Chapter 421 – Part 2 1. Out of Reach (1)
Part 2 1. Out of reach (1)
“Here it is! I found it!!”
Yi-yul screamed while pointing at the monitor. Hee-joo, who was in the kitchen of his officetel, hurries over to check the monitor. ‘Trainee No. 30X Lee Jun-hyung’. Seeing this, Hee-joo covered her face with both hands and shed tears.
“Do, what if it’s the same name?”
“Looking at the date, it seems correct. I don’t know what is accurate. But there is no explanation other than this.”
“What if… If not…”
“Wait. You can call the camp and check. There are quite a few kids who enlist suddenly, so the unit should know how to deal with this.”
His calm voice calms Hee-joo down for a moment, but soon she cries again with her anxiety over her missing son.
“Wow, can you check? Can you confirm where Junhyung is?”
“So you have to call to know. Calm down, for now. Lee Jun-hyung is a decent boy, so he should be fine anywhere. Then what’s the point if my sister collapses?”
Yi-yul turns his head to look at Hee-joo and holds her hand. Curiously, when he held on to his trembling hand, I felt a little relieved.
“Are you calm?”
“…Huh.”
The hands of a boy younger than his age are much bigger than his own. And much stronger. Feeling that strength, Hee-joo felt as if she was comforted by a husband older than her. Lee Yul took her further, pulled her chair behind her, sat her on his lap, and put one arm around her shoulder.
“Didn’t you get anything?”
“What stuff?”
“When you enter the training center, everything you bring, such as clothes and cell phones, is sent home. Are you not sending your cell phone these days? I do not know. Anyway, the clothes will come in a package.”
“I haven’t received anything like that yet.”
Lee Yul hugged her tighter towards her and comforted her.
“Probably the day after tomorrow. It’s too late today, so I’ll try calling the base tomorrow. Roughly, you can just pretend to be a relative or older brother. It’s not like I’m trying to call you, I just need to check if you’re at the unit, so I’ll let you know.”
“I-I’ll call you.”
“No. Seeing that he left without telling his family, it would be better for me to do it. And you could call home every weekend. I don’t know if I’ll call you then.”
Yi-yul sighs as if he doesn’t know. In his arms, Hee-ju sniffs again as if she were a child.
“Stop crying. You’ll be fine. If there is no tomorrow, then let’s go to the police together.”
“Huh.”
“But if it’s a simple runaway, they might not investigate. Legally, you are an adult male.”
“Gee, really?”
“It seems they don’t investigate adult runaways. Shouldn’t it take about 3 days to see it as missing? I don’t know, I picked them up too.”
Answering a little insincerely, Lee Yul turned off her computer. Even he wasn’t happy that Junhyung did this, but he was more annoyed that he wasn’t in the mood to touch her even after bringing Heeju into the house.
How many days had it passed since you took Chae-kyeong away from Jun-hyung? According to what I heard, Junhyung, who was said to never go to school and never left, suddenly disappeared. Hee-joo was worried about her because he wasn’t the type to go out without saying anything, but hee-joo thought that she might be drinking all night with her friends, and she contacted all of her son’s friends she knew and arranged her night out. Leaked However, when the sun rose the next day and it was time to go to work, Junhyung did not come home.
My son didn’t come out of the room except to go to the bathroom. It was a few days before Junhyung’s whereabouts that he found out what had happened to him, who only had to bring food into his room to eat. As a result of asking here and there about his strange behavior, he heard directly from Chae-gyeong that a couple of lovely childhood friends had broken up. He didn’t even hear the exact reason, but Hee-joo also guessed. Both the son and his girlfriend were cheating on each other with different partners, so anyone would know that it was a problem that would have exploded at some point.
Because she understood the pain of her broken heart, she just watched Jun-hyung quietly. Her father-in-law advised her that she should be able to recover and come out on her own, and she also felt guilty because she was not a perfect third party to her. The man that her son’s girlfriend cheated on is also a man she is mingling with. Her mother was also an accomplice who kept her mouth shut even though she knew it, so how could she be confident?
But when her brother-in-law disappeared, she immensely regretted keeping her mouth shut. She herself has contributed to the indelible wounds of her son. In her despair and frustration, no one comforted him, she just took a step back and looked. As a result, if the hidden son had made an extreme choice, Hee-joo had no idea how to deal with the sin.
She clung to everything around her. She contacted everyone who knew Jun-hyung and asked for news of him. It was about 48 hours after Jun-hyung left the house that she recalled filing a police report with the idea that she had to find her son on her own. However, before going to her police station, Yi-yul first contacted her asking if she had gone to the army.
Seeing Hee-joo rush home without contacting her, Yi-yul was surprised but somehow searched for his son – the presumed name – on the computer. She was terrified that she might have committed suicide, but she was barely able to put her mind at ease when she saw her son’s name on the enlisted list exactly two days ago. Of course, it was still something to check if the name was her son, but it was fortunate that she knew at least the direction to find it.
“Rather than that, Hee-joo, you… When was the last time you slept?”
“…”
Sleeping is sleeping. 48 hours ago. Even with that, she only slept for about 2-3 hours. The pain of her broken heart and her worry and guilt about her son not coming out of her room have kept her from sleeping well for the past few days. Two days she did not sleep completely due to a lack of sleep that lasted for several days. Her mind, ravaged by her worries, tensions, insecurities and fears, was also showing its effect on her body. Hee-joo’s beautiful hair was frizzy and messy like those of old people in the countryside, and blemishes that had never been seen before in her life stood out on her dry skin as if expressing her lack of nutrition, and her face was beyond emaciated and was about to collapse at any moment. Seemed anxious.
“Here, lay here.”
Yi-yul dragged her to her bed and forced her to lie down on her bed. Hee-joo, lying on the bed helplessly as he ordered, asked him with a worried face.
“Junhyung… Will our Junhyung be okay?”
“Are you okay. Don’t worry too much He and the public interest. I’ll be back after training for a month, but if my mom collapses, that’s a bigger problem. For now, get a good night’s sleep here and do it wherever you go tomorrow. I will contact you at home.”
“…”
Hee-joo couldn’t get up from her bed, even though she was worried that she would be okay. Her mental and physical strength was exhausted, and even her awakening, which she had been forcibly maintained by the faint hope she had barely gained, was released.
“Check.. Please do it…”
“Okay, so go to sleep. Call me when you wake up I’ll buy porridge.”
Heejoo closed her eyes and nodded her head slightly. Even though she knew that it was this man who made her son leave, she relied on Lee Yul again. Now she felt comfortable with the fact that she had someone she could rely on, and that it was Lee Yi-yul.
Junhyung’s disappearance has affected his entire family. The guard, who usually bothered him a bit, seemed quite worried about his grandson’s sudden runaway. In fact, half of his worries were for his grandson himself, and half for the unstable condition of Hee-joo and Jun-hee that would arise from it.
Like her mother, Joon-hee’s daily life was being disrupted by her missing brother. Her attachment to her brother was much weaker than before, but her affection was not completely gone. She also couldn’t sleep what to do if Junhyung made an extreme choice, and she couldn’t even do school life properly because tears burst out even when she stayed still. After learning the inside story of why her brother disappeared, she even angered her, saying that this would not have happened if she had filled the place of her brother’s vacant ‘woman’.
Speaking of Chae-kyung, who they secretly resent, she pretended to be okay on the outside, but couldn’t hide that she was quite shocked. She rationalized that Jun-hyung dumped him because he was wrong first, and that he cheated on him and changed her to Yi-yul, so her fault was Lee Jun-hyung. Also, as she worried about Junhyung who disappeared, she never spent a single day alone with Lee Yul, putting her confession that she had a good physical relationship with Lee Yul. In her mind, she was even determined to repent of her wrongdoing and to clean up her relationship with Yi-yul, as long as Jun-hyung returned safely.
It is said that people always feel an empty seat more, and Junhyung, who was inferior to other males around him as a male, showed his presence more strongly through his disappearance. But he had no way of knowing that the perception of those around him towards himself had changed little by little. As Lee Yul’s tracking showed, he was now in his first week at the training center and was eagerly adjusting to his new environment. Unlike other soldiers on active duty, he returned to society after 4 weeks of training, but after all the hardships he went through from civilian to soldier status, he was relieving his mental exhaustion with physical fatigue.
The agony of loss and defeat that I couldn’t bear was also hard to remember because my body was tired here. On the contrary, the more intense the training, the better he felt. When he took a shower after training with other recruits around him, he felt like he had accomplished something even though he hadn’t done anything. Conscription. It was the worst duty Korean men had, but for Jun-hyung, who barely crawled out of a hell that was worse than that, the time here was an opportunity to recover himself. Of course, at least for a short time of a month. When he returns to where he was, he will have to face and confront everything that has been bothering him.
