His Call, Her Return
Myeong Won-chul had called Woo-hee.
He had learned of her sudden return to Korea. Whether Myeong Eun-ju had relayed the news or Ki Seok-ju had, it scarcely mattered. A flicker of curiosity crossed her mind, but it burned out quickly; it was not worth lingering on. She had expected a scolding for returning without warning, yet the welcome she received was unexpectedly tender.
“Welcome back, Woo-hee. You’ve traveled a long way. You must be tired.”
She sat beside him in the study of Myeong Won-chul, where antique furniture in deep crimson tones filled the space. He had endured a long journey and offered her a rare cup of tea, smiling as he did so. While she had been in Korea, he had arranged a place for her to rest comfortably.
He was in the middle of negotiations with a foreign fund holding two percent of CK Group. If they closed favorably, their combined shares would surpass twenty percent. Everything that had led them this far, he insisted, was thanks to her.
“Indeed. You met Woo Je-hyeok, didn’t you? Seeing him in person—how did you find him? Rumor said he was extraordinary.”
The snake-like eyes of Myeong Won-chul curved long and gleaming with hunger. Woo-hee knew that look all too well.
“Just… trash.”
Won-chul burst into laughter. Woo-hee lowered her gaze and inhaled the fragrant steam of the tea. The warmth radiating from the hands that cradled the cup was soothing. She stared blankly at the red petals floating on the murky liquid.
“I am ashamed to admit it, but there is still one final mission I require your help with. Perhaps this will be the last task you undertake this year—and the most important.”
He had probably foreseen this outcome from the very moment he welcomed her.
“It won’t be much longer, Woo-hee. Truly, not much longer.”
The long preamble suggested the task would prove difficult. Woo-hee selected the words Myeong Won-chul would find most pleasing from the cluster of sentiments swirling in her mind.
“Whatever you command. What reason could I have for hesitating to bring my father down?”
“Indeed… you are right.”
Won-chul nodded, yet a shadow crossed his face.
“But, Woo-hee, are you certain there is no change in your resolve? Are you truly prepared for this?”
His eyes sharpened now, glinting like the scales of a snake. Woo-hee offered a faint smile.
“You seem to blame me for not warning you sooner about Ha-rin’s engagement. I admit I was careless for a moment, but you know the truth. Beyond bringing my father down, there is nothing else I desire.”
Won-chul nodded, lowering his eyes. Yet he lingered, deliberately avoiding her gaze. Woo-hee saw it clearly: in that instant his narrowed eyes shone with triumph.
Sweat began to bead on the palms still gripping the cup. While she waited for his next words, she discreetly wiped the dampness from her sleeve.
Soon Won-chul raised his head again.
“Woo-hee.”
‘Shall we sleep together?’
The moment her name was spoken, she could not explain why the crude offer from moments earlier resurfaced in her mind.
***
She occasionally revisited the beginning of everything.
Tracing memories backward, the day her father’s face filled the newspaper with full-page prominence returned to her.
“CK Chairman Jang Dae-soo, swift remarriage. The century’s grand affair—or perhaps the century’s love?” The headline had sounded like that.
That morning her mother sat on the living-room floor, one knee bent, staring fixedly at the article. No matter how loudly Woo-hee called, her mother never turned.
Woo-hee watched her mother’s bowed head and curved back for a long moment before looking away. She pretended not to have read the article. No words of comfort or curse against her father rose in her throat.
She tied her hair, dressed in her school uniform, and prepared breakfast.
“I’ll be back soon, Mom.”
Her mother gave no response. Still bent over, she continued gazing at her father’s photo in the newspaper.
Heat swelled inside her until it filled her throat, yet the young Woo-hee swallowed it down. The mother’s refusal to let go of the past was what she despised most.
In truth, there were many other things she disliked about her mother.
The mother who tore at her father’s hair, hurled vulgar curses, bit his limbs like a beast.
The mother whose lips bore bite marks and who trailed in disheveled hair, still crawling on all fours like an animal, clutching at her father’s legs and refusing to release them.
The mother who begged for love in a desperate, pitiable voice, asking how she could be more loved than the woman before her.
That woman was not the mother Woo-hee knew. The mother she knew had been gentle, graceful, innocent, occasionally strict yet always compassionate and generous. A beastly mother like this one did not belong to the woman she remembered.
Since the day she heard her father’s confession of loving another woman, her mother had changed.
At first she would switch her stance on divorce a dozen times a day, but one impulsive day she stamped the divorce papers. Then, face twisted in fury, she screamed at her father.
“Yes, go live happily with her! I and my daughter will disappear on our own—go see how well you live!”
She had shouted until her voice cracked, then granted the divorce her father had longed for.
She moved the family to Jeju Island, the farthest place from Seoul, and changed Woo-hee’s surname to her own. She even changed the name she and her father had chosen for their daughter.
Leaving her father behind that day, she had actually been waiting for him.
“Jo-gang-ji-chae,” she had said to someone once, a phrase she no longer remembered. “They never stay gone. Even if they shake for a moment, they always return. If you wait, they’ll come. Even if you’re far away… the wound that aches deepest is still the place you came from. In the end, they all come back…”
She remembered her mother murmuring those words.
Her mother had several ways to torment the father who had betrayed her. Several ways to drain his blood. Her maternal uncle, a lawyer, had shown her the methods; together they had tried them, but her mother always hesitated in the end.
How… how could you do it to me, Dad…
Even after changing her own name, her mother still called her Jang Jae-yi, not Sun Woo-hee.
Woo-hee understood the meaning behind those words.
She believed her father would return. She did not want to inflict such pain on the father who would come back. The grief of being betrayed and still hated was too terrifying.
By moving to Jeju and changing her daughter’s name, she had thought her father would eventually regret it and change his heart.
Woo-hee had found her mother foolish. Her father would not return. She hoped he would return to the mother she remembered.
In the newspaper, her father laughed brightly beside another woman, his arm gently around her shoulders. She wished her mother could have seen it and awakened, but instead her mother had hanged herself in the Jeju house. The image of her mother hanging motionless above, eyes never closing, remained etched in Woo-hee’s mind.
She looked even farther back.
Her mother’s private tutor—a handsome, poor university student she had loved. The mother who had married her father without her grandfather’s permission because she was carrying her. The mother who had worked tirelessly to win her grandfather’s favor, helping her father at her company and constantly lecturing him so he would not disappoint. The father who had remained silent out of fear, even as his grandfather suffered a stroke and suddenly became chairman of the group. The father who had urged her to demand shares, claiming that without them no one would respect him as chairman, that employees whispered he was a kept son or a panty chairman, and that a panty chairman had no authority.
The mother who had given him everything, believing the man who said he loved her. The mother who had loved her father too much and never suspected the affair he had been having long before she knew.
Mother.
Mother.
Mother.
After her death, her father had sent Woo-hee to America. She had known it was not a simple university matter but another abandonment. She had known.
The man who came to her when she was left alone and abandoned was Myeong Won-chul.