The Love They Never Had: The Nam Mansion

Part 4: Present Day 2-Chapter 44: Hablihwa (Rationalisation)

I couldn't see him anymore, no matter how hard I looked and ran around the entire brothel, Seon-Ho had once again left without saying a single word to me. For almost up to a year now, I had to endure his pointed stares following me everywhere I went, but I was just as helpless as he was and we all knew it. Even my brother could tell what was going on, but he wasn't too happy about the situation either. His 'woman' ran off with his best friend, so where did that leave me? Hwi had a new woman and after everything we had all been through, all I could do was to keep the peace with everyone. Seon-Ho was with Hui-Jee, so why wasn't he happy with her? Why did he always look so miserable? And why was he always finding excuses to stay around me? If I...If I knew that he would be this depressed and doing so badly at work then I wouldn't have done it, any of it. I would have stayed in his life, I would have helped him more if he let me, I would have looked after him and I would have...
You would have what, Yeon? What are you talking about? What were you thinking about? Have you already forgotten what has happened to you? Orphaned in childhood, separated from your brother for almost 3 years after suffering from memory loss, being a hostage, getting your heart broken by that man over and over again and...I still could not bring up the last thing that happened to me. Nobody knew that, and I wasn't planning on letting anybody know, not even Seon-Ho himself. It wasn't like anything was going to change anyways, so what was the point of bringing it up and reliving that pain al over again? I was stuck in a brothel and nobody knew why or how, but now that I was here I wasn't going to turn my back on these girls like Hui-Jee had the moment a man wanted her enough to buy her freedom from the brothel she grew up in. I was going to better their lives before finding a way out of here, I owed that to them...and my mother who was also thrown into this place. Not because we had committed any crime, we didn't shame our families and we were not crippled women...well, she wasn't at least. We were thrown into this place that every women left her dignity behind because we were different from everyone else. We were not weak and timid women who only spoke when spoken to, we were not women who could be kept locked up in our houses and we were not uneducated and illiterate women. We were far from that, we were women who had a deep hunger of knowledge, and we would do anything to get our hands on anything we could learn from. But we were still in the Goreyo Dynasty, and I doubt that even the next dynasty was ready to educate women like they did to men who were lucky enough to go to school and have tutors brought to their home to teach them whilst women had to only suffice with needlework and poems. And that was only for noble women as well.

After looking around once again, I returned to my own quarters, only to see a new flower on my bed that o wasn't familiar with. It was pretty and it was long-stemmed, it was clearly picked out by someone just for me. But Dal was long dead and there was nobody to pay attention to me like this anymore. But before I even got the chance to smell the flower, all of the candles in ihwaru were suddenly blown out all at once and we were left in darkness. I could hear the girls screaming in fright and see the men running around like headless chickens. I turned around to see what on earth was going on, but I couldn't open my door. There were no locks on these paper windows, and I entered my room barely two minutes ago, so I had no idea what could be blocking my door. I shouted from my door repeatedly for a while before I realised that all of the noise had suddenly stopped. I couldn't even hear a single whisper even though my quarters were located in the centre of the brothel so I could see and hear everything that I needed to.

I do not recall how long I was locked in my room for, but it was long enough for me to crawl around my room to see if anything was missing. Robberies had taken place in this brothel before due to it's flourishing reputation, so I was expecting some of my jewellery to go missing. But nothing could have prepared me for the fact that my private journals were the items that went missing. That made my heart drop to the floor and I started panicking immediately. My whole life; present, past and future was on there and I didn't even let my own brother touch them. Who could have...who even knew about them? I only wrote in them in private and in my spare time and there was nobody in my circle who could understand Chinese...unless...