“What is this?”
When I looked at him with eyes questioning what this hat was, Do Wonjin lightly ruffled my hair and answered.
“It’s to keep the flies away.”
“But it’s only early summer?”
“No, it’s because Jeongjae is too pretty, so it’s to keep weird guys from hovering around you.”
Did he spread butter on me?
As soon as I understood what Do Wonjin meant, my face became so hot that I bowed my head deeply. I needed to take off the hat and return it, but I couldn’t lift my head.
“Go on inside. When you find your wallet, don’t wander off elsewhere—go straight home.”
As he wrapped his arm around my shoulder and opened the cafe door for me, I couldn’t hold back anymore. After entering the cafe, I immediately scanned the interior. The cafe was quite crowded at 2 PM, but there was only one table where a man who looked like a foreigner was sitting alone.
“Hello.”
The man wearing glasses who had been seriously flipping through documents looked up at my greeting. He pressed his wrinkled brow and lifted his drooping mouth corners, perhaps due to fatigue. Just from first impressions, I could tell he was a very busy person.
“You’re here. Please, have a seat.”
He must have been here for quite some time, as the half-empty Americano in front of him had gone cold long ago.
“Um, my wallet…”
Not wanting to waste a busy person’s time, I immediately asked about the whereabouts of my wallet.
“It’s right here.”
“Thank you. I’d like to offer you some compensation…”
The familiar wallet appeared from his possession. As I reached for the wallet he placed on the table while expressing my gratitude, something felt off. He wasn’t letting go of the wallet.
“Excuse me? Your hand…”
At first, I thought it was a mistake, but when his attitude didn’t change even after I asked him to let go, I realized it was intentional.
‘He found my wallet and agreed to return it, so why?’
As I grew increasingly bewildered, the man grabbed my hand that was on top of the wallet. Startled, I hurriedly tried to pull my hand away, but he gripped it more firmly so I couldn’t escape.
“Mr. Woo Jeongjae.”
At the desperate tone in the man’s voice, I looked up at him.
“Please help me.”
I was now beyond bewilderment and becoming angry at this rude man.
“What are you doing?”
At my words, the man’s eyes wavered greatly. He ran his free hand over his face. He seemed to have lost his reason due to extreme fatigue.
“I’m sorry. I was afraid you might run away, so I grabbed your hand first out of urgency.”
“Why would I run away?”
“I apologize for being rude. If you promise not to run away, I’ll let go of your hand.”
“What have you been—fine, I won’t run away.”
I was irritated by this man who only spoke his own mind without proper explanation, but I softened my emotions seeing his desperate gaze that matched his voice.
“I’ll trust you.”
The man said those words and withdrew his hand from mine. I quickly grabbed my wallet and glared at him while lightly rotating my hand that had marks from how firmly he had gripped it.
“Now explain yourself.”
“I’ll introduce myself first. My name is Peter from the U.S. Special Operations Command. Our headquarters is located in LA, S district, and we mainly investigate terrorism cases involving special abilities. The reason I’m visiting Korea is because we received information that a high-ranking member of a terrorist organization that has been notably active recently has fled to Korea.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“I saw the photo in this wallet.”
If it was a photo, there was only one.
“It looked like a family photo, and I had my suspicions, but I couldn’t be certain until I confirmed it directly. Is the woman in the photo your mother?”
My heart sank. It was obvious what it meant for someone I was meeting for the first time today to mention my mother who had disappeared without a trace in the winter when I was 20.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Then please take a look at this photo too. It was taken at an incident scene on March 11th of this year.”
As if he had anticipated my answer, Peter took out a large printed photo from the documents he had been looking through before I arrived and handed it to me.
“Is this also your mother?”
The image of a woman standing leisurely alone in the midst of a chaotic terrorist scene was particularly striking. The photo quality wasn’t clear, possibly because it was taken from a distance and enlarged, but I could immediately recognize who she was.
‘My big son, you’ve grown so much. Mom loves you very much. Take care of Jeonghyun, and be careful out there.’
Those were my mother’s words as she hugged me before I left home to register my younger brother as a Guide. At that time, I just laughed it off thinking it was embarrassing, not knowing those would be her last words to me. I’ve regretted it ever since. How hard would it have been to say something warm back to her?
Something hot welled up in my throat.
“Woo Jeongjae?”
“Is this… real?”
My voice came out tight from holding back tears. I pressed the brim of my hat down deeply to hide my watering eyes.
“Yes, it’s real.”
While murmuring that I couldn’t believe it, I kept fingering the photo the man had shown me.
‘He says it’s real…’
Not long after my mother went missing, I believed she wasn’t dead, just residing somewhere out of sight. But when that stretched from 1 year to nearly 5 years, it began to feel like a lie. Maybe my mother had actually passed away in the winter of my 20th year, and I was the only one still believing otherwise.
‘So you were alive then.’
Just confirming my mother’s survival seemed to reassure me that my faith hadn’t been in vain, and my heart ached again.
“So that person is indeed your mother.”
Only then did I realize I hadn’t yet answered Peter’s question.
“Yes, that’s right. Where is my mother now?”
I had thought I would never see my mother again, but thanks to Peter, I now knew she was alive. Unlike my expression that softened with gratitude, Peter’s face was complicated.
“Unfortunately,”
With Peter’s first word, my peaceful mind made a discordant sound.
“I don’t know your mother’s whereabouts either.”
A sense of foreboding overwhelmed me.
“Has something happened to my mother?”
“I have something to tell you about that now.”
At his chillingly cold voice, reason returned to my head as well.
“On March 11th of this year, a Class A high-risk villain appeared in the S district under my jurisdiction. He was a flame-type ability user.”
The man recalled the time as he pushed up his sliding glasses.
“When we arrived at the scene after receiving the report, it was already a sea of fire. The damage from the flames was severe, so I had to deploy my ability over a wide area, and at that moment, all the surrounding wavelengths were distorted. I thought the villain had used his ability to counteract my attack, but he disappeared at that moment, and I realized there was an accomplice helping him.”
Peter took out another photo from the document envelope. It was identical to the one he had just shown me, but with one big difference.
“This is just one minute before the previous photo.”
In this photo, my mother wasn’t visible.
“This entire area was completely paralyzed due to the terrorist attack. Especially in the area where the woman appeared in the photo, it was close to the villain, so there should have been almost no survivors. Even if there were, they should have been injured by the flames, but as you can see, there’s no trace of such injuries anywhere.”
After finishing his explanation of the situation, he looked directly at me.
“Your mother was a special spatial-temporal adjustment Esper.”
Contrary to saying he wanted to confirm my mother’s identity through me, his attitude suggested he had already confirmed our relationship and completed related research.
“She went missing about 1 year and 4 months ago.”
Hearing this far, I found this meeting unbearably uncomfortable. For Peter, he had coincidentally found a woman in a wallet he picked up who appeared to be a key witness to the incident, or possibly a criminal accomplice.
It might have been a stroke of luck for him, but for me, learning about my mother’s whereabouts in this way only brought displeasure.
“If you already know all this, what kind of help are you trying to request from me?”
I was reaching the limits of my patience; if I hadn’t promised Peter I wouldn’t run away, I would have stormed out immediately.
“Circumstantially, your mother seems to be a member of the terrorist organization I’m chasing and is helping them.”
“My mother is not the type of person who would join a terrorist organization.”
Peter explained while pressing his temples firmly as if tired.
“That’s something I can’t know. Whether she was brainwashed, or forced to stay there due to threats, or participated in their activities willingly—the fact remains that she was involved.”
I was upset, but there was nothing wrong with what he said.
“But that’s why I need your help.”
It felt like we had come full circle to the beginning of the conversation. I glared at Peter, and he extended his hand to me with a kind smile.
“If we can just catch one person, we can find out why your mother was there and where she is now.”
Peter’s intentions were clear. He had told me from the beginning that his purpose for coming to Korea was to catch a high-ranking member of the terrorist organization. That had been his goal all along.
“So I need to help you catch this high-ranking member of the terrorist organization you mentioned?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
The investigation into my mother concluded even faster than when Woo Jeonghyun died. Many people said that although her body hadn’t been found, my mother was essentially dead.
The state went even further, offering to hold a funeral, but Woo Jeonghyun and I opposed it. The possibility that my mother was alive was slim, but I needed that sliver of possibility just to breathe.
“If I do that, I can get my mother back, right?”
I was desperate. I couldn’t let go of my mother’s whereabouts now that I had finally found a trace of her.
“Of course. You can meet her again.”
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
