For twelve agonizing years, I was the envy of my neighborhood. Every single year, without fail, eight thousand dollars appeared in my bank account from South Korea, a mysterious annual lifeline sent by my daughter, Mary Lou. My friends called me the luckiest mother alive, praising me for raising a daughter so devoted, so saintly, and so successful. I held onto those bank transfers like talismans, desperate to believe they were proof of her happiness in a faraway land. But bank statements are cold, lifeless things; they cannot tell you if your child is truly loved, or if she is drowning in a nightmare she is too proud to admit.
I lost my husband years ago, and I poured every ounce of my soul into raising Mary Lou. She was my world, my purpose, and my best friend. When she turned twenty-one and announced she was marrying Kang Jun, a man twenty years her senior, my heart plummeted. It wasn’t just the vast age gap or the daunting prospect of her moving to the other side of the world; it was a gut instinct that told me this man was not the partner she deserved. I fought it, but Mary Lou possessed a legendary stubbornness. Once her mind was set, there was no changing her course. I watched her walk through airport security with tears streaming down my face, clinging to the naive hope that she would return to visit whenever she could.
But she never came back. The years stretched into an infinite, hollow loop. Our phone calls, once long and filled with laughter, became brief, guarded exchanges where she seemed to be reading from a script. The lies grew longer, the silences deeper, and her voice became a stranger to me. Instead of genuine conversation, I received that same robotic text message every year: “Mom, look after yourself. I’m doing well.” I clung to the word “well” like a lifeline – but deep down, it felt like a fragile barrier she had erected to keep me from seeing the crumbling reality on the other side.
On those rare occasions when we managed a video call, she was perpetually rushing, her eyes darting away from the camera as if she were hiding something. I wanted to scream, to ask her why she wasn’t visiting, why she sounded so hollow, but I was a coward. I feared that if I asked the hard questions, the entire carefully constructed illusion of her “successful” life would shatter. So, I took the path of least resistance. I used her money to renovate my home, a house that felt like a tomb, and every Christmas, I would set a place for her at the table, plating her favorite beef stew and weeping into the dish towels as I stared at her empty chair.
