Chapter 21

“Could you bring me the things we bought for Dodam earlier? He’s gentle, so he simply doesn’t make a fuss, but he must be quite hungry by now.”

Han Jun-hee’s eyes were surely fixed on her. Seo-ha still couldn’t judge exactly what Jun-hyeok thought of his sister, but behind the spines bristling like a hedgehog’s, a younger sister’s feelings for her older brother were easy enough to read. The prickly welcome the woman had given her made sense, too.

“It’s very late. We’re both uninvited guests, so why not just let her stay here tonight?”
“That kid is nothing like you.”
“There’s nothing different about it. We’re family either way.”

Jun-hyeok lost his words for a moment and went quiet. Seeing her chance, Seo-ha pressed on.

“If you’re being considerate in case it makes me uncomfortable, I can stay at a hotel nearby.”
“Where do you think you’re going at this hour?”

Jun-hyeok bristled, just as she’d expected. On the very first day they met, too, he had overreacted the moment she said she was going home. She figured that provoking him in exactly the way he hated would, if anything, bring this to an end faster.

“A hotel. I don’t mind being with your sister, but if the two of you are uncomfortable, it can’t be helped.”
“The one who’s leaving is that kid, not you.”
“It’s because I don’t like a situation this uncomfortable either.”

Having laid it out point by point, Seo-ha added one thing more.

“It isn’t as though everything is fine with me. There are things I dislike too.”

Another curse spilled out of Jun-hyeok’s mouth. He was swearing unusually often today, but Seo-ha pretended not to notice. Han Jun-hee, who must have been right beside them by now, had even swallowed her sobs to listen.

“Hoo… Han Jun-hee. We’ll talk about it later.”
“Uh, okay!”
“Stay as quiet as a mouse.”
“I will!”
“Clear away every bottle you drank, and then go. Don’t leave a single thing lying on the floor to trip over.”

The sounds of the living room being tidied followed. Someone brushed briskly past a few times, and then everything quickly went quiet.

Clearly exasperated with Seo-ha’s behavior, Jun-hyeok spoke again.

“You had no reason to do this. Jun-hee wouldn’t have let it go. What on earth did she say to you?”
“The misunderstanding has been cleared up, so it’s fine. It seems she came back to the country suddenly; I hope it was nothing serious.”

Jun-hyeok pressed a hand to his temple as if his head were throbbing. Looking back over the past several years, Seo-ha couldn’t recall a single day as turbulent as this one.

“Seo-ha.”

He said her name and nothing else, so briefly and in a way so unfamiliar that her body stiffened on reflex. It was only her name, and yet her chest trembled a little. For a moment she even forgot she was supposed to answer.

“Make sure you call home tomorrow.”

She nodded slowly.

Now that she had a new guardian in Jun-hyeok, the ground beneath Cha Mi-yeon’s feet could only narrow. As long as Seo-ha held the marriage registration as a card to play, the odds of her adoptive father, Yun Jeong-hwan, taking his wife’s side were close to zero as well. If anything, he would be privately pleased.

Only Jun-hyeok, Seo-ha and Dodam were left in the living room now. Then Dodam licked her calf. It was the slightest touch, yet the tension drained out of her, and perhaps because of that her whole body ached as though she’d been beaten.

Seo-ha spoke in a worn-out voice.

“Dodam says he’s hungry.”
“Yun Seo-ha.”

Seo-ha had been hanging her head toward Dodam. At her name a second time, she lifted her face.

Ah, if only he would stop calling her name. Being called by it, nothing more, left her as precarious as a lantern guttering in the wind. That was not a good sign.

Jun-hyeok reached her in only a few strides, and when he murmured to her, his voice was steeped in utter fatigue.

“Break that nasty habit of deciding things on your own without even hearing a person out.”

His large hand touched the crown of her head and fell away. As though those words had been the trigger, the strength went out of Seo-ha’s legs and she crumpled onto the sofa right where she stood.

Unable to master her rage, Cha Mi-yeon swept everything off the vanity with one arm.

She had not been this angry in years, and she had never dreamed that the wretched girl she had raised so devotedly would stab her in the back like this.

“After I raised her so tenderly, how dare she….”

Then she shook her head hard. There was no way the Seo-ha she had brought up with her own hands, like gold, like jade, had done this of her own accord. It made her temples ache to think that the root of the trouble had been her own decision to give the two of them more time together on purpose.

“This is all that bastard’s fault.”

The whole business had started with Han Dong-pyo’s second son luring Seo-ha away. Cha Mi-yeon’s only interest had been bringing this arranged marriage off, which was why it had never once occurred to her that things would move like beans roasted over a lightning flash¹. However prettily she had been raised, Seo-ha was a blind girl, the sort anyone would think twice about.

Her mobile phone rang noisily just then. She didn’t want the call, and after wavering a moment over whether to take it, she reluctantly picked up.

“Hello, Madam Kim.”

Whether or not Madam Kim caught the reluctance in Cha Mi-yeon’s voice, she launched into a loud stream of chatter.

— So I hear you were asking an acquaintance of mine about Chairman Han’s second son?

“Ahh…. Yes.”

Nothing in this world stayed secret. Fear of exactly this kind of mess was why she had made herself hold back, and she should have lasted just a little longer. Too late, Cha Mi-yeon regretted her impatience to the bone; asking about Jun-hyeok in such haste, of someone likely to know, had brought this on her. Madam Kim was rather fond of playing queen bee at the conglomerate wives’ social gatherings.

— Say, dear, you know my late-in-life baby? My youngest boy. He went to school with that mad dog, remember.

“…Mad dog?”

Madam Kim shot a question straight back, as though astonished that Cha Mi-yeon didn’t even know that yet.

— Back when my child was in high school there was a mass brawl at the school, a real uproar. It’s a private school where every last one of them is from a moneyed house — what could there possibly be to brawl over? Every one of them has a top law firm in the family’s pocket.

The talk looked set to run long, and three deep creases carved themselves into Cha Mi-yeon’s fine brow. Hanging up now would be awkward too, so she held her tongue and pretended to listen.

— The ringleader of that brawl was CEO Han’s second boy, you know. Well, like everyone does, they hushed it up to protect their own kids, so only those in the know know. And that’s not the half of it. They call him a mad dog because he bites and tears at the other side to death, until they’re a bloody pulp. I worried myself sick that even my youngest would get caught in it.

She sneered inwardly at that. And who was it, not so long ago, who had scrambled for dear life to buy that very silence? The one caught with drugs, who had brought the police down on Cha Mi-yeon’s own charity party and left a stain on it, was none other than this woman’s late-in-life son. Did she take Cha Mi-yeon, of all people, for the greatest fool under heaven?

Whenever the conglomerate wives met, they were busy slipping in quiet digs at Cha Mi-yeon the former actress. They were forever whispering that it was quite something, a mere entertainer from no family to speak of latching onto a politician and walking the tightrope well enough to get this far. Cha Mi-yeon knew that even that verdict was a generous one.

Just let them wait and see. Once she became First Lady, every one of them would be bowing their heads at her feet.

— But why were you looking into what sort of reputation the boy has?

Cha Mi-yeon played innocent with a perfectly straight face.

“Ah, it’s because it looks as though I’ll have occasion to meet Chairman Han of H Bio soon. Even for a bit of small talk, I need to know something, don’t I? So I asked.”

— Ah, but there’s nothing to be gained by talking about that son of theirs, so don’t even bring him up. Even that household has written him off. He’s been cut out of the succession and does whatever he likes. I only called because I’m so fond of you, dear, and wanted to tell you.

“I see. Thank you, Madam Kim.”

— Ugh, he knocked about overseas for ages, so imagine the debauched life he must have led. Filthy, truly. We’d be lucky if he hasn’t caught some disease. Don’t you so much as think of getting tangled up with him.

That last remark hit Cha Mi-yeon hard. Her face slowly twisting, she picked anxiously at a hangnail.

If Han Jun-hyeok really did spirit Seo-ha away because he really has taken a liking to her….

Whatever Madam Kim said, to Cha Mi-yeon’s eyes Chairman Han of H Bio was indulgent toward his second son. A son who went around causing that kind of trouble might well have fallen out with his father, yet she saw no sign of it at all, and that puzzled her. Only today, when she had called him in desperation, he had done nothing but prattle on that she should try trusting his son, that his son was a man too.

Troubled, Cha Mi-yeon came at it sideways.

“…I suppose he’s very tangled up with women, too?”

— That’s what sons of bitches like him are best at, isn’t it? Rutting with anyone at all.

One more word of that cheap talk and she felt she would scream. Cha Mi-yeon hurriedly ended the call.

She didn’t need to hear any more. For all her love of putting on airs and boasting, the woman was not the sort to blab information she wasn’t sure of.

“It’s all right. Seo-ha has the spare medicine with her. Our Seo-ha is a good girl, so she’ll put the medicine in properly even without me. She’s certain to.”

Gripped by unease, Cha Mi-yeon bit and tore at her neatly manicured nails. A dried-out nail snapped off with a crack, but with her agitation spiraling out of control, she didn’t even feel the pain.