A Proposal, Not a Blind Date

Crack!

Jung-hee's palm came down without mercy across Sa-ra's pale, smooth cheek.

Crack!

Before she could even catch her breath, another vicious slap fell upon her reddening face.

"Mom……."

Struck again and again without understanding why, Sa-ra clutched her burning cheek, tears welling in her eyes. But Jung-hee, her fury far from spent, seized her daughter's hair and wrenched it without hesitation.

"Ah! It hurts! Mom, it hurts!"

"It hurts? You botch the job that badly and now it hurts?"

Only through the scalp-tearing pain did Sa-ra finally grasp that her mother knew everything.

She dropped to her knees at once, pressing her palms together and groveling shamelessly.

"You can't even fool one stupid girl properly, and this is the mess you make?"

"I… Min Yun-seul showed up out of nowhere. Without a word of warning, she just barged in. So I hid in the closet, but… she knew, like some kind of ghost, and opened the door herself."

Sa-ra's face drained white as she lifted only her eyes, watching her mother's expression carefully.

"I told her Woo Tae-kyung was going to win her back."

"Win her back, my foot. That girl's scared out of her mind after seeing what she saw—do you think she'd hand her heart over twice? Enough. You wrap things up with Tae-kyung, and do it cleanly."

Woo Tae-kyung was worthless now—he was not the man Yun-seul had set her heart on.

At Jung-hee's words, Sa-ra's jet-black eyes wavered helplessly.

"But what if I do, and then Tae-kyung oppa tells Yun-seul everything?"

"That's exactly why I said wrap it up properly. Leave him hoping you'll throw him a few scraps later on—just enough to keep his mouth shut."

When Sa-ra pressed her lips together and hesitated, Jung-hee's eyebrows shot up savagely.

In an instant, the air in the room froze solid.

"What? Don't tell me you've actually fallen for that piece of trash in the meantime?"

"No, it's not that. I was just… worried, that's all……."

"Come to think of it, you wanted him because he was Yun-seul's man, didn't you? He was never your type anyway."

"…Right."

When Sa-ra gave a small nod, Jung-hee let out a quiet sigh and turned away.

"From now on, you don't raise your voice at Yun-seul—you grovel to her. The Woo Tae-kyung insurance policy is gone now. And that sly little thing has already met her birth father, I hear."

"What? Already? But… who is he?"

Sa-ra had been curious about Yun-seul's birth father for a long time.

All this while, Jung-hee had said only that he was a man of staggering wealth, never once revealing who he actually was.

Just how rich does a man have to be for Mom to act like this?

A sour, twisting jealousy coiled in Sa-ra's stomach.

She and Yun-seul had both been born the daughters of unmarried mothers—that much was the same. But her own birth father, Jung-hee always said, was nothing but a penniless drifter, hardly even worth the name of rich.

And yet Yun-seul, who had always stood above her, had a father who was a man of means on top of everything else. It made Sa-ra want to claw her own skin off with envy.

"You don't need to know."

"…Okay."

Sa-ra answered weakly.

After Jung-hee left the room and Sa-ra was alone, eyes steeped in venom brimmed with tears.

Clutching her swollen cheek, she ground her teeth.

"Mom shouldn't be doing this to me. She doesn't even know what I know……."

Deep, deep in the dark, fragments of memory she had buried against her will began to squirm, struggling to claw their way back to life.

But Sa-ra clenched her jaw and forced them down.

Even if her mother had laid hands on her because of Yun-seul—Even if she was heartless—Sa-ra still loved her. For now.

On Sunday evening, Do Lee-gun visited the ancestral estate in Seongbuk-dong.

Since returning to Korea, there was one commitment he had never once skipped: the family dinner they all shared together once a week.

The food laid out elegantly across the long table was immaculate, every dish mouthwatering in appearance—yet the atmosphere around it hung as brittle and unstable as a sheet of thin ice.

For a long while, not a single word was exchanged. The only sound was silver spoons clinking against porcelain.

At last, his father Do Myung-jin sent a glare simmering with anger toward Lee-gun, then glanced sideways at his wife, Park Se-rin, gauging her mood.

He wanted to bark at his son then and there, but mindful of a wife who considered mealtimes sacrosanct, he swallowed it down.

The moment dinner finally ended, Myung-jin fired off the question he'd been holding in reserve all evening.

"Do Lee-gun. Do you actually intend to get married, or not?"

"If I didn't, would I be wasting my precious weekends showing up to these blind dates, Father? Surely not."

"Tch……."

The insolent son answered without a hitch, posture immaculate, not a hair out of place—and Myung-jin's brow furrowed deep with irritation.

"You're not just going through the motions to save face in front of the family elders, are you? Tell me the truth."

It had been three months now of meetings with the most eligible daughters of the family's circle, and Lee-gun had rejected every single one without so much as a second date.

His eldest son Lee-hyuk, once the pride of the household, had already blindsided them by declaring he would never marry.

'You told me I only had to show up, Father.'

Then, past his mid-thirties, unsavory rumors had begun to circulate, and even the blind dates dried up entirely. Lee-hyuk remained alone to this day, now past forty.

Circumstances being what they were, Myung-jin had no choice but to pin his hopes on his second son.

And now Lee-gun was turning every match away just as stubbornly as his brother had. Myung-jin's insides were burning black with frustration.

He could not simply stand by and watch the Do family line end like this.

"This is the person I'd spend my whole life with, Father. You can't marry someone just because the conditions on paper look right."

"You little—"

Just as Myung-jin drew breath to shout at his son for hiding behind pretty excuses, Se-rin gave his sleeve a gentle, deliberate tug.

"What's the matter, dear? The way I see it, Lee-gun takes after you exactly. You were just the same, weren't you? Which number was I, out of all your blind dates?"

"Honey, why do you keep bringing up things that are long past——"

The tiger who had been growling at his son a moment before turned into a docile lamb the instant he faced Se-rin.

Watching her husband, the corners of Se-rin's eyes curved softly.

"What I'm saying, darling, is that it's thanks to you turning down all those women that we found each other."

Myung-jin's father, Do Ik-heon, had served as Chief Justice—the head of the entire judiciary—and had frowned upon marriage alliances with business families.

And so the blind dates had come one after another from daughters of deep-rooted scholarly, legal, and political dynasties.

Myung-jin had rejected them all in turn, declaring none of them to his liking, until the list was finally exhausted and the turn passed, as a compromise, to Se-rin—the second daughter of the chaebol NE Group.

He had fallen for her at first sight, and the marriage proceeded without a hitch.

It had been an arranged match, yes—but for Myung-jin, who had never known so much as a proper relationship before her, Se-rin had been his first love.

Hmph. Myung-jin cleared his throat and carefully, tenderly clasped his wife's hand.

"Keep meeting them diligently, with the intention of settling it within the year. And don't go setting off sparks toward your mother for no reason."

The meaning of "sparks" was crystal clear.

Even in retirement, spending most of his days in the Mediterranean his wife adored, the patriarch had not relaxed his marriage pressure one bit.

That was why the devoted family man Myung-jin was pressuring Lee-gun in his father's stead.

"I really don't mind, you know……."

Se-rin murmured the words softly, meeting Myung-jin's eyes.

The moment her gaze touched him, the stern lines of Myung-jin's face melted away like snow in spring.

Can it really be that good……?

Lee-gun click his tongue at the saccharine spectacle unfolding before him.

And in that very moment, a woman surfaced in his mind.

Min Yun-seul.

Just like his parents there, he pictured himself sitting beside her, the two of them looking at each other and trading jokes. The image was impossibly vivid.

"I'll make it unmistakably clear, Father—I fully intend to marry."

"You think I don't know you torpedoed this weekend's blind date, you brat?"

"Ah… that."

"'Ah, that.' You—!"

Just as Myung-jin's temper was about to boil over, Lee-gun twisted the knife one turn further, seizing his father by the back of the neck.

"I won't be attending any more blind dates. Stop arranging them."

"There it is! So your true colors finally come out. Honey, look at this. I told you this boy would pull something like this."

Gripping her husband's hand tightly to quell his rising anger, Se-rin turned to Lee-gun and asked, calm and level.

"Son, is that the truth of it? What on earth is going on in that head of yours?"

It wasn't that he'd declared himself a confirmed bachelor like his older brother—he did intend to marry, but refused the blind dates. Se-rin pressed him for what he truly meant.

And Lee-gun dropped his bombshell.

"I received a proposal a few days ago."

"What?"

Not only Se-rin but Myung-jin beside her—even Lee-hyuk—turned to stare at him in open disbelief.

Yet Lee-gun himself remained perfectly composed, rolling Yun-seul's words over in his mind as the corner of his mouth curled upward.

'I don't… need a boyfriend. I need a husband.'

If that wasn't a proposal, what was?

She'd told him to skip the dating and go straight to marriage.

With a smile playing on his lips, Lee-gun delivered one final line to his stunned family, calm as ever.

"I've already had a proposal. If I went on a blind date with someone else now, how heartbroken do you think she'd be?"