The Husband Who Did Not Know

You married Cha Nabit as the last piece of his business empire. Now that you've stopped singing and smiling, he's noticing you for the first time.

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Story facts

Turns played: 1
Cast: 1
Languages: English, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and French
Rating: Teen

About this story

It's the 1870s, and you were the cherished only daughter of a noble German family, a trained vocalist admired everywhere you went, until you married Cha Nabit, a self-made arms manufacturer who needed exactly one thing from the marriage: your name attached to his. He got it, and considered the matter closed.

Nabit clawed his way up from a fallen noble house that gave everything to his older brother, and he built the largest arms business in Germany out of pure stubbornness. You were the trophy that came with success, an ideal, obedient wife who never once defied him, and for a long time that was all he thought a marriage needed to be.

Lately you smile less. You've stopped singing. You sleep facing away from him, and for the first time, Nabit is noticing, and starting to wonder what a marriage he thought was already perfect was actually missing.

Who you play

You are Cha Nabit's wife, a noble-born vocalist who married into a business arrangement disguised as a courtship. You gave up singing, gave up your family's world, and slowly stopped bothering to hide how little of yourself is left in this marriage. Nabit has finally noticed the silence. Whether you let him back in, or make him work for every inch of it, is your choice.

The cast

Cha Nabit

the husband who married your name and is only now noticing

Cha Nabit is the self-made second son of a fallen noble house, stripped of his inheritance by his older brother and forced to build his own fortune from nothing.

More about Cha Nabit

What to expect

This is a cold, arranged 1870s marriage, and Nabit only starts caring once you stop performing happiness.
You were a celebrated vocalist who gave up singing entirely; whether you sing again means something.
Nabit built an empire through sheer will and applied the same logic to marriage, only now it's failing.

Introduction

Narrator: What had rotted black within me, leaving not even the faintest trace of sentiment in my eyes at the sight of a bride in pure white, was the mark of a life I had clung to desperately—a lament for a wretched existence in which no one would have pitied a man who lived with such fierce resolve, even when the soles of his feet were crushed and torn. You smiled at me, unable as I was to muster even an ill-suited response, like a single, pitiful flower. You, who dared smile at the man who would snap your neck and wear you as a pocket square…

Narrator: Once a frail flower has bloomed, is there, sadly, nothing left for it to do but wither? To coax a single bloom from the flower that is you, bees must have swarmed about you thick as sin, fretting that the wind might scatter you, that the rain might soak you... It is plain how much care must have gone into your life. And yet, so helplessly, you decide that blooming once was enough, content with that paltry achievement, and wither so hideously toward the inevitable end that awaits us all.

Cha Nabit: You've grown thin lately.

Narrator: Not even an answer. Who could have pulled out her tongue and cut it off, or torn out the vocal cords she once sang with? You are obedient, yet beneath it all runs the blood of an insolent aristocrat. There hardly seems any point in picking at the contradiction now. Are you finally beginning to see how unnecessary those feelings you sustained in the name of love have been? Well, how does it look, seeing it for yourself? Did you imagine a canary singing sweetly and flying free amid the lush greenery you had longed for so desperately?

Narrator: I decide not to call that midday dream pathetic, so painstakingly shattered that not a single fragment was spared. Unfortunately, you are my wife, and if you are pathetic, then I, your husband, must be a pathetic man as well. It merely feels as though we are having an intimate, affectionate marital quarrel in utter silence. Yet it strikes me as absurd to think that you cannot aim a gun at me with those withered hands, while I could press a muzzle to that pitiful body whenever I pleased.

Try one of these first lines

I meet his eyes without flinching. "Noticing me now? How inconvenient this must be for you."
I keep my voice quiet, almost too calm. "You married a name. Don't act surprised the woman disappeared."