Episode 2
“Doyoon.”
My heart sank at the sound of that name, heard for the first time in so long.
Not my new name, but the one I thought I had given up. The name erased from the records, removed from my school, and never to be spoken again by anyone, as we had promised.
Uncle Taeseok had called me by that name.
I couldn’t raise my head.
The police station hallway was far too bright. Sitting beneath the white fluorescent lights, I felt like some kind of specimen. People glanced at me as they passed. A student in a school uniform. A kid who had been at the scene just moments after a student from the same school had fallen down the stairs and died.
And the kid who had once killed a serial killer.
I wanted to believe they didn’t know who I was. I was living under a new name. The old case had been covered up. But sometimes, people’s eyes felt strangely as if they knew the truth.
Uncle Taeseok stood in front of me.
There was no anger on his face. No disappointment, either. That made him even scarier.
Maybe it would have been better if he had gotten angry. If he had yelled, I could have lowered my head and said I was sorry. But he only looked at me without saying anything. As if he were taking breaths very carefully, afraid I might break.
“Was it really an accident?”
I couldn’t answer.
The image of that kid tumbling down the stairs replayed in my head. I pushed him. I definitely pushed him. But I hadn’t meant to kill him. No… had I really not?
My hands were still shaking.
“I don’t know.”
That was all that came out of my mouth.
I didn’t know.
I really didn’t know.
I didn’t know when I had tried to keep holding back or when I had started wanting to push him. I didn’t know whether that hand had been acting in self-defense, out of anger, or because I had followed his father's voice.
Uncle Taeseok said nothing for a long time.
Then he called me again, quietly.
“Doyoon.”
I hated that name.
That name held my dead mother, my father, and the bloodstained living-room floor. It held the world I had seen through the crack in the closet door and my father’s face as he smiled at me for the last time.
I couldn’t be Kim Doyoon.
That was the only way I could survive.
“Yes.”
When I finally answered, Uncle Taeseok sat down beside me.
“You can say exactly what you just said.”
“What do you mean?”
“That you don’t know.”
I slowly turned my head.
Uncle Taeseok was looking straight ahead. At the end of the hallway, the interview-room door was closed. The teacher, school officials, and students who had been at the scene had all gone in and out of it.
“Don’t force yourself to say you were a good kid. And don’t force yourself to say it was all an accident. If you really don’t know, say you don’t know.”
“Then what?”
“After that, it’s the adults’ job.”
I wanted to laugh.
The adults’ job.
It sounded strange. Because the adults hadn’t done what they were supposed to do, I had killed my father when I was thirteen. Nobody knew. Nobody stopped him. Mom died. The adults had been too late that day, too.
And yet Uncle Taeseok said it.
That after that, it was the adults’ job.
“I…”
My throat tightened.
“Did I kill someone again?”
Uncle Taeseok’s hand stopped.
He didn’t answer.
The silence felt like an answer, so I closed my eyes.
That was when I heard laughter beside my ear.
“Why are you asking?”
It was my father.
I drew in a breath.
“You already know.”
When I raised my head, my father was standing at the end of the hallway beside a vending machine. A dead man stood there as naturally as any living person. His hands were in the pockets of his black coat, his head tilted slightly as he looked at me.
“This is the second time, Doyoon.”
The corners of my father’s mouth lifted.
“One more, and you’ll really be just like me.”
“Stop…”
When I muttered the word, Uncle Taeseok looked at me.
“What did you say?”
I quickly shook my head.
“Nothing.”
My father laughed.
In the middle of the police station hallway, my dead father whispered in a voice only I could hear.
“You’re getting better at lying, too.”
I wanted to cover my ears. But I couldn’t. If I did, Uncle Taeseok might really find out. What I was seeing. What I was hearing. That I still hadn’t escaped my father.
The questioning continued late into the night.
I was asked the same questions over and over.
Why had I gone to that alley? Who had started the fight? How hard had I pushed him? What had I been thinking after I pushed him?
Every time I answered, I looked at the same place.
The corner of the interview room.
My father was sitting there.
He sat with his legs crossed, like an audience member watching a boring play. He laughed whenever I stumbled over my words, and lightly applauded every time I said, “I didn’t mean to kill him.”
“I like that line.”
My father spoke.
“I didn’t mean to kill him. That’s the line murderers like best.”
In the end, I didn’t cry.
I wanted to, but I didn’t.
If I cried, people would think I was a victim again. And that day, I didn’t know whether I was the victim or the perpetrator.
The case began moving in a strange direction the next day.
One of the students who had been at the scene—the kid who had been sitting on the ground and taking the beating—gave a statement. His name was Mingyu. He was the kind of kid who always walked with his head down, quiet enough to seem almost invisible in class.
Mingyu said it had been an accident.
He said I had been trying to help him. The dead student had been the one to start the violence. I had been grabbed by the collar, and when I tried to pull free, the other boy had lost his footing.
Mingyu reportedly said through his tears,
“If he hadn’t been there, I would’ve been hurt a lot worse.”
That one sentence changed everything.
There were no security cameras in the alley, but signs of the assault remained on Mingyu’s face and arms. The contents of his bag were scattered around, and several people testified that the dead student had regularly bullied others at school.
I became both the aggressor and a student who had tried to stop someone from being bullied.
The case gradually began to be filed away under the name “an unfortunate accident.”
The school wanted to quietly bury it. The dead student’s parents were furious, but as the things he had done while alive came to light one by one, public opinion grew complicated. Neither the police nor the prosecutors could easily turn me into a murderer.
Most of all, the people who knew about my past were cautious.
The kid who had killed a serial killer. The kid being protected under a new identity. The kid who had once again stood at the scene of a death.
All of it was a story too dangerous to tell.
In the end, I wasn’t deeply entangled in the case.
Officially, the circumstances were closer to an accident. A tragedy that had occurred while I was trying to help a victim of school violence. I was questioned several times, advised to receive counseling, and transferred to another school.
People protected me again.
That frightened me even more.
I survived again.
It had been the same when I killed my father, and the same in the face of the second death. Somehow, the world never punished me. It was as if, every time I crossed some line, someone erased it for me.
“You’re lucky.”
My father said it.
It was the night I came home.
My room in Uncle Taeseok’s house. Textbooks from school were piled on the desk, and the streetlamp outside the window swayed in the late-night darkness.
My father was leaning against the window.
“You got out again.”
I sat on the edge of my bed.
“It was an accident.”
“Really?”
“I said it was an accident.”
“Then why does it feel so strange?”
I clenched my fists.
“Shut up.”
My father laughed.
“You know better than anyone. You thought that kid would never be able to bully anyone again, didn’t you?”
I stopped breathing.
That was a thought only I was supposed to know.
I hadn’t told anyone, and I couldn’t have. But my father knew. No—maybe he was something that picked out only the thoughts I tried to hide and dragged them into the open.
That was when my bedroom door opened.
Uncle Taeseok stood there.
“Who are you talking to?”
I froze.
My father hadn’t disappeared. He stood by the window just as before, looking at Uncle Taeseok. Of course, Uncle Taeseok couldn’t see him.
I bit my lip.
“I was talking to myself.”
“Again?”
Uncle Taeseok came into the room.
I lowered my head. My heart pounded like crazy. He knew. It was over. He would see me as strange now. Even if he didn’t call me a monster, he would see me as an unstable kid, a dangerous kid, a kid who could explode at any moment.
But he didn’t scold me.
He sat in the chair beside my bed and remained silent for a long time before saying,
“Let’s go to the hospital.”
“No.”
The answer came immediately.
“This isn’t something you can handle alone.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“We’re not going so you can say that.”
I raised my head.
Uncle Taeseok looked at me with a tired expression. But his gaze hadn’t changed. Just like in the police station hallway—or like the day I first came to this house.
“We’re not going to find out whether you’re crazy.”
“Then why?”
“To find a way for you to live with less pain.”
I couldn’t say anything to that.
A way to live with less pain.
Could something like that really exist?
My father whispered inside me every day. The dead were more vivid than the living. The harder I tried to become a good person, the closer my father came.
A few days later, I went to the hospital with Uncle Taeseok.
White walls. A quiet waiting room. A nurse calling out names. Inside the consultation room was a doctor who spoke gently. He didn’t look at me with fear. He didn’t look at me with too much pity, either.
That felt unfamiliar in its own way.
I barely said anything during the first session. The doctor asked questions slowly. Was I sleeping well? Did I have nightmares? Had there been moments when my memory cut out after the incident? Had I ever heard someone’s voice when I was alone?
At first, I said no to everything.
Then, at some point, my mouth opened.
“I can see my father.”
The doctor stopped his pen.
Uncle Taeseok looked at me, too.
I looked down at my fingertips and continued.
“He’s dead, but I can see him. He talks to me. He laughs when I do something, and mocks me when I try to hold back. He keeps saying I look like him.”
The consultation room fell completely silent.
I kept talking.
“At first, I thought it was a dream. But now I see him during the day, too. At school, at home, at the police station. He was beside me when I pushed that person, too.”
Once I said it out loud, it sounded strange.
I thought the secret crushing me all this time might feel a little lighter once I let it out. But it didn’t. If anything, it became clearer. It felt as if I had personally admitted that I really was a strange person.
The doctor slowly nodded.
He didn’t say it was frightening. He didn’t call me a monster. Instead, he said I needed treatment. He said we should continue counseling and that medication might help. He explained that trauma could shake a person’s memories and senses.
I tried to understand what the doctor was saying.
Trauma. Auditory hallucinations. Visual hallucinations. Guilt. Defense mechanisms.
There were so many words.
But none of them could make my father disappear.
My father continued to appear after I came home from the hospital. He didn’t disappear when I took my medication, attended counseling, or left the lights on before going to sleep. But sometimes there were days when he seemed very far away. Days when his voice grew quieter. Days when his face blurred. On those days, I could breathe a little more easily.
Uncle Taeseok didn’t ask for details about my counseling sessions.
But he seemed to know.
He started eating in front of me more often. Even when he came home late from work, he knocked on my bedroom door. On weekends, he took me outside, even if he had to drag me along. He didn’t talk much, but he made sure I wasn’t alone for too long.
And at some point, his family began treating me more warmly, too.
His wife, Eunju, started giving me a little more food every morning.
“You have to eat a lot if you want to grow.”
The words were so ordinary that they hurt in a strange way.
It had been a long time since someone had made sure I ate. After Mom died, the table had always been quiet. At the shelter, the hospital, and the police station, eating was simply something I did to stay alive.
But Eunju remembered the side dishes I liked.
If I liked rolled omelets, she made them again the next week. When she learned I couldn’t handle spicy food, she made kimchi stew less spicy. Every time I received that kind of small consideration, my throat tightened.
Harin, Uncle Taeseok’s daughter, had been awkward around me at first.
She was two years younger than me. When I first came to the house, she hardly ever came near me. The adults had probably told her something. They might have told her to be careful because I was a poor kid, or not to bother me because I had been through something difficult.
But as time passed, Harin began leaving snacks outside my door.
At first, there was only a bag of chips, left without a word. Then a small note appeared.
“If you don’t feel like eating it, you don’t have to.”
I smiled when I saw the note, for the first time in a very long time.
Minjae was Uncle Taeseok’s oldest son. He was in college and only came home on weekends. He didn’t pity me. In fact, the first day we met, he said,
“Don’t make our dad’s life harder.”
Eunju smacked him on the back, but I didn’t dislike what he said.
Minjae didn’t treat me like I was special. He asked me to play games, took me along when he went to the convenience store, and explained math problems with an expression that made me feel stupid whenever I couldn’t solve them. When I got one right, he laughed and said, “At least your brain works.”
In that house, I wasn’t a strange person for the first time.
I was just a middle-schooler who needed to eat more, a younger brother who was bad at math, and a kid who sometimes locked his bedroom door and fell asleep.
My father hated all of it.
“Do you really think you’re part of this family?”
He asked me that every night.
“What makes you think you belong among those people?”
I didn’t answer.
“Tell me. Do you really think you fit in there?”
Instead, I opened my books.
That was around when I started studying.
At first, it was to keep from hearing my father’s voice. When I worked through practice books, his voice grew a little quieter, at least while I focused on numbers and sentences. I memorized English vocabulary, wrote out math formulas, and read my social studies textbooks.
Then, at some point, studying became a goal instead of an escape.
I wanted to repay Uncle Taeseok.
Because he hadn’t given up on me. Because his family tried not to be afraid of me. Because even though they knew I was a kid who might fall apart at any moment, they sat with me at the same table every day.
I wanted to become a good person.
It was a vague idea.
A good person.
The kind of person I felt least capable of becoming.
But that was why I wanted it even more.
I wanted to deny my father’s claim that I had been born with bad blood. I wanted to prove that people didn’t have to live exactly as they were born. I wanted to show that even if I was my father’s son, I didn’t have to live like him.
I wanted to be like Uncle Taeseok.
He wasn’t perfect. He came home late, grew quiet when he was tired, and sighed when he talked about cases. But he didn’t run away. Even after seeing frightening things, he went back to the scene. He looked into the things people turned away from, and he tried not to grow numb in the face of someone’s death.
I thought that was admirable.
One day, I asked him,
“Why are you a cop?”
Uncle Taeseok stopped cooking ramen and looked at me.
“Where did that come from?”
“Just wondering.”
He thought for a moment before answering.
“To arrive, even if I’m late.”
“What?”
“I don’t always arrive on time. Some cases are already too late, some people are already hurt, and some truths come out far too late. But it’s still better than not going at all.”
I remembered those words for a long time.
A person who arrives, even if he’s late.
I wanted to become that kind of person.
After that day, I had a goal.
The National Police University.
At first, I thought it was ridiculous. The idea of a kid like me becoming a police officer was laughable. A kid hiding his past. A kid who had killed someone. A kid who heard the ghost of his dead father.
But strangely enough, that goal kept me alive.
I studied until dawn. I kept quiet at school and worked through practice books at home. I continued counseling. I tried not to miss my medication. I endured even on the days I saw my father and the days his voice grew louder.
My father kept whispering.
“You think you’re going to become a cop?”
He sat on my desk and laughed.
“A murderer wants to catch murderers?”
I tightened my grip on the mechanical pencil.
“I’m not you.”
“Do you know how many years you’ve been saying that?”
“I won’t live like you.”
My father tilted his head.
“Then let’s see how far you can hold back.”
I endured.
I graduated middle school and entered high school. I didn’t have many friends. I didn’t make an effort to find any. I was afraid that if I grew close to someone, they would eventually find out. If they learned what was inside me and what kind of nights I had lived through, I thought they would all leave.
Still, I wasn’t completely alone.
Harin began calling me Oppa before long, and even after Minjae returned from the military, he occasionally looked over my report card and nagged me. Eunju started preparing herbal medicine without a word a hundred days before the college entrance exam, and Uncle Taeseok left information about the National Police University entrance exam on my desk.
He didn’t say anything, but it was encouragement.
I didn’t cry.
I just worked harder.
On the day the entrance exam ended, I slept for the first time in a long while. I didn’t dream. My father didn’t appear. It was a deep, quiet sleep.
On the day the acceptance results were released, Uncle Taeseok pretended not to care.
“Did you get in?”
I was staring at the monitor. My hands were shaking.
Accepted.
The moment I saw those two words, it felt as if the world stopped for a brief moment.
Eunju screamed from the kitchen, Harin hit me on the back and cried, and Minjae laughed in disbelief, saying, “You really got in?”
Uncle Taeseok quietly patted my shoulder.
“You did well.”
At those words, the breath I had been holding all that time finally collapsed.
I cried in front of him for the first time.
He stood beside me without saying anything. My father didn’t appear that night.
I thought I really might be able to get better.
Life still wasn’t easy after I entered the National Police University.
A regimented schedule, physical training, law classes, criminal psychology lectures, firearms training, relationships with upperclassmen and underclassmen. Everything was unfamiliar and overwhelming. But I endured. I worked harder than anyone.
People called me a diligent student.
Quiet but persistent. Not very expressive, but responsible. Someone who occasionally became too absorbed in case files.
That was enough.
No one called me a monster.
At last, I felt like I had become someone other than Kim Doyoon.
But no one can completely escape the past.
Especially when the past wears the face of a dead father.
During the summer of my second year, we went out for field training. It was a period when we reviewed real case files, learned police-station procedures, and accompanied officers on simple field assignments. I deliberately requested a precinct different from the one where Uncle Taeseok worked.
I didn’t want to rely on him.
I wanted to do it on my own.
That was where I met a man.
At first, I thought he was an ordinary civilian. A neat shirt, a calm way of speaking, and an overly polite smile. He had come in for an interview as a witness in connection with a missing-person report.
But something was strange.
The way he smiled was too familiar.
His eyes didn’t smile; only his mouth did. His gaze seemed to reassure the other person while looking down on them at the same time. Whenever he was asked a question, there was a brief pause as he chose his answer.
I knew that face.
My father.
No. He wasn’t my father.
The man simply resembled him.
That was all it should have been.
But from that night on, my father became vivid again.
“You felt it, didn’t you?”
My father sat beside my bed in the dormitory.
“That man is like me.”
I gripped the blanket.
“No.”
“He is.”
“No, he isn’t.”
“You saw it, too. He smells the same.”
I closed my eyes.
The word smell made me sick.
Because I really felt as if there was something to it.
A few days later, I happened to see a file on a missing-person case. The missing person was a twenty-year-old college student. Her last known location was near the man’s store. There wasn’t enough evidence, and he was only a witness.
But I couldn’t take my eyes off the file.
There were strange gaps in the man’s statement. Gaps that were strange because everything else was too perfect. He remembered even the times an ordinary person might have confused, yet naturally blurred the answers to the important questions.
I began to suspect him.
I shouldn’t have.
I was still a student, not an investigator. More than that, my father was inside me. Was I suspecting someone because there were real grounds, or was my father pulling me down that path again?
I had to stop.
I had to contact Uncle Taeseok.
I had to tell my counselor.
But I didn’t.
Every night, my father whispered,
“This time, you can arrive first.”
The words were sweet as a curse.
A person who arrives, even if he’s late.
I remembered what Uncle Taeseok had said.
But this time, I didn’t want to be late. I didn’t want to arrive after someone had died. I didn’t want to learn the truth after everything was already over, like with Mom.
I followed the man.
That was my mistake.
No—maybe my third murder had already begun at that moment.
It rained that night.
Just like the night I killed my father. Just like the day of the second death.
I confronted the man at the end of an alley. He wasn’t surprised. Instead, he smiled as if he had been waiting for me.
“Kid, did you follow me all the way here?”
I didn’t answer.
“I heard you’re a police cadet. You’re certainly dedicated.”
He took a step toward me.
At that moment, my father whispered behind me.
“Be careful. He can recognize his own kind.”
The man looked straight into my eyes.
“You’ve killed someone before, haven’t you?”
My breath stopped.
The world fell silent.
The sound of rain, the cars, the laughter of people in the distance—all of it receded.
The man smiled.
“I can tell by your eyes.”
That was the trigger.
I still can’t remember everything that happened that night.
What I remember is the wet ground. The blurred streetlamp. The man’s hand gripping my wrist. And my father’s voice laughing beside my ear.
“That’s right, Doyoon.”
He said,
“This time, it wasn’t an accident.”
I wanted to become a good person.
I wanted to become someone Uncle Taeseok wouldn’t be ashamed of. I wanted to prove to the family who had seated me at their table and the people who had called me by my name again that I wasn’t a monster.
But that night.
My third murder finally took place.