The Bear That Kneels with a Ring

If Baek Yoon-ah's mind was a whirring engine of calculations, Haeseo's was no different — and of course, the President had gotten there first.

―So the hospital wrote it up as a simple bruise?

"Yes."

―I'll let it be known internally that I'm wrapping up headquarters earlier than planned to prepare for my overseas assignment. I took a knock to the head, so I want to rest. Understood?

"Yes. Yes, that's completely understandable."

Haeseo nodded vigorously.

―And for the time being, Secretary Wi, you're moving into Ruby's place to look after him.

"Yes, yes. ……I'm sorry, what?"

Stunned by the abrupt order, Haeseo pushed back. Of course she had every intention of taking responsibility — but moving into his home was something she hadn't seen coming.

―I have no intention of adding more people to the list of those who know. Strictly speaking, it's not caretaking. It's surveillance and confinement. Keep Baek Ruby from setting one foot outside until I return to Korea. Did I make myself clear?

"Yes. Of course……."

Truthfully, it was the best possible arrangement, even from Haeseo's own perspective. Right now, Ruby was nothing short of a bomb with the pin pulled out. And she couldn't deny that she was the one who'd pulled it.

With things roughly settled, Baek Yoon-ah heaved a long sigh.

―How, in heaven's name, did something like this happen at such a critical moment?

The voice chewed over the stifling situation and lodged itself in Haeseo's heart like a blade. Even after the call ended, she stood frozen for a long while, unable to do anything at all.

If you mix your body with a Wicked Thing by mistake, everything you've ever built will be stripped from you, all of it.

Those words alone floated round and round in her head.

For Ruby, losing every memory of learning and working from the age of twenty onward in a single instant was truly the worst-case scenario.

And undeniably, that Wicked Thing was her.

"……"

Haeseo scrubbed roughly at her eyes with her forearm. This was no time to be drowning in self-pity. She would live under the same roof as Baek Yoon-ah had ordered, and do her utmost to help Ruby recover. His memories were bound to come back — and until they did, she would never let anyone in this world steal his life away from him.

Ruby wandered through his own house as though it were a museum. In the walk-in closet, he pulled out the hanging clothes one by one, inspecting them. Formal styles felt unfamiliar, but every single piece was undeniably pretty. So my taste hasn't changed.

After giving even the bedroom a cursory look — a room bare of everything except a lone bed — Ruby made his way to the living room.

Apparently, this is the place I moved into when I struck out on my own.

The other rooms made that easy enough to believe. But then there were the things that caught his eye right now. Standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, Ruby pursed his lips into a pout at the sight of the pots stacked in a lush heap.

Several trees tall enough to reach an adult's head, along with nameless plants even in bloom, soaked up the sunlight, glowing a vivid green.

Unlike his grandfather, who poured his whole heart into gardening, Ruby had never had the slightest interest in plants. So how on earth were these immaculately tended, thriving specimens supposed to be his?

He tried to imagine himself waking up every morning to water them, but the picture wouldn't come. Amnesia or not, something this alien to him clearly meant he'd outsourced their care to someone else's hands.

In that case, why keep them in the house in the first place? What a hassle.

He winced, creasing his brow for a moment, then gave a shrug. It wasn't as though it were some grave crisis. Twisting around, he looked down at Haeseo, who was trailing close behind him, brows knitted with worry.

Still, nothing about this "future" is bad. She came back to me — Wi Haeseo, of all people.

"Is anything… coming back to you at all?"

Haeseo spoke carefully, her hands clasped together. Her upturned eyes sparkled with anxious hope.

Ah.

A shiver slid down his spine, and Ruby's fingers flinched.

Those were the exact eyes. The eyes I prayed — countless, countless times — Haeseo would look at me with, if she ever came back to my side.

"Things are coming back……"

So, so many of them. The moment he'd seen her in that hospital bed, the days of his past had scrolled by like a panorama.

Back when he lived at Baekrimjae, Ruby came straight home after school without so much as a detour.

Because if he roamed the front yard — as vast as a palace garden, designed by his grandfather with obsessive care — he was guaranteed to run into Wi Haeseo.

It had been Ruby's longest-standing habit.

Baekrimjae.

It was a villa Chairman Baek had built strategically to bolster his eldest son's standing.

After installing his son in the Vice Chairmanship, Chairman Baek delegated most of his own authority to him. The world buzzed with the assessment that the Chairman had been reduced to a figurehead — that real power had passed, step by measured step, to his designated successor. And that was exactly how it played out. Chairman Baek chose to withdraw to the countryside and seclude himself behind closed doors.

The theater of stepping away from Seoul carried enormous weight. From then on, no one in the group doubted that the next Chairman of BH Group would be Baek Huhan.

The only thing never made public was the precise location of the Chairman's space for "peaceful retirement in the countryside."

That it was an immense estate hidden in a quiet corner of Chuncheon was known only to the Baek family's inner circle and the live-in staff who worked there.

True to the name he'd chosen — a forest, vast and beautiful — Chairman Baek brought along Wi-seonsaeng, the gardener who had stood beside the Baek family since his youth. Wi-seonsaeng moved in with his wife and granddaughter, settling into a staff annex on the edge of the estate.

It was also the period when everyone was urging Baek Yoon-ah to finally give up. But out of sight was not out of mind — far from it. Fretting that her detestable, infuriating father would forget her — no, forget her son — Yoon-ah had no choice but to follow him into Baekrimjae, dragging her feet every step of the way. With her already-strained husband, she used it as the pretext for a mutually agreed separation.

And so, in a region where they had no roots at all, two children with no prior connection whatsoever met. Within a sprawling, densely wooded estate where outside visitors were severely restricted, they grew up side by side for more than a decade.

The result: Ruby was forever trailing after Haeseo. A result none of the adults who had gathered at Baekrimjae for their various reasons could ever have predicted.

The year he turned sixteen, that endless game of hide-and-seek grew a little easier. From early summer on, Haeseo had taken a passionate interest in growing crops and practically lived in the small flower bed behind the staff annex — a space Wi-seonsaeng had happily set aside for her hobby.

The destination of Ruby's footsteps was a foregone conclusion.

"Ugh, why does this keep falling over?"

Just as I thought. The instant that muttering voice reached his ears, the corners of Ruby's mouth lifted as if by reflex.

He rounded the corner of the red-brick building. There was Haeseo, still in her school uniform, wearing nothing but work gloves, hammering a flimsy plant stake firmly into the ground. Her crisp white summer shirt was smeared here and there with dark brown soil.

Her unaltered skirt fell to her knees, but bent over as she was, the hem had swayed upward, baring the hollow behind her knee. And that spot was, well. Sixteen-year-old Ruby felt his cheeks flare hot in an instant.

The very moment Haeseo moved to plant a knee on the flower bed's brick border, Ruby called out to her.

"Noona."

"Oh. Hey, Ruby, you're home."

Smiling away so easily. She was about to do something dangerous. That tender knee could have scraped raw and bled, easy. And what if someone else had been watching? How could she be so utterly defenseless?

Which is exactly why every inconsequential punk struts up without knowing his place. Ruby strode toward her — and even in his middle school uniform, he stood a full head taller than she did. As he approached, a dark shadow fell over Haeseo.

Looking down at her — eighteen, and still delightfully soft in all the places that counted — he called her noona again. Made me want to say it a hundred more times.

The way the word sat in his mouth before spilling out had its own sweetness to it. The only taste of Wi Haeseo he could reach.

"You'll scrape your knees."

"Huh? Oh — you saw? My cucumber's tilting."

She never wasted words on preamble. Haeseo leaned over and pointed at the cucumber seedlings she'd been proudly raising since June.

The vines had grown respectable by now — they actually looked like a proper crop. Yellow blossoms dotted them here and there.

While Haeseo kept grunting and struggling to drive the stake into the ground, Ruby studied her closely, checking for anything out of the ordinary.

Her eyes darted restlessly, but Wi Haeseo was exactly as she always was. Look at her — those focused eyes fixed only on whatever needed her, those pressed-together lips. If I hadn't already known, I never could have guessed she was about to be confessed to.

The truth was, Ruby had loitered in front of Haeseo's high school gate on the way home that day. Because he had finally gotten his hands on a doll she'd been wanting for two weeks. Not that she'd ever asked him for it directly.

He had happened (sworn to God, purely by chance) to overhear Haeseo on the phone with a friend in the Section 4 garden. She'd been rambling on about regretting not stopping by the claw machines on her way home — about this muscular bear doll she'd glimpsed, down on one knee, holding out a ring.

Such a thing actually existed in this world? It was beyond absurd, but watching Haeseo grumble with such earnest conviction, Ruby had gone straight to the internet.

Bear holding out a ring. Bear kneeling with a ring. Claw machine bear doll with ring. Muscular bear. Ugly bear doll. He searched every phrase he could think of, and still no doll that made him think, this is the one.

Left with no choice, Ruby swept through every arcade and claw machine shop in the downtown area and around Haeseo's school. He'd figured one or two nearby stops would turn it up, so by the time he'd struck out everywhere, he was fuming.

The place he finally found that bear was a random unmanned claw machine shop that had materialized, out of nowhere, in a residential alley. If he hadn't spotted the muscular bear dangling from a backpack while crossing the schoolyard, he'd have suffered a great deal longer.

The instant he saw it, Ruby found himself seizing the wrist of the bag's owner.

Where did you buy that?

Huh? This? Want it? I'll just give it to you.

The classmate Ruby had grabbed — who spun around in shock — and every one of her friends beside her went into a stampeding, shrieking frenzy. It was, after all, Kang Ruby.

Towering head and shoulders above the stunted monkeys around him, handsome enough to put idols to shame, he was a school celebrity with a reputation that spread well beyond campus. And yet, amid all that attention, Ruby almost never gave girls the time of day.

And this Ruby had approached them first, eyes burning with urgency.

The doll's owner scrambled to untie it from her backpack, but he stopped her. The only thing Ruby wanted was information.

And as he sprinted off toward the shop, the girls squealed behind him for a very, very long time.