CHAPTER 5
I really do need a car.
Seyeon sat on an orange plastic chair waiting for the bus home, and eventually made up her mind.
She had realized that living without a car was practically an ordeal.
She had assumed that life would be manageable because the resort ran a bus service to her doorstep and there were buses whenever she needed to go into town, but she had been mistaken.
Every time she spotted something she needed at the market or in one of the small shops, she thought of the car she had left behind in Seoul.
She had deliberately left it there because she wasn’t planning to stay for long and didn’t want to attract unnecessary attention, but that had been sheer arrogance.
Even the man living across from her drove a car worth hundreds of millions of won.
No one around here seemed to think there was anything strange about it.
On top of that, the constant stares wherever she went were beginning to bother her.
She needed the shield of a car.
With her mood thoroughly sunk, Seyeon trudged home.
The man living across from her, the director of Seoul Clinic, had openly insulted her, while the pharmacist at Seoul Pharmacy right next door strangely treated her as if she were invisible.
It didn’t feel good knowing that the only doctor and pharmacist in the neighborhood both seemed to be shutting her out.
As soon as she got home, she crouched down in front of Cheshire and fed her some Churu.
She filled the new food bowl with an appropriate amount of cat food and placed it in front of her as well.
The reason she had gone to the market today was to buy food for Cheshire.
She had no idea what or where Cheshire had been eating until now, but since they were living together, she intended to make sure the cat was properly fed.
After watching Cheshire eat for a moment, Seyeon sat on the edge of the wooden floor and turned on her phone.
Daehyun had visited her house in Seoul yesterday.
Judging from the photos posted on Soyoung’s Instagram, she could roughly guess what the atmosphere at the meal had been like.
“……”
The latest post, tagged #OurFamily #Dating, showed her grandfather, Chairman Myung, along with her uncle and aunt, Soyoung, and Daehyun having a meal together.
Since it had been a family dinner, her grandmother must have been sitting beside Chairman Myung as well, but Soyoung had cleverly cropped only her grandmother out of the picture before posting it.
Like her parents, Myung Soyoung called her grandmother “Madam.”
Chairman Myung had scolded her about it several times, but she never changed the way she addressed her.
Still, since Soyoung never spoke or behaved disrespectfully in front of her grandmother, Chairman Myung eventually stopped saying anything about it.
As soon as Myung Soyoung started dating Daehyun, she immediately made their relationship public on social media.
Daehyun came from a respectable family, with both his father and grandfather having been doctors for generations and his mother being a university professor.
He was also handsome and popular at the hospital.
Judging from how warm and cheerful the atmosphere seemed, it looked as though Chairman Myung had approved of the two dating.
Even Seyeon couldn’t imagine Chairman Myung turning down the son of an internal medicine department chief who could potentially pull strings with Hansung Hospital’s purchasing team, especially when he had wanted to supply mattresses to Hansung for such a long time.
Seyeon had realized that Daehyun’s feelings had changed before they officially broke up.
He used to make time to come see her no matter how busy he was, but at some point, it became difficult even to get him to show his face.
The last time she saw him, instead of looking at Seyeon’s face, he had anxiously clung to his phone.
“Let’s break up.”
When Seyeon said those words, he looked genuinely startled.
“Seyeon, why are you suddenly saying something like that?”
“I know we’ve already broken up in everything but name.”
“But I thought we should at least end things properly, face-to-face.”
And just like that, their brief relationship of several months came to an end.
In that situation, having something to completely immerse herself in was actually a good thing.
Best Furniture, the industry’s number-one company that had supplied mattresses to Sunrise Resort all this time, had run into trouble.
The moment the number-one company was shaken by a scandal was an opportunity for all its competitors.
Everyone was putting everything they had into winning the bid to supply mattresses and bed frames to Sunrise Resort in the future.
More than the sales themselves, there was enormous symbolic value in supplying beds to one of the most prestigious hotel resorts not only in Korea but also around the world.
Companies overseas as well as domestic competitors were keeping a close eye on the situation.
“Regardless of the means or methods, we absolutely have to win this bid.”
“Isn’t someone who knows how to seize a major opportunity qualified to take charge of First Living’s future?”
Since this was a chance to rise to the top of the industry, Chairman Myung had no intention of letting it slip away.
He had openly declared at a family dinner that he would throw his support behind whoever succeeded in securing the deal.
It meant he intended to make his grandchildren compete against one another for the position of successor.
“We don’t have a single connection to Sunrise.”
Soyoung’s older brother, Myung Dongseok, was trying to establish a connection with Chairman Kang, the owner of Sunrise, in order to make this deal a success.
However, it wasn’t easy to approach Chairman Kang, who had lost his wife early and had no children of his own.
Chairman Kang was a businessman who had built Sunrise Hotel & Resort into what it was today without parents or siblings, and he had now stepped back, leaving the company in the hands of professional managers.
He was so reclusive that people said meeting him was like trying to pluck a star from the sky.
“Oppa, is there really no way to meet Chairman Kang in person?”
“No one knows where Chairman Kang lives.”
“I hear he travels around from place to place with only one secretary, like a secret royal inspector.”
“Isn’t the bidding price what matters anyway?”
“Our quality isn’t inferior to Best Furniture’s either.”
“There’s no way Sunrise doesn’t know that we’re the company right behind Best Furniture.”
The two began looking for someone who could connect them to Chairman Kang, but Seyeon was thinking in a different direction.
Chairman Kang had built the first hotel resort in Cheonghae-ri.
Since it had been the first one to be built, it was also scheduled to undergo renovations first.
Sunrise Resort in Cheonghae-ri had more than six hundred rooms.
In other words, this was where the giant hotel chain had begun.
Sunrise Hotel & Resort, where guests could sleep more comfortably than they could in their own homes.
For them, there could hardly be anything more important than providing their customers with a more comfortable night’s sleep.
Seyeon realized that the key was to find another competitive advantage besides price and quality, and decided to go directly to the resort site.
That was why she had come down to Cheonghae-ri, where she had absolutely no connections.
“All the resort beds around the country are basically the same, so why go all the way there?”
“If you really want to go somewhere, just go to Gangwon-do, which is closer.”
“You’re not actually going there just for fun when you already know it won’t work out, are you?”
Dongseok and Soyoung laughed at Seyeon for going down to Cheonghae-ri.
But there was one thing they had gotten wrong.
Seyeon wasn’t going to the resort as a guest.
She was going there to work as an employee.
“Seyeon, you can rise as high as executive director.”
“You know that’s your limit, don’t you?”
Dongseok, who had inherited Chairman Myung’s blood in equal measure, said it as though he were doing her a favor.
Executive director was their father’s limit.
Dongseok was pointing that out to her.
No matter how hard she worked, he was telling her that her father’s limit would be the highest position she could ever reach.
“Oppa, what do you think would happen if I won the Hansung Hospital bid?”
“If you win the Sunrise bid and I make connections at Hansung Hospital, wouldn’t Grandpa and Dad be really happy?”
“Soyoung, that’s difficult.”
“I know because I’ve tried.”
“The purchasing team won’t even give you the time of day.”
“Even so, wouldn’t the chief of internal medicine at the main hospital be able to pull some strings?”
So she knows that I dated Kim Daehyun.
Listening to Soyoung speak with that strange undertone that day, Seyeon became certain.
Seyeon went to bed early.
She was tired enough that she should have fallen asleep quickly, but the moment she remembered what had happened at the hospital, the sleepiness vanished completely.
He had insulted her in the most brazenly rude way, using the truth itself as a weapon.
“You certainly are a young lady who was raised well, but you don’t seem like a daughter who was raised with every privilege.”
Seyeon couldn’t understand why the man from across the street, whom she had met for the first time, had been so hostile toward her.
There was no way he could have acted that way unless someone had told him something terrible about her.
But there was absolutely no connection between us.
So how did that man know anything about me?
Then Seyeon suddenly remembered the medical license she had seen in the man’s consultation room at the hospital.
Director Si Yujin had graduated from the country’s top medical school and completed his internship and residency at Hansung General Hospital.
“…Kim Daehyun.”
Hansung General Hospital was the hospital where Kim Daehyun worked.
