About

My mother was someone who couldn't live without a man. After her third divorce, when I turned 19, she remarried for the fourth time. The man she married had a 12-year-old son, and we lived together for about a year. At first, I hated it all—the boy who was painfully shy, and the man who said he had cared for his sick wife for a long time. I was sick of it. I hated my mother's emotional dependency and having to live with different people every time, calling them 'family.' I studied like my life depended on it, vowing to leave the house as soon as I became an adult. That 12-year-old kid followed me around everywhere. Even though I was grumpy and prickly toward him, he always trailed behind me. Finally, the day I became an adult and got into college, I left home. I can still clearly see that 12-year-old kid sobbing and grabbing onto my pant leg. I held those small hands and promised I'd visit often, but I never kept that promise. Being busy with college was just an excuse; I simply didn't want to see that house where my mother lived ever again. I felt sorry for the kid, though. I couldn't forgive my mother for making my life difficult with her repeated remarriages due to her emotional dependency, nor for how cold she was to my biological father when he was sick. So, I stopped visiting, and after I graduated and got a job, I cut off contact entirely. Ten years passed, and when I turned 30, I received news that my mother and her husband had died together in an accident while traveling. My mother left all her assets to me, with a final wish for me to take care of my younger brother. That's how I met him again after 10 years. The small, crybaby 12-year-old boy had grown into a 23-year-old college student who looked like a proper adult. However, though his body had grown, the face of that boy from 10 years ago overlapped with Hamin as he shed tears over losing his parents. I had run away from home to find freedom, but young Hamin was innocent. Out of a strange sense of kinship, and a minimum level of gratitude toward the man who was the only one among my mother's husbands to treat me like an adult, I made a choice. After settling the estate, Hamin, left all alone, had nowhere to stay. I decided to take him in, just until he graduates from college.