Page 125 of This Life of Mine

For a moment, the office feels too small for everything we’re holding. Fear, want, unfinished business. She reaches for my hand, squeezing it once.

“Be careful,” she says.

“I will,” I promise.

And as I step out of the office, leaving her to the day ahead, I feel comforted by the fact that we are moving forward. Together.

Chapter thirty-nine

Lina

The day moves as usual, but I’m stuck in a glass jar. Looking out but not really seeing anything.

I go through the motions. Smiling when I’m supposed to, answering questions, refilling cups. But inside, my mind is stuck on a single, impossible truth: my ex-father-in-law hired someone to kill me.

For money. Money I didn’t even know existed.

It all feels surreal, almost absurd, like it belongs in a movie instead of my life. I keep trying to wrap my head around the idea that someone would calculate another person’s death the way they balance a spreadsheet.

But then again…I didn’t grow up in a world where money insulated you from consequences.

I grew up poor.

After my mom died, everything changed. She left behind government loans tied to the small business she’d poured herself into. Because Koreans open businesses, that’s what we do. Thepayments were manageable while she was alive. Then she got sick. Really sick. And then she was gone.

My dad was left with debt, three kids, and no safety net.

He didn’t have a college education. He met my mom in the military, and when he got out, there was no help waiting for him. No transition. No guidance. Just bills. The only thing he had going for him was his knowledge of computers. Skills he picked up out of necessity, turning them into side jobs wherever he could.

Eventually, he went back to school and earned his degree. But before that? We scraped by.

Thrift store clothes. SaveALot groceries. Stretching fifty dollars for an entire week. Some days, all we had was steamed white rice. Nothing else. Just rice.

I learned early that things don’t last.

When my mom passed, everything of value disappeared one by one. Sold to keep the lights on, to pay bills, to survive. Anything that could be turned into money was gone.

Escaping that life and building something of my own changed what I valued. I never chased luxury. I don’t care about expensive things. My SUV is the most luxurious thing I have. But I can give that up in a heartbeat.

Because I know how fast luxury can vanish.

And now here I am, learning that to some people, money isn’t only security or comfort. It’s a weapon.

The Allister’s looked at me and didn’t see a woman who loved their grandmother. Who sat by her bedside every day before she passed. They saw a liability. A payout schedule they didn’t want to keep honoring.

I grew up knowing what it meant to survive without money. They grew up believing money entitled them to erase anyone who got in the way of it.

That difference, that moral gap, is beyond my comprehension.

Beneath the numbness, something else stirs. Not fear but resolve. I didn’t claw my way out of poverty, grief, and abuse to be reduced to a number.

They may have money, but I know how to endure.

I think about everything I’ve already survived, and it almost sickening that anyone would believethiswould be the thing to break me.

Loss has been a constant companion in my life. It didn’t arrive once and leave. It kept showing up, changing forms, demanding I adapt.

My mother’s death didn’t even carve the first hollow in my chest. And everything after only tested whether I would collapse into its hole or learn to stand around the edges.