The Chairman Was You

Monday afternoon.

The Night of Patronage had ended in resounding success. There had even been an unexpected windfall. Thanks to Maestra Chae Eun-mi, Yeo In-ok had won Master Painter Go Tae-san's painting at auction.

They would be floating on cloud nine by now. But that joy wouldn't last. In a few months, they would learn exactly what consequences that painting would bring.

Seol-hee snorted a quiet laugh.

"Did something good happen?"

Ye-jun had struck up a conversation while she was preparing for the meeting.

"If something good's going on, share it with the rest of us."

"It's just... the weather's nice."

"It has been lovely lately. The breeze is nice and cool, too." Ye-jun kept the conversation flowing with practiced ease. "Seol-hee, what did you have for lunch?"

"Kimbap."

"By yourself?"

"Yes."

Even at her curt answer, Ye-jun wore an oddly wistful expression. "Well, that won't do."

He glanced casually around the room, then took a step closer.

"Have lunch with me next time. There's a good Italian place nearby."

His breath brushed her ear, and Seol-hee's body stiffened almost imperceptibly.

Just the two of us?

The decision took only an instant. Seol-hee closed her eyes and broke into a radiant smile.

"Of course! Let's all go get Italian together — the whole team. I can't wait."

Ye-jun's expression wavered subtly.

Just then, Im Team Leader cut in with a grin. "What's this? Italian? I was thinking sundae gukbap. But if Seol-hee's craving it, I suppose we have to."

Im Team Leader had been on cloud nine all morning. After the Night of Patronage, word had it he'd passed along to upper management that Maestra Chae Eun-mi had been enormously helped by Seol-hee — and the department head had even praised him for it. His shoulders were practically puffed to bursting.

"Should Kang Associate come along too?"

Da-yoon stole a glance at Ye-jun, then gave a small nod.

"Good. Not much time left now — let's wrap up the meeting prep." Im Team Leader clapped his hands. "This is the Chairman's first time attending one of our meetings, so everyone stay sharp. You know our motto, right?"

"Take initiative and do it well!" the team chorused before dispersing.

Even through all of it, Ye-jun's gaze clung to Seol-hee, but she pretended not to notice to the very end.

With every preparation complete, Seol-hee took a seat near the screen. While she waited, the events of the Night of Patronage drifted through her mind.

Now that I think of it, that man was there, wasn't he.

She remembered the moment after the auction ended, when they'd been handing out gifts of thanks to the guests. A man looking down at her from the situation room. Every time she encountered him, a strange feeling seized her. Unfamiliar, yet somehow not unfamiliar at all. Unsettling, yet impossible to stop thinking about.

Why did he look at me like that?

Their eyes had held for a long while. If Ye-jun hadn't called her name, she might have stood there staring at him for ages.

Only when Da-yoon sat down beside her did Seol-hee return to the present.

Focus on now.

Just then, the conference room door opened. The employees of Planning Team 1 rose from their seats in unison, and Seol-hee smoothed down her clothes.

Im Team Leader's words flashed through her mind. He'd said the Chairman came from an international think tank, that his questions were so razor-sharp other teams had been put through the wringer for entire meetings. And that once you fell out of the Chairman's favor, it was all over.

A tense hush spread through the conference room. Soon the Chairman entered alongside the secretary-general and the heads of every department. Im Team Leader hurried forward to greet him, and people gravitated naturally toward his center of gravity.

That moment — Seol-hee's grip went slack. The documents cradled in her arms nearly slid to the floor. Her gaze had stopped dead.

It was that man.

'Shoe Guy'?

She almost stopped breathing. At first she'd assumed he was a secretary. But the seat he took was the Chairman's seat.

"Good afternoon. I'm Yoon Ye-jun, Assistant Manager of Planning Team 1. I'll now begin the presentation."

Ye-jun stood before the screen, his voice taut with nerves. The lights went out.

In the darkness, Seol-hee's eyes darted. The man watching the screen. There was no mistake. It was him.

She hid half her face behind her hair.

What... what is going on here?

Emotion flooded in, belated and overwhelming. Before the shock came a strange, bitter sense of betrayal. The man she'd taken for an HR employee — the Chairman of the Shinwol Foundation.

His answer to her question about whether he worked in HR drifted back to her.

'You could say that's mostly what I am.'

What on earth is he really?

Her mind spun rapidly. Then a single memory flashed past — the man she'd met at the Night of Patronage, and Jin Dong-chan. The strange, discordant tension between the two of them.

Could they know each other?

Unease seeped in. And in that instant, a furious voice from the past rose in her memory.

'Those Shinwol Foundation bastards... Do Yi-hyuk is definitely holding a grudge against me. I know it.'

Seol-hee whispered to Da-yoon beside her. "Supervisor, the Chairman's name... what is it?"

Da-yoon gave her an odd look, then wrote it in the margin of her notebook.

Seol-hee drew a deep breath. Her eyes were riveted to those three syllables.

Do Yi-hyuk... It was you.

Her gaze swung toward the man. Graphs and photographs flickered ceaselessly across the white screen, and the light reflected off it lit his face. He happened to lift his head, and their eyes met. Seol-hee quickly turned her gaze back to the screen.

The fact that he was Chairman of the Shinwol Foundation — and the fact that he was entangled with Jin Dong-chan — both shook her to the core. She tried to force her focus onto the presentation, but it was no use. Every nerve in her body was trained on him. She didn't even notice when the presentation ended.

Only when the fluorescent lights in the ceiling blinked back on did Seol-hee come to her senses. Every gaze in the room turned to Do Yi-hyuk. As though the attention didn't inconvenience him in the least, he languidly paged back through the slides.

In the suffocating silence, the hearts of the watching employees began to pound. Seol-hee found herself tensing up along with them.

Yi-hyuk's firmly sealed lips opened a beat late.

"Is this campaign's ultimate goal to improve financial literacy — or social mobility?"

A brief stillness fell. As a program aimed simply at raising financial literacy, it was more than sufficient. But Yi-hyuk was demanding something far more ambitious.

"Assistant Manager Yoon Ye-jun?"

"...Yes, sir!"

"If the goal changes, the entire program structure will need to be rebuilt, won't it?"

Ye-jun hesitated like a man with a retort trapped behind his teeth, then finally answered. "Yes, understood."

"We have no use for a program that wastes budget. Next time, prepare a presentation with a clear direction and solid supporting analysis."

At Yi-hyuk's demand, Im Team Leader bowed his head and promised to do exactly that. But Ye-jun could not hide his frozen expression.

When Yi-hyuk rose from his seat, the officials filed out after him. In an instant, the conference room emptied, and Seol-hee's gaze followed him out of habit.

Once everyone had gone, Im Team Leader clapped Ye-jun on the shoulder. "We can't get by with the same surface-level prep we used to. I hear Planning Team 3 had to submit the same proposal four times before it finally passed."

As they packed up laptops and materials to leave, Ye-jun stood frozen in place. When someone told him to get moving, he said he still had some things to organize and sent the team ahead.

Seol-hee wanted to offer him a few words, but Im Team Leader held her back. "Leave him be. He just needs to stand there a minute, smoke a cigarette, and he'll be fine. Let's head out first."

Im Team Leader, Da-yoon, and Seol-hee closed the conference room door behind them. On the way out, Im Team Leader eyed Seol-hee. "What's the matter with your face, Seol-hee? You're white as a ghost. Feeling unwell?"

Learning Do Yi-hyuk's true identity had left her too rattled to settle. "It's just... the mood in there was so heavy, I think the nerves got to me."

"It'll become routine. We'll all just have to work harder from here on out."

"Yes."

And with that, they made their way back to the office. Even as she walked, the image of the unfamiliar man in the conference room kept surfacing before Seol-hee's eyes.

When she got home, Seol-hee ate dinner and even took a short walk with her father. Song-geun collapsed into sleep the moment he'd bathed, and Seol-hee opened a book — but the pages refused to turn.

Yi-hyuk, the man she'd seen at the office, kept surfacing in her thoughts, scattering her focus.

"Ugh, I can't concentrate."

Seol-hee quietly drew her phone over and opened her call log. She stared down at his contact entry.

"That Do Yi-hyuk... so it was this Do Yi-hyuk."

Do Yi-hyuk had been the perpetual object of Dong-chan's jealousy and admiration — the man who could shatter his self-esteem at will. She'd never faced him properly herself, so his face was hard to recall, but she clearly remembered the reactions that clung to Dong-chan like an accessory whenever the name Do Yi-hyuk came up.

It had been a few years after the wedding, if she remembered right. Dong-chan's friends had called to tell him that Do Yi-hyuk had returned to Korea after a long absence.

'F*** me, am I Do Yi-hyuk's lapdog? A dog that comes running the second you say he's back?'

Dong-chan had hung up in a fit of temper. But the very next day, he'd been on the phone with a friend, asking one question after another about Yi-hyuk. How was he living, was he staying in the US for good, what had he worn back, did he still drink — he'd dredged up the pettiest, most trivial details.

She could never tell whether he loved the man or hated him.

Later, Seol-hee came to understand: Dong-chan despised Do Yi-hyuk, and at the very same time, measured his own life against him.

Before she knew it, Seol-hee had her chin propped in her hand, recalling the faint figure of him in her memories of the past.

"Come to think of it, I think he was at the wedding, too."

The day she'd walked into that wedding hall, blissfully ignorant of the tragic married life waiting for her. A memory from that day flickered past. After the ceremony, when the friends had gathered off to the side for photos, one of Dong-chan's friends had called out to the man slipping away from the hall.

'Yi-hyuk, come get in the picture!'

'Leave him alone — would Do Yi-hyuk take photos? Him just showing up should be an honor. Wait, but what's he doing here? He's not even close with Dong-chan.'

Considering the relationship between the two men, it had been a strangely mismatched occasion for him to attend.

"I did think it was an odd relationship."

Then, abruptly, she remembered that moment in the corridor of the Night of Patronage — Do Yi-hyuk and Jin Dong-chan facing each other down. The memory of that stilted atmosphere raised a sudden question, and Seol-hee knit her brow.

"Then why... did they pretend not to know each other?"

Nothing about it made any sense.