EC~06

Chapter 6

Chairman Ryu slammed his hand down on the arm of the sofa.

“You think that marriage is remotely reasonable!”

“And what exactly won’t do?”

Tae-ha scoffed, as if he couldn’t see the problem.

“Ah, because of what people will say? Then we absolutely must go through with it.”

“How long are you going to keep going off the rails! Isn’t it time you came to your senses!”

Tae-ha knew full well that Chairman Ryu was waiting for him to return to the person he had been before learning the truth.

“I suppose it’s because I grew up without parents.”

But that day the Chairman was waiting for would never come. Not unless his parents came back to life.

Tae-ha’s eyes, dark with concentrated resentment, blazed.

“Aren’t you thinking about Joo-ah?”

When the conversation turned against him, Chairman Ryu changed the subject.

“Anyone listening would think you actually care about her.”

Tae-ha knew the Chairman’s blackened inner workings better than anyone.

“If Joo-ah, who saved your life, had been the housekeeper’s daughter, would you still have promised to transfer shares to her after the marriage?”

The housekeeper’s daughter.

Chairman Ryu’s wrinkled forehead creased, for he knew exactly who that referred to. Whatever emotion lay within that crease, it was certainly not regret or guilt. Even now, he must believe the choice he had made back then was the right one.

“You wouldn’t have. You’d have slipped her a few pennies. Or given her a job at Taesong. You chose her because she’s the eldest daughter of Sejin Trading, didn’t you? As a bride befitting your grandson.”

It was Chairman Ryu who had been using Joo-ah from the very beginning.

“To prevent the disaster of me—who takes after my father—falling for the housekeeper’s daughter, just as he did.”

To keep history from repeating its tragedy, Chairman Ryu had pulled Joo-ah in. Under the plausible pretext that she had saved his life.

“You must have also wanted to keep Aunt Jung-hee’s faction in check. But you never expected she’d end up marrying Ryu Jin-ha instead.”

From the very start, Chairman Ryu had intended Joo-ah as Tae-ha’s match.

“Wouldn’t it actually be a good thing if I married Joo-ah? It’s going exactly according to your plan.”

Tae-ha was saying he was simply reaping what the Chairman had sown. He had made his own bed.

Faced with Tae-ha, who saw straight through him, Chairman Ryu was left speechless.

“Then I’ll be on my way. I’m busy preparing for the wedding.”

“That marriage—I will never allow it.”

Tae-ha’s unhesitating steps toward the study door, intent on ignoring him, froze dead at the Chairman’s following words.

“It is something that cannot happen in our family.”

Our family.

His mother had never been allowed inside it. He hadn’t witnessed it, but he could imagine. How cruelly the Chairman had cast her out—a woman even younger than Tae-ha was now.

He had not the slightest desire to belong to such a family. And he intended to smash it to pieces. The family that had driven his mother to her death.

“What will you do if you can’t allow it? Two consenting, unmarried adults wish to marry. Do you have a way to stop us?”

Tae-ha turned back to face the Chairman, frigid fury surging in his eyes.

“Ah, are you going to kill me?”

His lips, pouring out venomous sarcasm grown even more explicit, curved into a cold sneer.

“It is your specialty, after all.”

His eyes, sunken like a swamp, were filled with hostility toward Chairman Ryu.

—

Carefully opening the door, Joo-ah felt along the wall. Bright light illuminated the room sunken in darkness.

“It’s changed so much.”

Tae-ha’s room, visited for the first time in nearly twenty years, bore no trace of its former self. The toys and fairy tale books that had once filled an entire wall were all gone.

“I used to play here all the time.”

Gazing at the now-empty wall, she turned toward the desk and scanned the bookshelf. Time in this room had stopped at his nineteenth year. After that, it became a place he never returned to after becoming independent. A space naturally abandoned once its owner left.

“The bed’s changed too.”

When they were young, there had been a bunk bed here. The space beneath it had felt like a world apart from the outside, and it became the two children’s secret base. Not that they had done anything particularly grand there. They simply read books and drew pictures.

“This looks like you.”

When Joo-ah showed him the small, cute rabbit she’d drawn, Tae-ha flipped a few pages forward in the picture book he was lying on his stomach reading, then pointed at something with his finger.

“You’re this.”

Beneath his tiny finger was a sun, smiling brightly in the middle of the sky.

“Why am I the sun?”

“Because you look like it.”

“I look like it?” She looked closely at the picture. A round, yellow face. Pointed rays stretching out in every direction.

“Hey! Why would I look like that? I don’t look like it at all!”

I drew him something cute, and he says I look like something weird. How mean.

Completely oblivious, Tae-ha tilted his head.

“But you do look like it.”

“Tch. Fine, whatever.”

Hmph! Joo-ah turned her back to him and sat down. But she didn’t leave the room. Because if she left, Tae-ha would be alone.

Perhaps because he was frail, young Tae-ha was always alone.

“Tae-ha, let’s do a puzzle.”

“Tae-ha, want to draw together?”

Tae-ha. Tae-ha.

The name she had called out countless times as she opened the door to this room.

Click.

Joo-ah lifted her head at the sound of the door opening.

“Tae—”

Her face, which had unconsciously called out his name just as she had as a child, hardened in an instant.

“We need to talk.”

The one who opened the door and entered was not Tae-ha, but Ryu Jin-ha.

The moment she saw that face, the reverie she had been lost in moments before shattered, and reality came crashing back like a dream fading away.

“If you have something to say, say it through my lawyer.”

“Joo-ah.”

Jin-ha blocked her path as she tried to leave the room.

“I’m a victim too.”

And then, with a face that truly looked aggrieved, he began to spew a string of absurd excuses.

“Da-yeon approached me first. I was drunk and blacked out, and when I woke up in the hotel, she was next to me. I don’t even remember it, but she threatened me. Said she’d tell you everything if I didn’t keep seeing her.”

From the mouth that dared to call himself a victim, not a single word of apology emerged.

“So I had no choice!”

For Jin-ha, self-justification always came first.

“But I felt like Da-yeon was hiding something. So I met her a few more times to find out. That’s how I learned she was your half-sister, and I was going to tell you too. I only just found out myself not long ago.”

The excuse was riddled with lies. There was no sincerity in it.

Had it always been like this? Had he been deceiving and fooling me with such flimsy words all this time?

“What I said in that video earlier, I only said that to figure out what Da-yeon was hiding. I didn’t mean it.”

How pathetic must I have been? Even at this moment, he’s saying such things. Such obvious lies. With such a fake face.

“It was one mistake. People make mistakes in life. It won’t happen again. I promise. Just once—just let it go this one time.”

She had known it wasn’t love. It was the same for her. But she had thought there was at least trust between them. This was the moment she confirmed once again that it had been nothing more than her own delusion.

He should have just said he was sorry. That he was wrong. Then I might have been fooled again. By those desperate eyes.

“You’re just emotional right now. Once time passes, this won’t be a big deal. Something like this is nothing to us.”

Jin-ha repeated, as if brainwashing her, that it was nothing, that it meant nothing. That it was one mistake.

He had been rattling off his words as if he had prepared them in advance, anticipating this day, but he stopped at the sight of Joo-ah silently watching him.

“Are you done now?”

Jin-ha’s face, flushed from his passionate speech, grew confused at her calm question.

“One time? Not long ago?”

His eyes wavered, as if sensing something had gone wrong. Perhaps he was already thinking up another excuse.

Joo-ah took a small document envelope from her bag and held it out to him.

Jin-ha’s hands trembled as he opened it and took out the contents.

They were the photos that had arrived in the same courier package as the video not long ago. Pictures of them entering and leaving his officetel, Da-yeon’s studio, even a hotel. Together.

She hadn’t had time to verify their authenticity. But Jin-ha’s expression told her the answer. He wouldn’t look so shocked if they were doctored.

“You see the dates on the photos? Though of course, you’d know them better than anyone.”

The dates were from a year ago. Meaning he had been deceiving her for over a year.

No.

Meaning she had been foolishly deceived for over a year.

“Han Joo-ah.”

Jin-ha’s face, looking down at the photos, turned ice-cold.

“You. You had someone following me?”