Page 148 of Perfect Happiness

He was rapidly losing his senses.He couldn’t hear or see anything.He was losing the ability to tell between dream and reality.Before he knew it, the lake from his dream was reappearing like a phantom, and when he opened his eyes, he was still trapped beneath the ice of the Half Moon Marsh.

Because of his fading consciousness, Eun-ho hadn’t been aware that he was already drifting out from under the ice.But then suddenly he felt his arm catch on something.At first, he didn’t give it much thought.And when through the dull, dark surface of the water, he found those eyes, he thought at first that he was dreaming.Even as the owner of the pair of eyes pulled him out of the water, he still thought this wasn’t reality.It was only much later when he heard a voice calling to him that he snapped out of it.

“Eun-ho.”

It was his sister-in-law.She pulled him out of the water, but he was still in a daze.His airway opened, oxygen rushed to his decaying cells, and his skin felt as hot as though he’d been stung by a bee.But that was all; his brain was still only working at half capacity.Because of this, he didn’t know what the light approaching Jane from behind meant.Only when he saw Jane being pulled back into the water by Wife’s hands did he realize what was happening.

That was also the moment he heard the sirens again.They sounded much closer than when he had fallen out of the wheelbarrow.They sounded like they were near the cabin.Eun-ho dug his fingers into the embankment and started dragging his body onto land like a caterpillar.At first, he had no strength in his limbs, but with each attempt, he could feel his strength returning to him.As his muscles warmed up, they chased away a bit of the cold.He continued to listen to the sirens invading the wetlands as he pulled his body completely out of the water.

Eun-ho collapsed face first into the snow.He could see police cars entering the marsh.

He woke up two days later in the hospital.It took Jane four days to wake up.Wife, however, never woke up.She was discovered the next afternoon, at the bottom of the gorge.The snowstorm and treacherous terrain of the gorge made recovering her body difficult, so he heard.

According to Jinu, it was Min-young who called the police.Just as Eun-ho had planned, Min-young had contacted the police as soon as she got his message.The head detective sent his people to Cheongyeon, where they ran into Jinu.Jinu had gone there to look for Eun-ho, who had stopped answering his phone.Until then, because they thought Eun-ho had run away with Yuna, they hadn’t considered he could be in danger.But they changed their mind when they realized that Jane had gone missing, too.

The Seodaemun Police Department had suspected Yuna from the beginning.Just before leaving for Cheongyeon, they called her into the station.That was already their second time calling her in.Yuna probably realized that the next time she saw them, they would be putting handcuffs on her.In fact, after the first time they called her, Yuna decided she needed to go to Woohyeri to get rid of the murder weapons.

But that day, Wife and Jane ran into each other at that cabin.That was the same day that Wife assaulted Jiyoo, and it was the same day that Eun-ho asked for a divorce.These had already pushed Wife to the edge of a precipice.

Locating the three of them wasn’t easy.All their cellphones had lost service at different locations around Cheongyeon, not Woohyeri.Jane’s phone’s last signal came from a stream in Jeongin-dong, Cheongyeon; Wife’s last signal came from their house in Cheongyeon; and Eun-ho’s came from the outskirts of Cheongyeon.Later, the police realized that Wife must have taken Jane’s phone with her back to Cheongyeon to throw off the police.

Because Eun-ho had managed to turn on his phone just before losing consciousness, the police were able to figure out they were in Woohyeri.Wife’s phone had also been turned on for a short period of time in the same location.And once they realized that Jane’s phone had visited the same location earlier that day, they wasted no more time.

The police found traces of Joon-young’s DNA in the soil surrounding the Half Moon Marsh and on the grinder that Wife took to a junkyard.They concluded that Wife had murdered Joon-young.But she was never charged with the murders of her father or her past boyfriends.Noah’s case was also left unsolved.They had no physical evidence to implicate Yuna in his death, only circumstantial evidence.And because the prime suspect was dead, the case simply went cold.Eun-ho was able to avoid charges of homicide, but his life never returned to normal.

*

Eun-ho never saw Jane again after that.All he heard was that she had taken Jiyoo and left for Russia.She probably found it unbearable to live in Korea anymore.

Eun-ho, who was labeled by the media as the “only man to survive Yuna Shin,” also found it unbearable to live here anymore.As soon as the charges against him were dropped, Eun-ho quit his job and moved down to Jeju Island.It had already been a year since he moved into the house in Aewol.For the last year, he lived like a ghost.He didn’t talk, he didn’t work, he saw no one.The only time he went out was to sit at a café with a view of the lighthouse or walk along the beach.

Mornings in Aewol always came with sea fog.He would leave his house around dawn to take a walk along the coast.As he walked through the fog while listening to the sound of waves, his thoughts were always lingering on his dreams from the previous night.

Last night, Yuna came to him in his dreams.

“Honey, why did you marry me?”

Why indeed?Back then, he was a satellite to Yuna.Every moment of every day, he was thinking about her.He thought about her when he woke up in the morning, at stoplights on his way to work, during breaks between classes, at the convenience store to pick up a beer on his way home from work.He would sit alone in the living room and think about her laugh until she came through the front door, shining like a star.From the moment he rose in the morning, to when he lay in bed at night waiting to fall asleep, he was always thinking about her.The only solution to such an obsession was marriage.

But as payment for his decision, Eun-ho lost everything.He still suffered from doubt about whether he killed his own son.On the nights his doubt prevented him from falling asleep, he would take temazepam, the miracle drug of death that Yuna had introduced him to.High on sleeping pills, he would be taken back to the cabin in the country.When Yuna inevitably appeared to kill him, he would ask her a question.

“Are you happy now?”

And she would answer with no expression on her face, “No.I’m just unlucky.”