CHAPTER FORTY FIVE: SPECIAL CHAPTER #7 

To the End of Time  

“There’s a reason why you have to leave our Minjeong behind, anak ko,” Janinah says, sighing as she took one of her last breaths of her life, staring at her eldest daughter and everything she has to lose. “It’s something you should hide yourself. Please... Make sure that our Minjeong doesn’t know.”  

“Minjeong?” Taeyeon scoffs, almost slamming her hands on the table. “She’s not—”  

“Winter Minjeong Kim deserves all of our love,” Janinah says, sighing as the last bits of her life ebbed from deep within her, slowly inching away and away from her grasp. “Please... do this for me, anak.”  

Taeyeon watches as the last person who knows her secret aside from her soon fades away. Her hand goes slack against her daughter’s, and somehow, it doesn’t put her at ease. There are too many secrets in this family. So much. So, so many secrets that it’s going to swallow her alive. She knows it will.  

“You’re so unfair, ma,” inis na sabi niya as she pulls her hand away from her mother, wanting to leave everything behind and never looking back. “Why do you have to leave this to me? Hindi mo ba ako mahal? Like how you love your twins and that man, ha?”  

Taeyeon decides to leave this all behind in front of her mother—dead corpses don’t answer, anyways. They just sit there, holding every secret you tell them and never telling it to anyone else.  

“Always the one who has to deal with the that you leave behind,” Taeyeon laughs, leaning back into her chair and staring at her mother who does not have anything left to say. “Always the one who has to deal with the past that keeps ing bleeding into the future. Ako dapat umayos, ganito ganyan...”  

Taeyeon gets up, a glare left on her face as she stares at her mother who she’d have to watch being buried deep six feet underground sooner than she thinks. With this, she leaves one last sentence that is sure to anger her mother if she was still alive—hell, Taeyeon doesn’t care. She’s too angry at everything to even care, anyway.  

“Pagod na pagod na ako ma,” she says, and the urge to raise her middle finger at everything is strong but she doesn’t indulge herself in it. “I really wish you thought of everything first before deciding to up my life by having the twin sisters from another man instead of my father you claimed you loved.”  

If Minjeong was the one who always got left behind, then Taeyeon was the one who always had to leave so she could keep the secret safe. Always the one who had to be hated just so the world would satiate its urges to always point fingers. Always the one who had to be the one to blame, always the one to act like a villain so the hero would emerge victorious in the end.  

Always the holder of secrets. Always the one who had to fix everything, make sure that the past would not continue to bleed into the present and affect the future.  

It isn’t an understatement that Taeyeon feels tired.  

Leaving San Juan is something she didn’t want to do.  

She loved that place—before the chaos of the kidnapping happened, Taeyeon loved taking care of her mother, her twin sisters and most of all, her father who looked like he could not hurt anyone at the time. Would you blame her if she told you that she loves her family the most out of anyone or anything else, then?  

No, because Taeyeon Kim had the only fragment of the part of her life where her parents were happy.  

She was that fragment.  

Long before Minjeong and Minji were born, Taeyeon believed that her parents loved each other even if they didn’t. She believed that she had the best family there was in dysfunctional and chaotic San Juan, and she believed that even when the twins arrived in their lives. Believed so endlessly even when there were signs that her mother didn’t love her father anymore.  

So many telling signs, with how Taeyeon often saw her mother stare at the child of the neighbor who was at least one year older than the twins, and how the neighbor stared at the twins like it wasn’t Kihoon’s child, but his.  

Taeyeon held onto the truth so obsessively, hiding it from either side: her mother’s affair, her father’s alcoholism, the fact that both Minjeong and Minji didn’t even have any of Kihoon’s features, the fact that Kihoon hated the twins and began to hate the twins that her mother made him believe was his. The fact that Kihoon knew it wasn’t his, probably right from the beginning.  

Taeyeon held onto them and kept them only to herself even at a young age because she knew of the consequences once it got out. She knew that the family she had grown to love and admire would be broken apart the moment it got out of the darkness to the light, for everything was just an exposed fuse waiting to be lit.  

Everything was on the verge of catching on fire, and it seemed like Taeyeon was the only one who could keep it at bay—at least, that was before Kihoon had the ing bright idea to ruin it all and kidnap the twin sisters, then go on an elaborate scheme to make it seem like the twins then died in that place.  

She had to do something. She had to make sure that at least one of them lives, even if she couldn’t save the other—she knew she had to intervene, because if both of the twins die right there, it would break her mother. She knew that she had to do something, so what else would she do but sneak into the abandoned factory and distract the one who’d shoot, make sure that they only shot one?  

Taeyeon didn’t know if it would work. She didn’t know if something as idiotic and unpredictable like that could work, but it did anyway—she watches as one of the two twins slump down the ground and withdraw their last breath, the police showing up before Kihoon could even finish the deed.  

Up until Janinah Kim told her the entirety of the truth, Taeyeon didn’t know who survived between the two. Somehow, she had accepted in herself that Kihoon’s “favorite”, Summer Minji Kim was the one who died back then. He mourned for her, and Taeyeon felt sick watching him, knowing what had really happened.  

What of the truth, then?  

What of the fact that all this time, it was Winter Minjeong Kim who had died back then?  

Even then, Taeyeon knew about it accidentally. Janinah had instigated everything—somehow, she felt that her Summer would be safe pretending to be Winter, pretending to be the rebellious one who could get out of her fake father’s grasp rather than the tame and subdued twin who would certainly be manipulated into doing something she didn’t want.  

And my God, it worked.  

Worked so well that even Kihoon himself didn’t know even as he died. No one knew but Taeyeon Kim, forever burdened by the fact that her once perfect family is now buried underneath so many layers of deception and greed that she could never decipher it perfectly, never to bring it all back.  

What then, could she do?  

What else than to endlessly try to run away from everything? What else than to try and give a little bit of her suffering to her sister, who she knew was spoiled by their mother from the moment that she was born?  

Minji wouldn’t understand everything, anyway.  

Wait... Right, it’s Minjeong now, isn’t it?  

Anyways, that was it, wasn’t it? The explanation as to why Taeyeon did the things that she had done.  

She loved her sister so much, God, she did, but Minjeong would never understand. Right? No one would be able to understand what she’s felt all this time because she didn’t let anyone in fear that they’d be turned off at everything she knew. They’d be pushed away by every secret she knew, and she’d never find peace with every baggage she has in store.  

Somehow, there was something in her that hated her sister. Something in her that hated Lito Lee, something in her that hated Janinah and Kihoon Kim and everything that had burdened her to live a life filled with misery that would never leave her side.  

Maybe, that’s why she didn’t want Minjeong to end up with Jimin.  

She didn’t want her sister to find a happy ending first, because by then it would really be unfair. Bakit mas mauuna pa ang kapatid niyang makahanap ng happy ending kaysa sa kanya? After everything she’s sacrif