Chapter : 7
An inexplicable anger wrapped itself around his entire body.
“This is the man who went on a blind date with Hong Yumin here, right?”
“……”
“…Young Master?”
Yongil called Ja Joon again when he received no answer.
“Are you… all right?”
Ja Joon closed his eyes, trying to calm the anger boiling inside him.
But the anger showed no sign of subsiding.
How could it?
Hong Yumin had been his first love, and the woman who had first made him experience the feeling of loss.
As if going on a blind date with a man old enough to be his uncle wasn’t enough, he had heard that she had gone for a second round with him right afterward.
How was he supposed to feel at ease?
“Young Master.”
“……”
“It didn’t seem like Hong Yumin went to the second round because she wanted to.”
Ja Joon slowly opened his eyes.
“You told me to make sure Hong Yumin got home safely, didn’t you? Since it seemed like you were concerned about Hong Yumin’s safety, I stayed in front of her house for thirty minutes even after she went inside.”
“Yeah. Continue.”
“After some time passed, Hong Yumin came back outside. Then a car that happened to be approaching from the direction of her house kept following her as if it were tailing her.”
“……”
“After that, it seemed like they argued for quite a while in the middle of the road, but Hong Yumin absolutely refused to get into the car and went on her way alone. The car followed her all the way.”
Ja Joon tapped Yongil’s phone with his index finger and asked,
“Even to this snack shop?”
“Yes. Hong Yumin went to the snack shop first, and that man followed her inside afterward. I don’t know what they talked about, but the atmosphere didn’t look good.”
Ja Joon’s blood boiled even more.
Wasn’t that basically saying that the man was following Yumin around like a stalker?
“What the hell is that guy doing, huh…”
Ja Joon started to ask what kind of man he was, then stopped and let out a sigh.
He felt pathetic for being so openly curious about another man.
He had first met Hong Yumin during his first liberal arts class after returning to university immediately following his military discharge.
Because of Yongil’s prank, he had wandered around looking for the classroom and arrived a few minutes late. He quickly took an empty seat.
Right beside him, a female student was already sleeping with her head down, despite the lecture having barely begun.
Throughout the entire orientation, she slept while occasionally changing the direction of her head. Eventually, she turned her face toward Ja Joon.
And at that moment, Ja Joon’s time stopped.
How could someone look so beautiful with her eyes closed, with her cheek pressed against the desk like that?
Her face had no trace of makeup, and her features weren’t particularly sharp, yet somehow, she had left her presence deeply engraved in his heart.
Perhaps it was because he found it striking that someone with such an innocent face—someone who looked incapable of doing anything bad—would unexpectedly fall asleep right from the very first lecture.
His eyes kept drifting toward her. Pretending to listen to the class, he rested his chin on his hand and stole countless glances at her.
At some point, their eyes met.
“Hi.”
Love that makes you fall without any reason was dangerous.
It was the first time in his life that he had spoken to a woman first.
After that, as though telling his parents’ constant advice to always maintain his dignity to go to hell, he forgot that he was the only son of the chairman of Taehyun Group and pursued her relentlessly.
How hard must it have been to forget the woman he had given his heart to so crazily when she suddenly disappeared without a word?
For five years, he had painstakingly erased the traces she had left in his heart.
And now, after all that, she dared to be sitting across from a man old enough to be his uncle on a blind date?
The person he had struggled so hard to become again had disappeared like a mirage the moment he met Hong Yumin.
It made him insanely angry.
As if he knew what was troubling Ja Joon, Yongil handed the phone back to him after briefly taking it away.
“Actually, I was already checking his identity. To give you the brief version, he’s the CEO of a private equity firm. It’s a fairly large company.”
With his lips pressed tightly together, Ja Joon checked the name entered in the people-search window.
Kim Byungtae.
What a damn awful name…
“I didn’t have enough time to look into him in detail, but… I asked around in the secretaries’ group chat, and some strange things came up.”
Ja Joon’s gaze sharpened slightly.
“Strange things?”
Yongil took the phone again, tapped it several times, then opened the secretaries’ group chat and showed it to him.
My younger sibling’s friend’s cousin is that CEO, and apparently even his relatives avoid him lol. His hands aren’t exactly clean, and his personality is so eccentric.
Whoa~ Then I guess the rumor that he called his wife a punching bag is true too?
I don’t know about that lolol. But his reputation is pretty bad. I mean, he’s got that much money and still can’t find a woman willing to go on a blind date with him. Apparently, he’s blacklisted in the matchmaking scene. I’ve even heard that the admins of dating apps screen him out…
Ja Joon’s gaze turned chillingly cold.
Yongil took the phone back and carefully continued explaining.
“……It seems his character isn’t particularly good. I’ll investigate further and report everything to you once I’m certain.”
With his brows furrowed, Ja Joon roughly ran his hand through his hair.
There was no smoke without fire.
If he was someone people avoided in the matchmaking scene, there was a high chance the rumors were true.
Then why on earth had Hong Yumin been going on a blind date with someone like that?
Had she ended things badly with her previous fiancé? If not, was she in a situation where she desperately needed money?
Bzzzz-.
While he was lost in heavy thoughts, Ja Joon’s phone, tucked inside his jacket, began to vibrate.
After telling Yongil to investigate absolutely everything he could find out about Kim Byungtae, Ja Joon took out his phone.
It was his mother, Seo Jeonghwa.
He hesitated over whether to answer.
It was undoubtedly another call urging him to hurry home.
She had called him repeatedly even right before he boarded his flight in the United States, asking trivial things like when he would come straight home and what he wanted to eat.
It was understandable. Her only son was finally returning to his parents after five years, so she must have been eager to see him as soon as possible.
But after hearing that the man who had gone on a blind date with his first love after five years considered his wife a punching bag, that son wasn’t exactly in the mood to go home and receive a grand welcome.
By then, the call had ended.
But soon, his phone rang again.
This time, it was his father.
Ja Joon narrowed his eyes and silently stared at his phone.
His father rarely called him, so if he was calling now, Ja Joon wondered if something urgent had happened.
In the end, he pressed the answer button.
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“I came to the hotel for a moment. There’s something I wanted to check before the inauguration ceremony.”
“So it’s not urgent.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Your mother has been hospitalized. Go to Korea University Hospital.”
Ja Joon slowly asked again as if he had heard incorrectly.
“Mother is at the hospital right now?”
“Yes.”
Ja Joon abruptly ended the call and hurriedly left the place.
After getting out of the taxi, Yumin stood there blankly, staring at the hospital entrance.
She had barely managed to get away from Byungtae and come to the hospital because she wanted to see her father, but she couldn’t bring herself to take another step.
If she saw her father on a difficult day like this, she might end up showing him her tears.
And her father, who had difficulty even moving around, would suffer because he couldn’t do anything for his daughter.
That was why, whenever something difficult happened, she tried her best not to come to the hospital….
But today, she truly had nowhere else to go.
At least today, she didn’t want to go to the place where her aunt and uncle were—the people who, instead of worrying about their own daughter, were secretly wishing that Yumin would die in her daughter’s place.
But this also seemed like a day when she couldn’t stand in front of her father, smile, and pretend that everything was going well.
What should she do?
As she repeatedly pressed her dry lips together in the cold, shifting her feet restlessly, it happened.
A familiar silhouette appeared faintly at the main entrance.
