For Ruby, Part 1

"I wanna go home. I don't wanna sleep at the restaurant."

When I fussed and whined, Grandfather stroked my round little hands to soothe me.

"For our Haeseo, your grandpa would do anything."

"Then take me home!"

"Anything. Really, anything, Haeseo."

The pressure of his grip grew stronger. My soft five-year-old hand crumpled inside those calloused hands that had spent a lifetime working wood. He said he'd do anything for me. But he wouldn't even take me home. And my hand hurt. Waaah—that was probably what I was thinking as I burst into tears.

"Haeseo……"

She had wanted to care for him at home until the very end, but once he became entirely bedridden, Haeseo had no choice but to admit him to a hospital. Baek Sarang Hospital, in Seoul.

Grandfather had worked as the Baek family's gardener for half his life. Though he had retired a good while ago, he still met the requirements for welfare benefits, and so in his final years he was granted the privilege of hospitalization at the foundation-run hospital of the Baek family—that is, of BH Group.

Peeling a Korean melon, Haeseo answered, "Yes, I know." By now she could predict anything Grandfather had to say.

"Your grandpa…… would do anything…… for you, Haeseo."

"I know. You've done it all along, Grandpa."

She meticulously scooped out the melon seeds. The stickier they clung to the blade, the sweeter the fragrance grew. With every organ in his body weakened, Grandfather got a stomachache whenever he ate the seeds. But the melon was his favorite fruit, an indispensable summertime treat he could never pass up.

If we can just get through this summer too…… She had quit her job to devote herself entirely to his care, and even two years in, Haeseo steeled herself with the passing of every season. Please stay with me as long as you can. For my sake, Grandpa. Okay?

"For Haeseo's sake……"

On a summer day when the melon flesh had ripened unusually heavy and sweet, those words—the ones he repeated like a parrot—became, at last, his final words.

Take what you love with you when you go.

Her parents had died when she was five, and with no children of their own, her grandparents had taken her in—which was why Haeseo kept vigil alone beside her grandfather's coffin. Her grandmother had wanted to be there too, but Haeseo had gently but firmly sent her home.

Her grandmother was elderly and looked frail, so Haeseo had only insisted she attend the funeral procession itself. Grandmother was the last family Haeseo had left. She wanted to protect her, even if it meant disappointing her.

Haeseo carried out the funeral quietly and well. She greeted every arriving guest with sincerity and offered them her thanks. It was a mercy that the condolence callers were few.

She was no longer at an age where all she could do was cry her eyes out, and parting from her grandfather was an inevitability that had always waited somewhere ahead. Years of preparing her heart served her in good stead.

But there are things no one can prepare for, and those could still startle even Haeseo.

Like the woman who swept in, bodyguards flanking her on either side, black heels clicking beneath a razor-sharp, creased suit.

"Look how you've grown."

After dipping her head in a brief bow before Grandfather's portrait, the woman came straight toward Haeseo.

"It's been over ten years and somehow your face hasn't changed a bit. Uncanny."

"……You haven't changed either, ma'am."

Haeseo stared at the still-beautiful woman and answered as if in a trance, then hurriedly added, "Not that I mean uncanny in a bad way. In a lovely way."

She meant it. Baek Yoon-ah, the Chairman Baek's second child and eldest daughter, was a mirror image of the woman Haeseo remembered from childhood—the very woman Haeseo had once believed the most beautiful in the world.

Baek Yoon-ah made a show of scowling.

"Ma'am, what's this…… I said uncanny, girl. When exactly do you think I got divorced? Do you live with the news switched off?"

"Ah…… I suppose I do."

"Call me President."

"Yes."

She really had been living with the news off, so Haeseo had no idea what company she presided over, but she nodded obediently all the same. Baek Yoon-ah was, from the very start, a woman suited to the title of President far more than to ma'am.

"The Chairman wanted to pay his respects in person, but his schedule wouldn't allow it, so he sent me."

At this even more surreal news, Haeseo's eyes went round.

"Don't be disappointed, now? He could have sent a servant, yet I came in his place—do you have any idea how enormous that is?"

"Disappointed? It's an honor, truly."

"Hm. You've grown some, at least. Not resting on your laurels."

It was a brief encounter, but the afterglow Baek Yoon-ah left behind, sweeping through and sweeping out, was intense.

It was only after the funeral procession had concluded in full and Haeseo checked the condolence money that she was staggered a second time—by a sum she couldn't have imagined. Standing before that single check, she spent nights upon sleepless nights agonizing over what to do, whether she ought to return it, until at last she sent a formal gift of thanks to Chairman Baek through an official channel.

It was Baek Yoon-ah who opened that reply alongside him.

"Yoon-ah. Set that over here by the bed. Somewhere I can see it."

Chairman Baek, who supposedly had a schedule, lay propped up in a hospital bed—treatment kept strictly confidential, with the media barred from any mention of it.

In what might as well have been a sterile isolation room, the old man had insisted, against all logic, on keeping Teacher Wi's maple bonsai.

"Well, look at this."

As she read the letter Haeseo had written by her own hand, one of Baek Yoon-ah's eyebrows lifted.

Chairman Baek rose in the autumn of that year, watching the maple leaves blaze crimson. But before that happened, Yoon-ah had moved one step faster and gone to find Haeseo.

"You. Be Ruby's personal secretary. He's finished his degree in America and completed his military service, and now he's about to join the company."

Ah, Ruby. At that peculiar name, unheard for so long, the hand holding Haeseo's coffee cup stopped midair.

When Haeseo had left the Baek estate, Ruby had still been in middle school. By now, she thought, he must have climbed to heights her hand could no longer reach. High enough to need a secretary.

"I'm grateful for the offer, but I've never worked as a secretary."

"Who said anything about sitting at a desk writing up documents?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Professional secretaries get sorted out later, once he's appointed to the executive ranks—we'll assign him the best of the best then. What I need right now is someone to enter his personal space and look after him. Say, sending gifts to people Ruby can't be bothered to keep track of himself, on all the right occasions…… or attending the weddings and funerals in his place. The way I went to the funeral in the Chairman's stead."

"……"

"What, does it look beneath you? For people like us, that's honestly the most important work there is."

Haeseo shook her head. It wasn't that the scope of the job seemed shabby. She simply wondered why something so important was being entrusted to her.

"You've spent the last two years caring for Teacher Wi, haven't you. You haven't managed to find work since your career gap, either."

Asking how she knew would have been a waste of breath. There was surely no secret within South Korea that could be hidden from the Baek family.

"Right—caring for someone. Just think of this as that too. Staying at someone's side and looking after them—it's the same thing."

Being asked to care for a perfectly healthy person—maybe I should have asked for more details then.

She could look back and say that now, but whatever the conditions, Haeseo would have accepted the offer regardless. She had to earn a living one way or another.

She signed the contract, followed in her grandfather's footsteps, and formally became a member of BH Group.

And then she met Ruby again.

After the divorce he had reverted to his mother's surname, so it was Baek Ruby now, not Kang Ruby—don't you dare get it wrong, Yoon-ah had drilled into her—so Haeseo waited for Ruby, wound tight with tension.

So tight that both her hands were clasped together at her chest.

Her grandfather had worked as the Baek family's gardener, and until his retirement they had lived in staff housing on the grounds of Baekrimjae. Naturally, Haeseo had lived there too. Ruby, two years her junior, had been the only other child in that enormous estate. Because of that, the two had grown quite close. In Haeseo's memory, at least.

This was the first time she'd seen him since leaving that house. What kind of man had Ruby grown into? Uncanny—your face hasn't changed a bit was what people said to her, and it was true enough that high school and now looked much the same on her. She was past the age of getting taller, and her style had barely shifted.

But Ruby would be different. What would the grown-up Ruby be like? Ba-dump, ba-dump—her heart fluttered pleasantly. She could picture the smile of that bright, pretty elementary schooler, Ruby beaming up at her.

The tiny hand that had snapped off flowers her grandfather treasured, wrecking them, and offered them to her with pure, guileless devotion. Even the soft cheeks that jiggled in time with his bouncing steps.

Not the sort of thing one should be thinking while waiting to meet one's new superior—but as a child, Ruby had been like a puppy that trailed after her and no one else.

BANG.

The dark wooden door flew wide open without so much as a knock. Only one person could throw open this door like that.

"Wow, holy shit……"

"……"

"It's really Wi Haeseo."

It could only be Ruby.