I answered the phone on the back step in my slippers, the cold already seeping through the wood. Dong-soo’s voice was steady but thin, the way a man sounds when he has carried a secret too long and can no longer hold its weight. He told me what his son had said that morning, the rest of the sentence that had been cut short in their earlier argument: “I know that I let her believe it was her body.” Before the wedding, a specialist in Seoul had told Tae-ho he could not father children. He never told Clara. For three years she endured tests, injections, and two failed treatments, calling me every month in tears, apologizing as if her body had failed everyone. Tae-ho held her hand through every appointment while the truth stayed locked in a drawer.

His father found the old medical report that spring. What Tae-ho needed, he explained, was a wife who would never leave, and he was certain Clara would leave the moment she learned the truth. I did not shout into the phone. I stood there in the cold and asked Clara to come home now, and to come to the guest room first.