Did you think I was going to pretend like nothing had happened?

The woman wanted to ask her what the evidence was for. But the caller seemed to have gone past the anger and cursing stage and entered the lamenting-her-fate stage.

—My husband is the real idiot for associating with such filth like you two, quitting his good job so he can go into business with his college buddies … You two were probably fake students, right? Pretending to be college kids? A couple of grifters!

The moment the caller began to get all riled up again, she heard someone punching in the code to the main door downstairs.

Her husband. This surprised her so much that, for reasons she couldn’t understand, she quickly hung up the phone.

She heard him come up the stairs. Swiftly, she put the phone back where it was and went to the fridge. She began rifling through its contents. It had been cleaned after her husband’s friend had disappeared, but the fresher berries they had saved were starting to rot as well.

More keypad noises. It came from the second floor; it wasn’t her husband but the tenants coming back from lunch.

She sighed in relief.

The phone lay mute on the desk.

The words “texts and calls” refused to leave her mind.

As did the passcode to her husband’s phone.

She couldn’t decide whether it was a good or bad thing that the blood-sausage place on the first floor chose that moment to raise the issue of the premium.

First, the old man came alone. Since it was the woman who mostly dealt with the renters, he had probably thought it would be easy for him, a man who had experienced the world, to get a young woman to do whatever he told her to. But the woman’s husband, unusually for him, decided to lend his masculine presence to this meeting for reasons unknown.

When the old man mentioned the premium, the woman’s husband countered with his understanding of the relevant legal facts. The old man reminded him that they had signed a modified contract to avoid transaction fees and threatened to report him to the tax offices. Undaunted, her husband continued to call the man “sir” and repeatedly explained the situation to him. “That contract was signed by both parties, and if you follow through with that threat, you will also be prosecuted by the tax offices. Also, your rent is actually not that high, nor have you paid it for a long time, which means whatever money we owe isn’t going to be that high, either. Don’t you think that it would be cheaper for us to just pay the back taxes than pay the thirty million won difference in a premium that has nothing to do with the landlord anyway? Don’t you think so, sir?”