Chapter 1 What Passes for Normal
A NOTE ON VOICES
This novel is told through multiple voices. Each narrator sees the world differently. Kwon thinks like a detective — short sentences, facts, distance. Soo-yeon controls every word because control is all she has left. Choi speaks in the language of logic because he doesn't see what he did as a crime. And Song-jin — his chapters are addressed directly, in the second person, because what he did is something you cannot assign to a stranger.All events and names are fictional.
KWON BONG-SU — SEOUL — JANUARY 2024
The light rain had already started by the time Lee Ji-yeon reached my office. I spotted her from the window before she knocked — a woman in her mid-thirties walking with measured steps, as though each one was a deliberate decision. She held her bag in front of her body, not slung over her shoulder.
That small detail told me something: she hadn't come to ask for help. She'd come to present a case.
She knocked.
"Come in."
The man who sat behind the desk — me — is forty-five years old, with a face that has learned to absorb hard things. Not hardness, exactly. Something else. The calm that comes from spending too many years on the wrong side of doors that no one wants to open.
She placed two sheets on my desk before she sat. Two, not three — which meant she'd chosen the most important evidence and left everything else behind. I read them slowly, not because they were complicated, but because I needed enough time to watch how she breathed while she waited.
She breathed evenly.
That's rare.
She told me the story. The hospital. The doctor who gripped the edge of the file. The HLA result — zero compatibility — that had confused the doctor before it confused both of them. The DNA test that her ex-husband, Tae-min, had run in two separate labs because his brain refused to accept the first result. And then the divorce, which had arrived not as a question but as a full stop.
When she finished, I noticed she hadn't used the word 'unfair.' Not once. She hadn't called herself a victim, or wronged, or any variation of that. She had described facts. Only facts.
"I'm going to ask you some very direct questions," I said.
"Ask them."
I asked. The standard questions that fill the first blank in any case. She answered every one with a 'no' — until I reached the last one:
"Where was Song-ho born?"
"Hanil Specialty Hospital. Maternity ward. June 2019."
I wrote it down. Then I stopped writing.
"Did you have an HLA test done on yourself?"
She looked at me with the obvious question in her eyes: Why?
"Your husband also believed he was the father."
I didn't finish the sentence. I never finish sentences when the other person can finish them themselves — it makes them understand at a deeper level. When they understand it themselves, they believe it more.
She looked at the paper on my desk. Then at me. Something shifted in her breathing. Not much. But enough.
"You're saying…"
"I'm not saying anything yet. I'm suggesting you get the test done. Today, if possible."
She left. The light rain was still falling. I looked at the two sheets on my desk.
Twelve percent.
That number didn't mean infidelity. It meant something else. And that something else — when it surfaces in a file — is rarely random.
