by Mi-ae Seo
“You’ll live with your dad. But first, you have to tell him,” Seonkyeong said, and drank some more milk. She wanted to send Hayeong out of the room as soon as possible.
Hayeong, who had been quietly watching her drink the milk, smiled suddenly and whispered, “Do you want me to tell you a secret?”
Seonkyeong felt afraid for some reason to see Hayeong smile, her eyes gleaming, looking completely different from the way she had a moment before. Seonkyeong felt stifled. She wanted to go to the bathroom and throw up.
“Do you know how my mom died?” Hayeong asked.
She had died, supposedly after taking something. But Hayeong’s smiling face seemed to say something different. Seonkyeong felt sick with an ominous dread.
“How . . . how did she die?” she asked.
“She died after drinking some milk, like you just did” was Hayeong’s reply.
Seonkyeong looked at her in trepidation.
“My dad told me to put it in the milk and give it to her, if she hurt me really, really bad.”
“The medicine, then?”
“He gave it to me. He said it would make her fall asleep. I think she died because I put too much in.”
Seonkyeong’s mind went blank. Her hands and feet felt numb, and she kept rubbing her hands. Her head felt heavy, too.
“It’s a secret between just my dad and me. He told me to throw away the rest of the medicine, but I didn’t,” Hayeong said, and took something out of her pocket and held it out to Seonkyeong. A dainty little medicine bottle lay in the palm of her hand.
Why hadn’t Seonkyeong thought of it? It would’ve been so easy for him, a doctor, to get his hands on medicine. She remembered his sensitive reaction whenever she brought up his ex-wife. Seonkyeong had thought it was because of the wounds the woman had inflicted on him, but there seemed to have been another reason.
She wondered what his true intention had been in handing Hayeong the poison.
Had he given it to her because he couldn’t bear to see his daughter being abused by her mother? Or had it been a plan, to free himself of his ex-wife? There was no telling why he had really given Hayeong the poison, but it had killed them all—Hayeong’s mother, grandmother, and grandfather. Now it was Seonkyeong’s turn.
Seonkyeong smiled in spite of herself. Hayeong tilted her head, unable to understand why she was smiling. Seonkyeong had reproached herself again and again for the horrible experience the child had gone through the night before. But the child was far beyond the point where her concern could do any good.
With deep, large eyes, Hayeong was looking at the changes taking place in Seonkyeong. Her eyes shone with anticipation.
Seonkyeong feared how the child would grow up. What lay in her future?
She wondered who had turned her into a monster. Was it her mother, who abused her, or her father, who gave her the poison? Or was it Seonkyeong herself, who had made her commit another murder? Sleep washed over her and interfered with her thoughts. How strange. She thought she had slept well; why was she so drowsy?
Seonkyeong tottered, and Hayeong rushed over and took the cup from her.
Seonkyeong fell limply onto the bed. Hayeong covered her expertly with a blanket, as if she had just been waiting to do that. She put her arms tightly around Seonkyeong’s waist and said, “Do you know something? I liked you till just yesterday.”
Seonkyeong couldn’t say a word.
“I wished that you were my mom.”
Seonkyeong couldn’t see her face very well, because her eyelids kept drooping. She recalled Yi Byeongdo’s face.
She felt that the devil had played with their fates, by putting him into her hands.
The devil had killed Yi Byeongdo, and created another monster in his place. A new devil that came to completion when Yi Byeongdo was dead.
Hayeong, who was still so young, was smiling innocently, unaware of the devil’s scheme. Or perhaps Hayeong was evil itself. But it was everyone—her mother, her father, and everyone else—who had brought this evil into being.
Seonkyeong knew the end Hayeong was to meet.
Yi Byeongdo had shown that to her through his own death.
She wondered how Hayeong would look, when one day, far in the future, she realized that she was at the end of her life.
As her consciousness slipped into deep slumber, Seonkyeong heard the child’s clear voice in her ear, saying, “Good night . . . Mom.”
About the Author
MI-AE SEO was born in 1965 and studied Korean literature in college.
She made her literary debut in the spring of 1994 when she won a contest held by Sports Seoul with her short story “Thirty Ways to Kill Your Husband.”
Her works include the novels The Only Child, The Doll’s Garden, Arin’s Gaze, and The Night Your Star Disappeared, and the short-story collections Thirty Ways to Kill Your Husband, The Murderer I’d Like to Meet, and Trajectory of the Star. She won the Grand Prize for Korean Detective Literature in 2009 for The Doll’s Garden.
She wrote the screenplays for My Beautiful Girl, Mari, which won the Grand Prix at Annecy International Animation Film Festival, as well as Temptation of Eve: Kiss and Temptation of Eve: Her Own Technique.
In television, she’s written for Please Don’t on Sundays, Into the Storm, Detective Q, Thirty Ways to Kill Your Husband, and The Murderer I’d Like to Meet.
Currently, she is working on the sequel to The Only Child and on a script for a television drama about a criminal profiler.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE ONLY CHILD. Copyright © 2020 by Mi-ae Seo. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph © Kativ/iStock/Getty Images
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sŏ, Mi-ae, author. | Jun, Yewon, translator.
Title: The only child : a novel / Seo Mi-Ae ; translated by Yewon Jun Other titles: Chal chayo ŏmma. English
Description: New York : Ecco, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019013861 (print) | LCCN 2019020273 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062905055 (Ebook) | ISBN 9780062905048 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062959171 (pbk.)
Classification: LCC PL994.74.M52 (ebook) | LCC PL994.74.M52 C48 2019 (print) | DDC 895.73/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013861
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Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-290505-5
Version 01032020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-290504-8
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