Just Take It (16)
A grandfather who had served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
A father who was a former Supreme Court justice and the head of Domyeong, one of the nation's largest law firms.
A mother who was the second daughter of the powerhouse NE Group and director of the NE Art Center.
An older brother, twelve years his senior, who had passed the judicial examination at the youngest age on record and was serving as a prosecutor at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office.
With a pedigree spanning both the legal world and high finance, Lee-gun was a monster among monsters — a man who had shattered his own brother's record for the youngest judicial exam pass almost as an afterthought.
A life in which every scrap of the world's power and wealth landed in his hands the moment he was born, where glory and acclaim were guaranteed so long as he simply walked the path laid out before him.
There had been a moment when that life — the one everyone envied — drained of all its color in an instant.
The day he had personally slammed the trash who ruined his beloved brother's life down into the gutter, he learned the truth: the person who had driven his brother into hell was none other than his seven-year-old self.
From that moment on, Lee-gun's brilliantly Technicolor life lost its color.
It no longer shone.
It was in a general-education film elective — the breathing hole he had clawed for himself back then — that he met Yun-seul.
Only in the moments he spent shooting a short film with her could he briefly escape the suffocating guilt that squeezed the air from his lungs.
'Wow... so this is how you can direct a scene.'
'This shot feels so much warmer than it did in the script.'
'How did you even think of this angle? Are you a genius or what?'
When he was with her, he could breathe.
His heart pounded like it would burst, his blood boiled hot.
That was why his gaze kept drifting back to her, why she occupied his every thought.
'Wow... I think I'm about to cry. How are you this good at acting?'
'The boom mic was heavy, wasn't it? You worked so hard. Here, drink some water first.'
He even felt jealous of the kindness Yun-seul directed at people other than himself.
The woman who bustled from one corner of the set to another in plain slacks and an oversized T-shirt, her face bare of makeup, shimmered to a degree that seemed almost impossible to believe.
When Yun-seul, with those clear, childlike eyes, smiled brightly inside the frame of his viewfinder, Lee-gun felt — for the first time in his life — the sensation of his heart dropping out from under him.
'What is there even to agonize over? Just confess. Don't tell me the great Do Lee-gun is worried he might get rejected?'
Right. He was.
Because from Yun-seul, he couldn't sense even the tiniest flicker of selfishness directed at him.
Before long, Lee-gun understood why.
It happened at the drinking party they all shared after wrapping the final shoot.
'Tae-kyung, over here!'
The instant Lee-gun saw Yun-seul running toward another man, her face lit up in a radiant smile, he stopped dead in his tracks.
'What are the odds of running into you here?'
'I know... what an amazing coincidence.'
'I thought I'd only get to see you on weekends.... It feels like an early birthday present.'
The moment he saw that smile, he knew.
Knew that the smile Yun-seul showed him had never contained a single grain of selfish desire.
Knew that the smile she gave with selfish desire mixed in was dazzling beyond a different dimension entirely.
And so his clumsy, green-as-grass feelings were stamped with a period before they ever truly began.
But they left behind a blazing ember, buried deep in his chest.
And the one who noticed it faster than anyone else was his brother.
'Live free. Do what you actually want to do.'
That gave him a plausible excuse to leave his brother's side — a clean, natural one.
Lee-gun left Korea without a moment's hesitation.
In America, he turned away from directing and toward the business of overseeing works — production and investment.
The suppressed, feverish emotions he had never once gotten to pour out became the tinder that set his talent ablaze.
He had the discerning eye to recognize fine works still in their raw state, and he unearthed promising talent faster than anyone.
Even works that had seemed ordinary took on a singular life the moment his hands touched them.
That unrivaled ability carried him — at just twenty-eight — to the helm of Diflix Korea.
After returning to Korea, Lee-gun vaguely assumed that one day, he would cross paths with Yun-seul again.
But that chance arrived far sooner than he expected.
The forgotten ember in his chest began flaunting its existence once more.
The moment he learned that the seat beside her was empty, his usual ice-cold reason simply short-circuited.
That was how his sincerity tumbled out of his mouth before it ever reached his brain.
'Should I just be honest? Tell her I'm making a move on Min Yun-seul.'
The moment the words left him, regret over the recklessness of it flooded in.
He had assumed, naturally, that she would refuse.
But Yun-seul's answer, cutting through the silence, shattered every expectation he had.
'I don't... need a boyfriend. What I need is a husband.'
Seeing the stunned look on Lee-gun's face, Yun-seul blurted out a quick thank-you for the ride and scurried out of the car.
Thank God they were in front of her house — if they'd been in a moving vehicle, she might have thrown herself out of it.
"I've lost my mind."
Why on earth had something like that popped out of her mouth?
She should have added something like, Of course, purely as a management matter for my screenwriter, I'd even go so far as marriage if needed.
Then he would have taken it as a joke.
Instead, she had fled the scene like a criminal escaping arrest.
Should I just be honest? Tell her I'm making a move on Min Yun-seul.
The moment she'd heard those words, Yun-seul had thought: I want this man to be my husband.
There was no guarantee that a second Woo Tae-kyung, or a third, wouldn't appear in her future.
If she had to suspect every single person she met of ulterior motives and keep them all at arm's length, was there any reason to exclude the perfect answer key named Do Lee-gun?
The only person who had reached out his hand to her before she died. The person showing her kindness even now. The one person she couldn't bring herself to suspect might be a trap laid by Min Jung-hee.
There was only one such man — Do Lee-gun.
And so she had thought: I want that man in the seat beside me — the very seat Min Jung-hee tried to stuff Woo Tae-kyung into.
That wish had spilled out of her mouth without ever passing through her brain.
Still, how on earth had something like that just... slipped out on its own?
How baffled must he have been to hear it?
Drowning in a wave of belated embarrassment, Yun-seul beat her pillow to a pulp.
The Chairman's office, Hansan Group.
Chairman Jung Yoon-joon sat frozen like a stone statue, the documents Chief Secretary Hyun Jong-hyuk had reported on mere moments ago still clutched in his hand.
After seeing Yun-seul at the Hansan Media Awards ceremony, he had ordered Secretary Hyun to look into her background.
And there, emblazoned across the very first page of the report he now held, were three characters he had spent a lifetime steeping in regret and longing.
Park Seul-hye.
The woman who had left his side so ruthlessly had told him, unmistakably, that she had married another man and borne his child.
Yet the documents stated that she had given birth alone and raised the child by herself, until a car accident claimed her life.
After that, Min Jung-hee — the director of the shelter for unwed mothers where Seul-hye had been staying — had adopted Yun-seul and raised her as her own.
But what drove Chairman Jung into deeper shock than even the death of the woman he loved was the line at the bottom of the page: Yun-seul's age.
Twenty-three.
If Seul-hye had left him pregnant and given birth, the child she carried would have turned exactly twenty-three this year.
Thud. The documents slipped from his nerveless fingers and fell to the desk.
It felt as though someone had swung a heavy blunt object into the back of his skull.
The Chairman ran a hand down his face, his features twisted in confusion.
Could Yun-seul be my child?
And if she truly was — why would Seul-hye have lied about building a family with another man?
"Seul-hye... why, in God's name—"
Had he been so powerless back then, so unworthy of trust, that she'd had to bury the truth this completely?
When the thought reached that point, the Chairman's breathing grew ragged.
Because he hadn't wanted to lose both his mother and the woman he loved, he had only ever wished Seul-hye would simply endure and hold on at his side.
Perhaps, in places he knew nothing of, far crueler threats had been pressed upon her.
Perhaps it was that which had driven her to decide, once and for all, to leave him forever.
"Hah...."
A heavy sigh escaped the Chairman's lips.
He wanted to ask for the truth — but his mother had passed from this world years ago.
Hot tears slid down the Chairman's wrinkled cheeks.
When he had found Seul-hye again, he never should have let her walk away like that.
The sense of betrayal — that she had become another man's wife — had made him turn his back on the spot.
Afterward, he had spent long years drowning in drink, gnawing himself hollow, until at last his mother's fury forced him into an arranged marriage.
The woman fate had bound him to was his wife of today, Jin Seo-yeon.
She was gracious, and she was good.
But there had been no love between them, and no child had ever come.
The Chairman pressed the intercom with a trembling hand and called for Secretary Hyun.
"You called, Chairman?"
"Arrange a meal with screenwriter Min Yun-seul. As soon as humanly possible."
Secretary Hyun's mind instantly filled with the Chairman's schedule — packed solid through next week.
But he couldn't bring himself to say it.
Because he had read the raw desperation brimming in the Chairman's eyes.