“What? She’s resting?”

“Yes……. She says she’s tired.”

“Crazy bitch!”

The DMC director’s office.

Seo Dahui’s resistance that morning had been reported the moment it happened.

All this time she had gone wherever the halter pulled her and earned without a word of complaint, and now the cow had begun to hold out.

The swearing burst out of Yang Docheol’s mouth.

There was more malice in his eyes than there had ever been.

“Team Three leader.”

“Sir!”

“Leave her.”

“Sir?”

“Secure the evidence, all of it. Gather everything, and weight it toward whatever breaches company regulations.”

“…….”

Yang Docheol laced his fingers together, settled back into his seat and crossed one leg up over the other.

“What is a thing like her going to be able to do. With nothing in her hand. Heh heh heh.”

Seo Dahui’s father is a middle-school teacher.

There is nothing a country teacher can do for his daughter.

The relatives around her are all of much the same order.

There is no end of ways to grind down an entertainer with no connections worth the name.

And DM Group’s legal team stands at his back like a folding screen.

Handling a private individual with no power at all is no work.

The rule of law?

A phrase that only sounds well.

The Republic of Korea is a country of laws in form and in pattern.

The system of courtesies owed to men who have come out of the courts grows sturdier as it goes.

Contract a large firm with large enough money and the outcome can be turned whichever way you want, whenever you want.

To put it coarsely, even a killing can be got out on a suspended sentence.

In a field like that, sending one woman singer with nothing behind her down into the pit is child’s play.

“Dahui-ya……. If I can’t have you, no other bastard is having you either. Heh heh heh.”

Yang Docheol thought of Seo Dahui and let a rank laugh out of him.

He did not know it even in his dreams.

That a tall crown prince had, this very moment, appeared at Seo Dahui’s back.

“Seo Dahui?”

“Our crown prince client. Now what’s this, then?”

The office of Kim Gyeongmin, senior attorney at Jo and Jang.

When they are not carrying a large case, two or three who get on will ordinarily put a team together.

A trainee attorney is carried through on the senior attorney’s own ability, and led by it.

Which is why, if it can be managed at all, they try to get in under an attorney who has come out of the courts.

But not just anybody may join one.

The sums that change hands over a place differ.

The reason is obvious.

The crumbs that fall off a former court man’s success bonus come to more than a respectable fee.

Attorney Kim Gyeongmin has no line of his own, and is pushed back every time.

He has received one email from his crown prince client, for all the world like a royal edict.

“Would she be somebody he knows?”

“How would I know. Somebody His Highness knows, presumably. Who on earth…… is Seo Dahui?”

Kim Gyeongmin, who has never taken any interest in the entertainment world, asked it looking at Ah Yura.

“She’s a woman solo singer. Her tone is attractive, and her looks are…… pretty.”

“How old?”

“She’ll be somewhere around thirty now.”

“Mm?”

At Ah Yura’s words Kim Gyeongmin started violently.

“What?”

“No, pretty as she may be…… that gap in age…….”

“Attorney Kim!”

“……??”

Ah Yura showed a reaction slightly prickly for her.

The sight of it left Kim Gyeongmin the more thrown of the two.

“The crown prince — no, our client Ha Tae-ung — isn’t that kind of man.”

“Oh, come on. Men are all much the same. Pretty, and the heart goes.”

“Attorney Kim!!”

“What’s got into you today, Attorney Ah? A client of our crown prince’s standing, and one woman entertainer is anything at all? Tall, good-looking, and a house behind him to carry it. Is that the whole of it? Money as well. Kyaa! If I were a woman I’d strip off and go at him!”

“…….”

Attorney Kim Gyeongmin’s unchecked way of putting it turned Ah Yura’s stomach.

She turned away, showing him her back, and bit her lip a little.

It is barely one night since.

The crown prince had sat drinking with her, and gone home.

The email came in the moment she got to the office.

A request for information on everything to do with Seo Dahui, a singer signed to DMC.

Kim Gyeongmin took it as work handed to them. Ah Yura took it differently.

Ah Yura knows the singer Seo Dahui too.

An attractive woman solo singer, and popular with women as well.

She has the look of a fox about her, and became known, against that look, as one of the ones who work — and her following is solid for it.

And now, all at once, she has the crown prince’s interest!

Which makes it another matter altogether.

Next door?

Seo Dahui’s registered address is the Signiel, where the crown prince lives.

And the unit number is the one immediately beside his.

Surely not…….

The crown prince had not given so much as a glance at her when she went out done up for it.

A high-school pupil, and unmistakably a man of age.

Whatever he chooses, there is nothing wrong in it.

“Right! The client’s instructed us, so let’s move. Play it well and there’ll be something to eat out of it.”

Attorney Kim Gyeongmin, with the smell of money in his nose.

He got onto the websites and set about gathering information in earnest.

“Oh! She is pretty! Most men would go straight over.”

Kim Gyeongmin let out an exclamation at the photographs filling his monitor the moment Seo Dahui was searched.

“Hmph…….”

Ah Yura made a sound in her nose, without meaning to, as though the whole thing were distasteful.

Flap-flap-flap-flap.

Cool air came into the cabin through the sunroof, left half open.

The sound of the wind tearing past the car was cool with it.

Friday, 3 June 2022.

School finished and I set off straight for Sokcho.

Cheonghwa was still and quiet, the way a place is once a storm has gone through it.

Pupils and teachers alike were busy watching for my mood wherever I went.

Rumours of one kind and another seemed to be putting on weight.

But nobody readily asked what they wanted to know, and nobody threw themselves about.

A week went by in no time, and for the first time in a long while I am going home.

Monday next week is Memorial Day.

A holiday with the weekend folded into it, so I had expected the roads to be blocked, and they were clear.

Setting off in the early afternoon, I ran the wide-open Yeongdong expressway at a good clip.

The season with spring finished and summer at the door.

Last night’s rain had left the air fresher still.

Coming up on the Taebaek Range, bright bubbles of oxygen mixed themselves into my breath.

“Haa.”

I have never felt as clear as this.

In the past I had no car of my own.

I took the licence early, and never once owned a vehicle.

Dad said a driving licence is as good as one more certificate a man carries through his life.

I took it as soon as I got into university.

I did my lessons in Dad’s little car.

One of the happy memories.

Through the whole of my instruction — and I was a complete beginner — he never once lost his temper.

He had sat through Mom’s lessons before mine, the same kind way.

In his own manner, he went carefully through everything to watch for at the wheel.

Thanks to him I had the whole technique down perfectly, and in no time.

And that was the end of it.

In a household with nothing to spare, a car was a luxury.

I was living in a rooftop room, so there is no need to say anything about Seoul.

Public transport was the whole of how I moved.

The occasional run in a company car was the chance.

But today, like this…….

“Is this the thing they call happiness?”

The freedom money puts in your arms is still a little strange to me.

They lift me up and call me a crown prince, but the marks of a life lived as one of the ordinary people can’t be rubbed out altogether.

This is why the surroundings matter.

The blood of a gold-spoon house is right enough, but what I grew up inside was another thing.

Even so, I am waking to it, one thing and then another, and quickly.

It is strange, and it feels like putting on clothes that were mine all along, only now.

Flap-flap-flap-flap-flap-flap~.

With the fresh air coming in through the open sunroof, I run for Sokcho, where my parents are.

—Did we love each other~♬ was it really love~♪

I put Seo Dahui’s song on loud.

The BNW X7’s speakers add to the style of it.

The high notes break clean without a scrap of noise in them, and my ears are the better for it.

“It’s been a while……. This tunnel.”

A tunnel of better than ten kilometres has to be gone through on the way to the house in Sokcho.

Driving the road inside it, bored through Taebaeksan, always made me solemn.

After a long stretch driven in silence, the point where the motorway ends came into view.

Out through the Yangyang tollgate and onto Route 7.

And a moment later, there.

“The sea.”

Swaaash. Swaaash.

The sea wind is rough today.

Hard waves throwing up foam and rushing at National Route 7 as though they meant to come over it.

Everything in front of me opened out.

Living the first time round, I never knew the taste of this at all.

In the past, coming home to see Mom, I didn’t look out of the window.

I kept my eyes shut until we arrived and the bus stopped.

Every moment then, my head was tangled.

I made a point of turning away from the rough life in the East Sea.

Dad, who couldn’t be got so much as a place in a charnel house and was scattered into the East Sea.

Those last traces of him tormented me.

Today it is not like that at all.

“It’s different now. Future or past, I’m not the man I was then!”

I looked at the East Sea with its dark blue-green cast and sent it a nod.

Vroooom.

I pressed the accelerator smoothly and went on.

For the first time I took the whole wide sea of the East in.

“My mom’s a girl. A girl~”

Mom’s top-favourite snack.

The sweet little turd-shaped buns they sell at the motorway services.

I walked up Jungang-ro with a set holding an even spread of the different flavours.

Mom’s shop came into view ahead.

In the past, at this point, Mom was running a sideline in Sokcho.

A neat little flower shop, set not on the main road but back in a tucked-away alley.

A position nobody but a regular could find.

And even so she held out there, stubbornly, and lived through it.

After Dad went I never once asked how Mom was placed for money.

I was finding it hard to hold on myself, then.

I put my life on my grades for the sake of the scholarship.

What I earned tutoring was gone once the rent and the food were paid.

Tramp, tramp.

But my step now is light beyond measure.

“Today I’ll take Mom out for sundaeguk and a glass of soju.”

I mean to have an evening out with Mom.

Mom, who loves sundaeguk.

Halt.

I stopped dead in front of Mom’s shop.

Tae-ung’s Flower Shop, painted by Mom’s own hand.

The sign comes into my eye sharp today.

A mother’s heart loving her son, and I feel every bit of it.

Glad of it, and at the moment I reach to open the shop door and step in…….

“Madam Han! What are you going to do?”

“Chairman……. It’s a tiny little business. What am I supposed to do if you tell me all at once you’re putting the rent up by two hundred thousand won?”

Rent?

“Don’t you know what the going rate is round here now? The motorway went through and every one of them put it up by hundreds of thousands.”

“It isn’t the same here. It’s back in an out-of-the-way alley, and it’s only just the regulars who find their way in…….”

“Out of the way, is it? Then why trade in a place like this? All this time I’ve looked at your circumstances and let it to you for a bare five hundred thousand, and this is what I get?”

The old man’s voice, stubborn and coarse, rang out shrill.

“That isn’t it, Chairman…….”

“I’ve given you notice, so take it as given!”

“…….”

My heart came up sore without my meaning it.

Even in these days, with Dad alive, the two of them were fighting this hard on their own.

Mom, too weak in the body to find any other work.

“It isn’t that there’s no way at all…….”

“Sorry?”

“I told you the other time. Meet me this evening, a drop of soju and a plate of sashimi……. Heh heh.”

What? So-o-o-oju??

(End of Chapter 81)