Day twenty. Exactly four o’clock in the afternoon.
I was walking softly down the east corridor, carrying a stack of freshly folded linens, when a sharp, involuntary yelp shattered the quiet of the penthouse. It wasn’t a loud sound, but it was laced with a sudden, sharp pain.
I dropped the linens on a side table and shoved the heavy oak door open.
Sara was standing impossibly close to the wheelchair. Eun-ji’s delicate left hand rested rigidly in her own lap. The thin skin across her knuckles was already blooming into an angry, swollen red. Sara hurriedly shifted her weight, stepping back. She had been standing directly on Eun-ji’s fragile fingers with the needle-like heel of her designer stiletto.
“Oh, Ruth!” Sara chirped, spinning around with a blinding, camera-ready smile. “You startled me! I was just adjusting Eomeonim’s blanket for her.”
That night, the penthouse was suffocatingly quiet. I sat on the edge of Eun-ji’s bed, gently wrapping an ice pack in a soft towel and pressing it against her heavily bruised, swollen fingers.
“Why don’t you just tell him?” I whispered into the dimly lit room. “Tell your son exactly what she is doing to you.”
“She will put me in a home,” Eun-ji replied, her voice entirely devoid of the professor’s fire. “She has been telling Jae-hoon for months now that I am constantly confused. Forgetting basic things. She even brought a private doctor here last week. She stood right behind him and told him I was rapidly declining. She is methodically building a legal case to have me declared mentally incompetent.”
“You are the absolute sharpest person I have ever met in my entire life,” I argued, securing the bandage around her finger.
“It does not matter what I actually am, Ruth,” Eun-ji sighed, staring blindly at the ceiling. “It only matters what she successfully makes him think I am. She has thought of absolutely everything. She has trapped me.”
“She is not smarter than you,” I insisted fiercely.
“No,” Eun-ji agreed, her voice trembling. “She is not smarter. But she is meaner. And in this world, those are two very different things.”
By day twenty-five, I couldn’t take the suffocating silence anymore. I took the private elevator down to the corporate floors and marched directly into Kang Jae-hoon’s executive office. It was a cold, intimidating sanctuary of extreme wealth. The walls were made of sheer, tinted glass overlooking the sprawling metropolis, and his polished mahogany desk was roughly the exact size of my bedroom back in the guesthouse.
I stood in the center of the room and told him absolutely everything. I told him about the cruel, whispered threats in the afternoon. I told him about the hidden reading glasses. I told him about the dark, finger-shaped bruises on her upper arm, and the designer heel deliberately grinding into his mother’s frail hand.
Jae-hoon’s face was an unreadable mask. He picked up his phone and called Sara.
When she arrived ten minutes later, the performance of a lifetime immediately began. The pristine tears flowed exactly on cue. She pulled up perfectly curated Instagram photos of the two of them smiling in the penthouse garden.
“I love your mother, Jae-hoon,” Sara wept, pressing a manicured hand to her chest. “She is like my own flesh and blood. Why would this woman—this stranger—lie about me like this?”
Jae-hoon stood up, adjusting his suit jacket. “We are going to my mother’s room.”
We all took the elevator up in suffocating silence. Jae-hoon walked in first. I followed closely behind him. Sara trailed at the back, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.
“Eomeoni,” Jae-hoon started gently, crouching beside the wheelchair. “Ruth says that Sara has been hurting you. Is that true?”
Eun-ji’s dark eyes flickered rapidly. She looked past her son. She looked directly at Sara, who was standing right behind Jae-hoon’s broad shoulders. Sara’s beautiful face was meticulously arranged into an expression of profound love and deep concern. But her eyes—cold, dead, and entirely locked onto Eun-ji—were screaming a silent, terrifying promise. The home. The sterile facility. Completely alone. Say exactly what I told you to say.
Eun-ji swallowed hard. Her shoulders slumped in total defeat. “No,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “The maid is simply mistaken. Sara has been very kind to me.”
Jae-hoon stood up slowly. He turned to face me, his jaw set. “My mother has spoken. She is clearly afraid of the tension you are creating. If you continue making these completely unfounded accusations against my fiancée, I will be forced to seriously reconsider your position in this household.”
He turned and walked out of the room. Sara lingered in the doorway for a fraction of a second. She slowly looked back at me. The theatrical tears were instantly gone. What remained underneath that beautiful mask was something utterly cold and reptilian. Then, she turned on her heel and glided down the hall.
I stood frozen in the quiet room. The old woman in the wheelchair simply stared down at her bruised lap.
“I am so sorry, Ruth,” Eun-ji whispered, a single tear cutting through the wrinkles on her cheek.
“Do not be sorry,” I said, my voice thick with emotion. “Be angry.”
“I am far too tired to be angry anymore.”
I walked over and sat down heavily on the floor right beside her wheelchair. I gently took her good hand in both of mine. “Then I will just have to be angry enough for both of us.”
“Please,” Eun-ji breathed out, squeezing my fingers weakly. “Do not leave me alone in this house with her.”
“I am not going anywhere,” I promised.