Haaah.

Lee Hyoju, watching Ha Tae-ung from behind, went the colour of ash.

What Ha Tae-ung actually is, which she has not managed to tell even her mother.

She had meant to keep the charity case buried for good.

That she would meet him again here today she had not dreamed of.

And in a gathering with her grandfather sitting in it.

Other things can be hidden, but her grandfather is a man who enjoys reading a face.

The bearing Ha Tae-ung is showing now would satisfy anybody meeting him for the first time. It is exemplary.

So far nothing has shown that could be held against him.

But the moment the charity case comes out, all of it stops meaning anything.

And her mother, and her father along with her, would have fingers pointed at them. That much is plain.

Her cousin Lee Jeongho hasn’t caught on yet, but he will soon enough.

“……”

The family’s eyes went over Ha Tae-ung all at once.

Chairman Lee Dojung studied him with more interest than any of them.

Open between the brows, and the eyes are a phoenix’s, and the bridge of the nose runs straight and handsome as a mountain range. The philtrum is deep, and the lips——

It had been a long time since Lee Dojung had seen a face this good, and his curiosity stirred at it.

Nothing so open had come in front of him in years.

Lee Hyoju, the second son’s only child.

Set beside the other grandchildren, there was something quick in her from the time she was small.

Little as she was, she picked out only the sweet things to do, and he could have put her in his eye and felt nothing.

She takes after her mother, as she ought to, and there is nothing to reproach in the nature she was born with.

Had she been a boy he would have raised her as the group’s successor without a moment’s hesitation.

But she is a girl, more’s the pity, and however you look at it there is a limit to what can be done.

That she is the grandchild he loves does not change, but he has no intention of leaving her the group on the strength of it.

That he watches her more closely than the others, though, cannot be denied.

She was frozen out as a child through no fault of her own and shut her heart on everyone around her, and she is the sore finger.

And that child has brought a friend.

A friend from the same school, one who goes in and out of golf courses, met by nothing but chance.

“A friend of our Hyoju’s, you say?”

Lee Dojung put it to him with a softness in his eyes.

“Yes. Grandfather.”

“……!!”

“……??”

Every one of the family started at the answer.

Apart from Lee Hyoju’s mother, all of them are seeing him for the first time today.

And without a flicker of hesitation he had said Grandfather to a man he had never met, as though it were nothing at all.

Lee Dojung holds to a strictness even in front of his own children.

At the company the form of address has been standardised: Chairman, from every mouth.

So whoever’s friend a boy might be, calling Lee Dojung Grandfather was not a thing that happened.

No — it would be truer to say he had never once been face to face with a grandchild’s friend.

Which only tightened the people watching.

If the word insolent were to come out of the chairman’s mouth, and the thunder come down after it——

“Oh— hahahahahahahaha!”

A great open laugh broke out of Lee Dojung with no warning at all.

“That’s right. You’re my granddaughter’s friend, so I am your grandfather.”

The answer came out against everything the family had been dreading.

What…… is this?

That little bastard!!

Hmm.

Lee Hyoeun, Lee Jeongho and Lee Jeonghun, who had come in behind him, went round-eyed at a sight they couldn’t believe.

Not once has their grandfather shown them a laugh as open as that.

And yet…… to a friend of Lee Hyoju’s he had never laid eyes on, he had shown a liking that astonished.

“You were out on a round?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Not yet.”

“Then come and sit here. Have a mouthful with us.”

“Thank you.”

Lee Dojung offered him the seat beside his own, and gladly.

Which left the three sons having to produce an empty chair on the spot.

They had been sitting in their places with every confidence, and now they were getting out of them in a hurry.

Not one of them put in a word. They shifted along a seat each, carefully.

“Did you come alone?”

“No, sir. I have somebody with me.”

“Do you?”

Sliiide.

The door of the halfway house opened at that exact moment, and An Hyeonju stepped inside.

In the halfway house there is only the Oyang Group family, and the uninvited Ha Tae-ung.

Nobody else was mixed in among them.

Snap!

Every eye in the Oyang house drove into An Hyeonju as she came through the door.

“Oh! Pro An Hyeonju!”

“Why is Miss——”

Lee Seokjong, the chairman’s third son, who has the leisure side under him, knew her first.

Then Lee Jeongho and Lee Hyoju, both pupils at Cheonghwa High School, made her out as well.

Wh— what is this?

An Hyeonju had come out of the toilets a little late.

Her party was nowhere to be seen, so she had come looking for them at the halfway house.

And what she had walked into was the eyes of strangers.

A few of them knew her.

And.

“Pro An.”

The old man straight ahead of her, who does not look like an ordinary man.

And Ha Tae-ung, sitting at his side.

He called her in a voice loud enough for the whole room to hear.

His round partner today was Miss An?

Lee Hyoju’s head was in confusion.

Of course she knows her — the Miss who has the golf.

She is not a regular teacher, but she runs the after-school programme.

The boys in particular are very keen on her.

Pro An Hyeonju is in her early twenties and gives off the scent of a grown woman, thickly.

And Ha Tae-ung, apparently out on a round with an unlikely person in order to have his first time.

Ha Tae-ung. What on earth are you really?

The doubts kept coming and coming, and Lee Hyoju’s head felt thoroughly tangled with them.

What pupil in the world, standing as a charity case, plays a round with a professional?

Pro An Hyeonju is under restriction in her professional work.

There is no possibility at all that she carried the cost of this round.

“Grandfather. This is Pro An Hyeonju, who has come with me today as my teaching manager.”

“Has she?”

The boy was warm with him and put Grandfather into his mouth as though it belonged there, and Lee Dojung did not find it grating in the least.

What he did, how he held himself, how he spoke — a confidence came off all of it, and it satisfied.

If he is a friend of his granddaughter’s, he decided, the boy will already know who he is.

At Cheonghwa High School a group family stands out against the ordinary pupils and cannot help it.

And in among that crowd, nothing in Ha Tae-ung’s bearing gives ground or shrinks.

If the surname is Ha……

Lee Dojung gave nothing away, and thought of a house.

The Ha family’s group, which stands several moves above the one he runs.

And there is a resemblance, too……

At the business gatherings, Lee Dojung and Haryun Group’s chairman call each other hyungnim and dongsaeng.

A man stiffer in the neck than Lee Dojung, and more thorough in how he keeps his group and his children in hand.

That is Chairman Ha of Haryun Group.

Others do not know the private sides of him, but Lee Dojung knows Chairman Ha’s faces well.

Where the group is concerned, the man has neither blood nor tears in him.

“Come over here, Pro An.”

Lee Dojung called her closer.

He enjoys his golf, but he does not know the players who are active in it.

He has played for decades, as exercise.

But he has kept his distance from golf people, coldly.

When other chairmen put rounds in the diary with good-looking women professionals, he did not attend.

There was no need to be dragged into talk for nothing, and it did nothing for the management of a private life.

And it is long since he was widowed, but Lee Dojung still loves his dead wife deeply.

“Sorry? Yes……”

An Hyeonju could not believe what was unfolding in front of her.

She is seeing them for the first time, and these are not ordinary people.

And Ha Tae-ung, mixed in among them, occupying a seat as calmly as anything.

“Pro. This is the chairman of Oyang Group.”

“……!!”

An Hyeonju had been about to sit down in the empty chair they had made beside him, and she jumped.

The astonishing things have not stopped since she first came to know Ha Tae-ung.

Ha Tae-ung, admitted to Cheonghwa High School on the charity-case track, is sitting at this moment beside the chairman of Oyang Group.

“H— how do you do. My name is An Hyeonju.”

Her manner went demure of its own accord.

And she bent deep from the waist.

She has already learned, to the bone, that pride must not be shown in front of a group chairman.

“Don’t stand on ceremony.”

Chairman Lee Dojung gave her a good-natured smile.

Sudden meetings were coming one after another, and he was in good humour with all of it.

Both Ha Tae-ung and An Hyeonju had set his curiosity going.

Ha Tae-ung showed a temper that belongs to Chairman Ha Cheolgon of Haryun Group and to nobody else.

He cannot be certain of it, but there is something in the boy that resembles him oddly.

A few more exchanges and he will have him placed.

People generally call a group’s heirs gold spoons, or royal family, and look at them with the prejudice that goes along with it.

But an heir to a group is never simply raised.

You cannot make a captain of a boy half tested.

In a world like this one especially, he goes under fast.

Character, schooling, strength of mind and ease with people — he is grown until he has all of it.

And what goes into that process is no joke.

A group feeds thousands of staff at the low end and hundreds of thousands at the high.

The head of a group is the man with his hand on the helm of that enormous vessel.

The lion, king over the grassland.

It is not simply born.

“Thank you.”

An Hyeonju sat down carefully.

“Grandfather. Let me pour you a cup.”

“Do that. Hahahaha.”

There was a brass to the boy’s manner, and Lee Dojung let every guard down at it.

His own laugh came so freely that it raised the illusion of somebody else sitting there.

That Ha Tae-ung was not the least bit awkward with him made the boy remarkable to him, and rather admirable.

Every one of his grandchildren is awkward with him.

His sons are busy watching his face.

Inside the house and out, he was dealt with only as the chairman of Oyang Group.

Ha Tae-ung pours the drink, and it strikes somewhere inside an old lion who has been solitary and alone.

He lifted the makgeolli kettle respectfully and tipped it toward the cup.

The cold makgeolli filled it, throwing up its fizz as it came.

The dish alongside is the seafood pajeon the chairman likes.

Trickle, trickle, trickle.

Ha Tae-ung filled the cup with both hands and never wavered.

The precision he had learned in the last life in order to survive came out of him now as something the body had taken in.

He’s been taught properly.

Lee Dojung watched each movement closely and was pleased with all of it.

Boys of this age cannot carry themselves with restraint like that.

Which means the house has disciplined him and taught him strictly.

Look at his own grandchildren — hold a cup out to them and they handle the bottle clumsily.

Set Ha Tae-ung against them and——

Trickle.

The makgeolli stopped exactly at the line, without going over.

“Will you take one yourself?”

“If you pour it, I’ll take it gratefully.”

“Father. If he’s a friend of Hyoju’s——”

Lee Seokpil, the eldest, had been watching the two of them, and he came in carefully.

The boy is not family, he is an outsider, and he is a minor.

Press drink on him and there could be talk, and it worried Lee Seokpil.

“There were circumstances when I was small, and I took some time out of school.”

“……??”

“Hyoju and I are in the same year, but I’m of age. There’s no need for concern.”

“Ah! Is that so. Then take a cup.”

Lee Dojung checked for a moment, then took the kettle up again.

Ha Tae-ung holds the cup out in both hands.

That bastard!!

Jealousy came to the boil in Lee Jeongho until his lid was very nearly off.

Leaving aside years he can barely remember, he has never once sat close up against his grandfather.

Drink?

Of course he has never been given any.

And is this a situation that makes any sense at all?

Ha Tae-ung is a friend of Lee Hyoju’s whom he met for the first time today.

And that one has taken the seat beside a grandfather like a tiger, and is fawning on him with everything he has.

You…… are dead by my hand.

Lee Jeongho ground his teeth on it, hard, inside himself.

Ha Tae-ung had stated he was at Cheonghwa High School.

The moment he is back at school he would find him and take him apart, and he set his mind on it hard.

“Right! Let’s drink.”

Lee Dojung raised his cup first and brought it to his mouth.

Ha Tae-ung and the sons raised theirs after him and drank.

Only the grandchildren stared, blank-eyed, boring into the unbelievable thing the rest of them were making.

“Grandfather.”

“……??”

“If it’s all right with you, might I join the next round and play with you?”

Lee Dojung had just emptied his cup, and Ha Tae-ung put the proposal to him out of nowhere.

That he would come along on the next round.

Which meant mixing himself into a round the family was playing together.

“Today is my first time out…… and I’d like to learn what you know, Grandfather.”

“Would you? Then we’ll play together. I’ll hand it all over and hold nothing back! Hahahaha.”

Lee Dojung’s humour rose another step.

He nodded, and went on nodding, and gave his permission gladly.

“……”

The Oyang Group families’ jaws came open at the sight of the chairman breaking every pattern he had.

A breaking like this one, the family had never witnessed before.

“Haaah.”

Lee Hyoju, who has not been able to say what Ha Tae-ung is.

She buried the charity case in her chest one more time, and let out a short breath.

(End of Chapter 44)