A butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing causes a hurricane in the United States. Seen that way, it wasn’t entirely impossible to understand how one notarized agreement written by a husband had turned his wife into a terminal cancer patient lying in a hospice ward. Or perhaps, Joo-young thought, the death of someone close to you had always been an unavoidable fate, no matter who you were. Either way, it was Joo-young’s fault. He had thought they were a couple without love or affection anymore, but seeing his wife lying in the hospital bed, reduced to a gaunt, dried-out shell, made his heart ache. He was sincerely sorry. His daughter returned to the room and slowly sat down beside him.
“What’d they say?”
“They said it looks like she got through the crisis this time. But… you know how it is. She’s in a condition where it wouldn’t be strange if she passed away at any time… Dad, I’m scared…”
His daughter began to cry. Joo-young clasped her hand tightly.
“Don’t worry. Your mom and dad will definitely save her.”
Of course they had to. He had caused this mistake, so he had to fix it himself. But all three time points remaining in the pendant were from before the night he wrote the notarized agreement, and there was no way to undo what he had done by returning to the moment after he wrote it. He couldn’t come up with any idea at all for how to restore reality, which had been twisted into “his wife’s death.”
After comforting his daughter as best he could and sending her home, Joo-young sat in the dark hospital room until deep into the night. No matter how much he thought about it, the only way to save his wife seemed to be to “never get married in the first place.” Joo-young, in his early thirties, had flapped his wings by writing that ridiculous notarized agreement, and those wings had caused his wife to develop cancer. But there was no way to go to a point after that and clean up the mess. Therefore, the only option was to make sure they were never husband and wife to begin with. If they were complete strangers with nothing to do with each other, then whether he wrote a notarized agreement or did anything else, it couldn’t affect her. That was the conclusion he reached.
Joo-young took the pendant from the inside pocket of his jacket. Beyond the fog of time, three soft green glows flickered faintly. At least one of them had to be from the period when he was dating his wife. That had been the happiest time they had ever shared. If he went to that time point, there was a seemingly simple solution: break up with her by whatever means necessary. But a massive obstacle stood in the way of carrying it out. If he didn’t marry his wife, then naturally their two daughters would never exist, and that would be an unbearable loss for Joo-young. The only way to save his wife was a choice that meant losing his daughters. Trapped in an agony that left him unable to move either way, he could only watch the night deepen.
“Mm…”
His wife, whom he had thought was asleep, let out a low moan and shifted her body. Maybe she had been enduring the pain the whole time. Pain… It seemed he had caused her plenty of it, and not just this time. She was someone he had loved dearly, someone he had wanted to make happy, but he hadn’t been able to. He wanted to make things right. Resolving to endure whatever pain came his way from then on, Joo-young pressed firmly on one of the soft green glows.
Inside a café, Christmas lights twinkled to the rhythm of carols. Joo-young sat with a cup of old-fashioned instant coffee in front of him—the kind made with powdered coffee, creamer, and sugar added to taste. Another cup of coffee sat across from him, but its owner was nowhere to be seen, perhaps in the restroom. Joo-young slowly looked around the café. The place felt strangely familiar. Had it been one of his date spots with his wife? Then the owner of the coffee across from him returned to the table and sat down with an embarrassed smile. That smile, etched vividly in his memory—she was his first love.
When Joo-young was a freshman in college, Cupid must have used his back as a target, because he helplessly fell for an upperclassman in his department. Whenever he actually came face-to-face with her, he couldn’t say a word, yet he loitered around the department office all day. Once he got home, he went straight to bed before sunset. He needed the next day to come quickly so he could go to school, because going to school meant he could see her. Though he had never experienced anything like it before, he could smack his forehead and say, “Ah, so this is what love is!”
Then an emergency struck: summer vacation. Not only could he not see her even if he went to school, but the break was unbelievably long. After spending sleepless nights lovesick, he finally wrote his aching feelings in a letter and sent it to her. Then she wrote back. Joo-young still remembered the exhilaration he’d felt one evening when he saw her letter tucked into the front gate. Of course, her reply was essentially a textbook example of an experienced response to a lovestruck kid’s confession: she wanted them to remain close as senior and junior, as noona and little brother, and he should feel comfortable around her. Thanks to that, though, they were able to go on something resembling dates, and more than anything, he was happy that they could continue exchanging letters. Before winter vacation, they even went to an amusement park together. He remembered it vaguely. On the night when his wish to go to an amusement park with her had come true, he had thought, sitting in a café near her house, that he wanted to experience this moment again at least once.