Recompense [ Inso's Law ]

2: Avoidance or Reflection?

'Ahhhh, that was embarrassing,' Yeomin thought. Her eyes and nose burned from how many times she rubbed at them. Even though she had stopped crying a while ago, her face remained red and puffy. She didn't remember crying so much in front of her parents since she was a little kid. She probably looked like a mess.

A warm hand tensed around hers, and she looked down at her father who was leaned over the edge of the bed. When Yeomin first started crying, he grabbed one of her hands and pulled up a chair right next to the bed. Even after her tears stopped, he stayed there, right next to her.

Though that was mainly because he had passed out on her blanket.

Snoring in a rumpled suit with his face pressed up into his crossed arms, he looked kinda stupid. Smiling slightly, Yeomin squeezed his hand back.

Behind the curtain, Yeomin could see the silhouette of her mother as she talked on the phone.

"I'm going to take a couple weeks off of work. I don't want to leave you here all alone," her mother had told her earlier, smoothing out her hair.

The sentence nearly made Yeomin tear up all over again. Instead, she just sent her mom a weak smile, hiding the burst of relief that lightened her entire body.

As she glanced back at her parents, Yeomin felt a sense of levity that she hadn't felt in a while.

'They don't appear in the story,' Yeomin told herself. She looked at her father's hand that nearly engulfed hers in its grasp.

'I think...I think I can trust this.'

――――――――――

Not really knowing what to expect, Yeomin had expected her stay in the hospital to be more full of appointments, tests, and medical procedures. But, while there were a lot of those, her schedule consisted, primarily, of nothing.

With her phone being a smashed, unusable mess, there was only one thing she ended up doing during that time: watching TV (and enduring her mother's complaints about watching too much TV).

Truthfully, once her father had figured out how to operate the weird, configurable screen in the corner that looked more like a dentist's lamp than anything else, there was no going back.

And that was how she ended up hugging a pillow and watching random cliche dramas with her dad.

"Bonding experience," he said.

'An excuse to watch shows without Mom calling him a layabout,' Yeomin thought.

After the long period where she would only see her father for a few days at a time between business trips, she forgot how addicted to these shows he actually was. Personally, Yeomin didn't care for them much. Still, the intensity with which he stared at the screen made her unwilling to change it.

"What about Hannuel?" a girl with short, black hair said. She leaned against the bathroom wall coolly while another girl with hair in a high ponytail stood awkwardly to the side.

"Hanneul! " Fixing her long brown hair in the mirror, the other girl scoffed. "No way! That creep? I'd rather die," the brunette said dramatically.

The camera cut to a close-up of the ponytail girl's furrowed face.

―Two days ago―

Yeomin snorted at the white vignette that came over the screen.

The ponytail girl walked down the hallway, carrying a large stack of papers in her arms. Then, out of nowhere, she tripped and papers flew all over the floor.