Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The day I first met my wife, it was snowing at night.

I was sitting in the car, staring aimlessly out the window. Snow filled the sky, as if it meant to bury me without a sound.

I found it a little hard to breathe.

Just then, a flash of pale yellow broke into that endless white. It was fresh and bright, but also battered and frantic, fleeing without direction.

Only afterward, when I looked into it, did I learn what had happened. That night, my wife’s adoptive father had lost money at the card table and used her to pay off his debt.

Five or six grown men chased after her. The snowy road was treacherous, and the e-bike she was riding soon skidded sideways and crashed, throwing her hard onto the ground.

They surrounded her, yanking and dragging at her, laughing with wild, obscene delight.

Noisy. Ugly.

But within minutes, the laughter stopped cold.

My wife darted through the snow like a sharp, nimble snow leopard. The colder the night, the harder her body became; the heavier the snow, the clearer her mind.

She bit one man’s hand, headbutted another in the stomach, and kicked three of them in the crotch. While they were still trying to process the pain, she scrambled back to the e-bike and pulled a weapon from its storage compartment-black, but gleaming with a pale shine.

I lit a cigarette and narrowed my eyes to study it.

I still couldn’t make it out, so I lowered the window. Wind and snow, mixed with bits of ice, lashed against my face, but the scene before me grew clear.

She was holding a chainsaw.

Probably some off-brand model. Its shriek was sharp and grating, just as chilling as the cold smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

And just like that, offense and defense changed hands.

Those bastards turned and ran like mad. My wife took long strides after them, carrying the chainsaw over one shoulder with one hand, unhurried and steady. I don’t know if it was my imagination, but I seemed to hear her let out a clear, pleasant whistle.

Back then, she was young and reckless. If a dog bit her, she would bite off two chunks of flesh in return.

Only when flecks of blood spattered across the clean white snow did she finally stop, standing powerless and alone beneath the vast sky.

Her face was wooden, without the slightest ripple of emotion.

I smiled. My cigarette had burned down at just the right time.

My hand had just settled on the car door when another person suddenly entered the world before me.

It was a handsome young man. They knew each other.

The chainsaw in my wife’s hand fell to the ground in an instant. They had eyes only for each other as they ran forward and held each other tightly in the snow.

She cried.

Curled in his arms, tears streaming down her face, she looked so fragile, so helpless-and so real.

I was the one who did not belong in their world.

I turned back, closed the window, and shut my eyes in thought.

At last, I smiled again.

They were so young, with too little experience of the world. They acted without thinking through the consequences.

That big boy could only offer her an embrace that would stay warm for less than three seconds. He could not clean up the mess for her.

Once I understood that, I felt utterly at ease. I lit another cigarette, but did not smoke it. Instead, I held it out the window, letting it stand amid the wind and snow like a star for that night.

It was November. Thanksgiving fell in that month.

My father, who had always liked sowing his seed wherever he pleased, had also died at the beginning of that month.

Good things happened one after another.

Thank God.