UNPLANNED | namjoon ✔️

10 - unwed

❁ CHAPTER 10 ❁

UNWED

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THREE YEARS LATER...

"...I'm sorry, can you repeat that?" you asked the School Principal, astonished. 

The Principal - who was sat across the heavy oak desk and looking entirely awkward - simply coughed lightly. "Unfortunately, on the basis of the reasons I have just given... we cannot offer your daughter a place here next year."

You could barely believe what you had been hearing.

For the last three years, you had committed yourself to being the best possible mother to your daughter. Kim Nari, approaching the age of three, was already becoming a law unto herself. She was a beautiful child, as she had been the day she was born; and yet there was something else to her, a layer that shifted beneath her burning amber irises, as though she were constantly assessing and reassessing the world as she lived each day.

Namjoon often said that her eyes were Taehyung's, but everything else was yours - including her brain.

To support yourself and Nari, you had taken a job at a prestigious private school in the city, one that paid enough for you to save up for an apartment for yourself and Nari to live in. When Nari was 18 months old, you had finally had enough to move, and had left Mrs. Kim's house to much crying and hugging. Although you were sad to leave Mrs. Kim's house, knowing you wouldn't see her, Mr. Kim and Namjoon as much, you felt proud to have your own space once more. Mrs. Kim had cried a lot, but you still dropped Nari off every day at her house when you went to work - so really, it wasn't too big of a change. 

And it wasn't just the apartment that had changed for you. You had quickly risen within the literature department, and had just accepted a job as the new Head of Literature, beginning in the upcoming school year. It was so exciting, that you'd already begun to plan events that were months away.

For three years, you had felt like you were merely surviving, one day to the next. If you could feed, clothe, bathe and entertain Nari from the moment she awoke to the moment she went to sleep, you considered it a successful day. But now, here was something else in your life. A sense of new purpose. You were still a mother, but you wanted to prove that you could excel in your career, too. That life was going somewhere.

And yet in this office, today, you had been delivered a killer blow. Because Nari was coming up to pre-school age, and she had just been refused a place at your school.

"Correct me if I'm wrong," you began slowly, trying not to get on the wrong side of the Principal although you were becoming quietly furious. "But it sounds like you're turning my daughter down from joining the School because I'm a single mother, even though I work here."

The Principal's eyes darted around the room, up to the ceiling and then down to the ground, but never at you. He looked highly uncomfortable. 

"Unfortunately, this is not my decision," he said now, holding his hands up as if to say he had no control. "It is the School Governors who determine these rules, and they value the reputation of this school very highly. They want to ensure that the... values, of the school and its school body remain intact."