“Mum~ Mum!”

“Why is the princess in such high spirits today?”

Her daughter Jiyu came back from the crammer with her voice up, and her mother Ju Huiyeon met her with a smile.

“Something huge happened at our school today!”

“Did it? What sort of something?”

Her mother Ju Huiyeon, in an elegant house dress, asked it with refinement in her eyes.

She was once a top singer who had the whole country talking.

At the height of her popularity a connection formed between her and her husband, Jang Yongguk.

Like any Cinderella story: a second-generation chaebol and a top star meeting.

Ju Huiyeon gave up everything she had been enjoying and chose a household with Jang Yongguk.

Ju Huiyeon got a child, and the marriage was not happy.

Jang Yongguk was not the attentive man she had thought.

And beyond that there was Go Junhui, the overall chairman, who found Ju Huiyeon unsatisfactory.

A member of the Ilseong chaebol house, she had large complaints about her daughter-in-law.

She disregarded her as some song-and-dance girl.

Ju Huiyeon, who had been like a bird flying free, became a creature in a cage from the moment she chose Jang Yongguk.

After the marriage her husband Jang Yongguk watched his mother’s face and never once took her side.

Nor was the group’s succession perfectly settled.

Ju Huiyeon, who had lived as a star of the public, was hardly likely to be meek in front of Go Junhui either.

The trouble between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law set it off, and there was never a day without a fight between the couple.

Living like a caged bird, Ju Huiyeon began to soothe the pain of it with drink.

She regretted the choice she had made in a moment when she thought love was everything.

And as for her love for her child——

“Today a charity case blew away Maths Thug, and his foul temper with him.”

“Maths Thug? That famous mathematics teacher?”

“Yes! He was a pervert who lived on taking the piss out of kids for fun, on nothing but being good at maths.”

“You can’t say taking the piss. If your grandmother and your father heard——”

“Tch……”

Go Junhui, the overall chairman, out of Samhwa Women’s University; Jang Yongguk out of Seoguk.

Ju Huiyeon, against that, had never gone past secondary school.

When the people of that eminent house gathered in one place Ju Huiyeon was left out of the count as a matter of course.

Even at family occasions they froze her out openly.

The lowest part of it is that the cousins’ wives did her down while pretending they were not.

Their surgical faces settled nothing against hers, so they brought out where everybody had studied instead.

In any gathering Ju Huiyeon was part of they spoke to each other in a foreign language, without exception.

For a long while Ju Huiyeon swallowed tears of blood and bore it.

“And then?”

She saw her daughter Jiyu pushing her lips out in a sulk and turned the subject naturally.

“Maths Thug went apeshit, I mean, made a scene, and then Jo and Jang attorneys turned up, and the principal put one across Maths Thug’s cheek——”

“You’re a third year. Did you go and watch it?”

“No, I heard it. Where would I get the time.”

Jang Jiyu leaned back into the sofa and rattled on without a pause.

“Is that all of it? There seems to be more.”

“My mum’s reading of things is astonishing. Heh.”

Jang Jiyu is prickly and haughty at school, and at home she is nothing of the kind.

In front of her mother she went into a mode with every weapon laid down, like any teenage girl.

“Did the charity case suddenly turn out to be chaebol blood, something of that sort?”

“M— Mum!”

“Mm?”

“Did you know? No — have you heard the rumour already?”

“No~!”

“Then…… how do you know??”

“Well, Mother knows everything.”

“Whoa! Mum, you’re a ghost——!!”

Jang Jiyu, chattering away in delight as though it were a wonder.

In that instant she shut her mouth and stopped moving entirely.

And……

Trickle, trickle, trickle, trickle.

Like a lie, the tears broke out of both eyes.

Flash!

At Jang Jiyu’s word ghost, her mother Ju Huiyeon vanished from in front of her in an instant.

The house with the stillness running through it.

The air of that wide marble-laid space felt colder still.

Expensive display cabinets and ornaments stand in rows, and the place is chill, without one handful of warmth in it.

Jang Jiyu looked steadily at the family photograph on the wall behind the sofa.

A family photograph with her father missing from it.

“I miss you……. Mum…… hh-huuu.”

Her mother Ju Huiyeon, smiling wide as a sunflower inside the family photograph.

Jang Jiyu broke into sobs and could not stop.

That was how it was.

Ju Huiyeon, once a star of this country and Jang Jiyu’s mother.

She——

A man came straight in.

A few days more and it is June.

The air outside was warming slightly.

The man appeared in a suit in the navy range.

A colour that can easily look provincial and slight, and the man carried it as well as any model would.

A light shirt under the jacket, and no tie.

Down to the pale brown shoes it is perfect.

And a manly set of features and a handsome face put the dot in the dragon’s eye.

“……”

Ah Yura, frozen where she sat, watched him with her pupils gone wide.

Jo and Jang, where she works, is overflowing with the opposite sex doing well.

It is where the finest men in the country gather, going at limit-up on education, ability and looks together.

But not to the degree of the man who has appeared in front of her now.

The natural charisma that comes off him cannot even be imitated.

And the smile resting at his mouth, and the gentleness in his eyes, were hard to put into words.

The moment she confirmed who the man was, Ah Yura’s face went red of itself.

The gap in their ages is enough to make even calling him a younger man embarrassing.

In plain fact he is a pupil still in his second year at a high school.

He looked like a man to her eyes, and at the same time the sight of him in a school uniform lay over the top of it.

“Was your boyfriend…… an entertainer?”

The bartender asks it, polishing a glass.

“N— no, he isn’t. He’s my client.”

“Is that so?”

The bartender let it pass with a light laugh.

And Ah Yura’s face burned hotter still.

“Have you been waiting long?”

His client Ha Tae-ung came over and asked it kindly.

“No. I only just got here myself.”

Shff.

Ha Tae-ung sat down in the seat right beside her, naturally.

“He’s good-looking.”

Ha Tae-ung took his seat and the bartender let the compliment fly, easily.

It was confirmed again that this is not an ordinary bartender’s manner.

Not a bartender who reads a room and handles his customers according to what he sees.

“Thank you.”

Ha Tae-ung, meeting the bartender’s eyes and talking with him, in a manner impossible to place.

What is this, why is my heart carrying on like that?

It is the feeling she had going out on her first blind date after starting university.

The young crown prince sitting right beside her.

She has lived with men taken out of her life, for social success and a career.

An unfamiliar feeling and mood, and a long while since she felt it.

Ah Yura felt her face heating quietly inside the silence.

“Will you order?”

The bartender asked it, looking at the two of them.

“Would you recommend something?”

“Shall I?”

“If you would.”

“Haha. Very well.”

The bartender broke into a pleased laugh, like a fish finding water.

“Then…… for the gentleman.”

The bartender looked steadily at Ha Tae-ung for a moment.

“I would recommend the King Alexander. A whisky made by bringing together six spirits, each matured in a different cask. A flavour that suits a client who is a six-sided man, as you are.”

Six-sided? He can tell at one look?

The bartender looked different to Ah Yura.

A bartender who speaks to a customer without a check in it, close enough to seem discourteous.

It was not an ordinary person’s manner.

“Among the Dalmores it’s a whisky I like.”

“I thought it would be.”

The two of them, who appear to be meeting for the first time, talked easily.

He knows the taste of drink already? And whisky at that?

Wine she could understand to a degree.

The chaebol houses value bearing above everything, so they start them young on the way of drink as well.

Her client Ha Tae-ung is of age, and he is still a high school pupil.

It looked early for him to be discussing the taste of drink with an elderly gentleman bartender.

“And for the beautiful lady beside you……”

The bartender looking at Ah Yura with a practised eye.

Why am I nervous about this, of all things?

The look in the bartender’s eyes seemed different from the first.

A suspicion came to her that he was somebody with the ability to steal a look at another person’s fate through their eyes.

“Dark chocolate, bitter as a life, and vanilla that has met a sweet fate, with their deep and complicated flavours in it…… I would recommend the Hennessy XO cognac.”

“……”

Ah Yura was suddenly frightened of the elderly gentleman bartender.

It seemed as though he were divining a past and a future through the drink he was offering.

Already the look in his eyes was unlike the way ordinary bartenders deal with customers.

A look that truly seemed to go through a person.

“Th— thank you.”

Ah Yura accepted the bartender’s recommendation, which cannot be refused.

In fact she knows almost nothing about whisky.

Wine now and then with her cohort, or with the seniors at Jo and Jang, is the whole of it.

She does not much like drinking to get drunk.

And even so, today she wanted one glass.

The jazz running past her ear, heavy and settled deep, added to the atmosphere.

And the scent coming off Ha Tae-ung, fresh and clean, and the soft lighting with it!

Ah Yura was already drunk on the atmosphere.

“I’ll prepare them at once.”

The bartender moved toward the whisky cabinet.

Even at a rough look there are enough whiskies on display to run well past a thousand bottles.

Whiskies of every kind, which put together would look like several hundred million at the least.

“Er…… Mr Ha Tae-ung.”

Ah Yura called him carefully.

“Yes, is there something you want to know?”

Ha Tae-ung asked it with a soft smile, his eyes still on the whisky cabinet.

“Do you…… know this place well?”

“Roughly…… I know it.”

“Then, that bartender is……?”

“He owns the building.”

“What??”

So the bartender was not ordinary after all!

Ah Yura lost what she was going to say.

The building she is in has more than ten storeys.

Rattle a calculator roughly and it comes to a man with assets in the tens of billions.

“And……”

“……??”

“He’s a spirit-man.”

“A spirit-man……. You don’t mean a— a shaman??”

(End of Chapter 70)