The Runaway Wife
Husband.
The word felt foreign, unplaceable. At the mere presence of Yu-gam — dredging up the marriage she had fought so hard to erase five years ago — Jae-kyung swayed with a dizziness that bordered on convulsion.
It had been a divorce, plain and simple. A marriage that was over. In the ten months their contract had run its course, she had never once seen his face. So why now? Why would her ex-husband surface out of nowhere — and for what possible reason?
Min-ho, who had been closely studying her reaction, went wide-eyed, his brow knotting.
"Your husband? Jae-kyung. Do you know this man?"
Even pressed like that, she couldn't bring herself to answer.
Perhaps it was the strangely familiar way he moved, or the ghost of déjà vu clinging to him — her memory held nothing, and yet her body had reacted first, trembling in fine, involuntary shivers.
She couldn't tear her eyes from Yu-gam. It was the first time she had ever seen him.
He looked to be in his mid-twenties — her own age, maybe? Eyes that pulled you under as if you were gazing into the deep sea, a nose bridge carved clean over flawlessly smooth skin, lips with a quiet sensuality. She had grown sick of handsome faces long ago — her father's outshone any celebrity's — and no man had ever once made her waver. And yet here she was, staring at that cold, statue-carved face as if spellbound by something.
He's probably just a typical con man. All glitter on the surface, nothing underneath.
Ashamed of herself for gaping, Jae-kyung cleared her throat and dropped her voice low.
"I'm afraid there's been some misunderstanding. I've never met this person before in my life."
Yu-gam spat out a short laugh, as if her sheer nerve had left him breathless. Then, without asking anyone's leave, he dropped into the seat beside her.
Jae-kyung's body recoiled on instinct, fleeing the unfamiliar man.
"Looks like you're in the middle of a proposal. You ought to know a woman's past before you do that. This one took the money and bolted before her contract was even finished."
A woman who ran away?
For one instant, Jae-kyung's heart dropped like a stone. She clenched her trembling hands into fists.
"Seo Jae-i. Five years should be plenty long enough for running, don't you think?"
After divorcing at twenty, she had traded the name Seo Jae-i for Seo Jae-kyung. Aside from her father, only her oldest friends ever called her by the name she'd been born with — and yet this man had just spoken it without a flicker of hesitation.
No. Don't tell me — when Dad fell victim to that phishing scam a few months ago, did his personal information leak out with everything else?
She looked again, eyes narrowed with suspicion, at the man seated beside her. It felt as though everyone in the restaurant was sneaking glances her way — not just Min-ho.
"I don't know who you are, but that's quite enough."
Jae-kyung seized Yu-gam's arm as if begging him, desperate to stop him from invoking the marriage that was already dead.
His frosty gaze fixed on her, relentless.
"Fine. I'll stop here, if that's what Seo Jae-kyung wants. The rest we'll settle outside. My runaway wife and I have a great deal to discuss."
His hand closed around her wrist — the one barely clinging to the tail of his suit.
He wasn't even gripping her tightly, and yet at his glacial touch, every ounce of strength drained from her body. She had wiped it all from her memory completely. Still, beneath her wrist, a hazy sensation she'd forgotten came smoldering back, creeping up her skin.
Five years ago.
Her heart slammed like something deranged — exactly as it had on the day she'd been cast out, lashed by sheets of driving rain.
"Min-ho, one moment. ...I'll step out and come right back."
Jae-kyung moved to rise, urgent now.
"Say it here. Jae-kyung! The marriage — it isn't true, is it? What contract?"
Across the table, Min-ho watched her with bewildered eyes, pushing up his glasses as he pressed her anxiously.
"That I'm divorced... is true. I'm sorry. I should have told you from the very beginning."
"You're a divorcée?"
Min-ho, who had been watching the exchange with razor attention, shot up from his seat.
Before the two of them, both lost in confusion, Yu-gam drew papers and a business card from the inside pocket of his suit and held them out.
"Not a divorcée — a married woman. If you won't take my word for it, the documents will speak for themselves."
And there, on the marriage certificate, were the names and signatures of Do Yu-gam and Seo Jae-i.
"We married five years ago. As you can see — spouse, Do Yu-gam."
Jae-kyung, combing through the card and papers he'd set down, felt her fingertips shudder as though her breath might stop.
"That marriage is over. I signed the papers. I finished it — I know I did."
"The filing was never accepted, so as you can see, the divorce is void. And I came to offer you a position as secretary to the chairman's office."
No matter how frantically she protested, Yu-gam didn't waver an inch. He simply said what he had come to say.
"A secretary? What on earth is that supposed to mean?"
"Think of it as a change of post."
The man who had introduced himself, preposterously, as both her ex-husband and the foundation's chairman let his insolent gaze sweep over Min-ho and Jae-kyung in turn.
She had certainly received notice from the vice principal that her contract might not last out. There was no conceivable reason for a foundation's chairman to appear in person to hire a one-semester contract teacher as his secretary.
Don't tell me...
If he's the newly appointed chairman — did he come because of that post slandering the foundation, the one the vice principal mentioned earlier? First the penalty fee, and now a lawsuit?
Min-ho's eyes darted between the documents and Jae-kyung's bleached face, and his expression crumpled, black with fury.
"That's absurd! I'm an advisor to the Eui-tae Foundation — who the hell are you supposed to be?"
Min-ho slammed his fist against the table, hurling the challenge at the man calling himself its chairman.
"Oh? An advisor to the Eui-tae Foundation, is it? I see Seo Jae-kyung has been keeping company with people connected to the foundation as well."
Yu-gam's brows drew together as he aimed the words at Jae-kyung — the look of a husband interrogating an unfaithful wife.
As Min-ho dragged a hand down his slackened face, the phone in his grip began to shriek like something convulsing.
"Your patients seem to be looking for you. Why don't you head to the hospital first?"
Legs crossed, watching it all with lazy amusement, Yu-gam tipped his chin at Min-ho — a small, unhurried gesture telling him to answer his phone already.
"Min-ho, you have a call. I think it's the hospital — you should take it."
"Hah... Why would the hospital matter right now?"
The ringtone, showing no intention whatsoever of stopping, jangled on clamorously.
"Haah — damn it."
Scrubbing a hand through his hair, Min-ho checked his missed calls and messages, then looked at Jae-kyung.
"Jae-kyung. We'll talk again later."
"I'm sorry. Later... I'll explain everything."
However many times they'd met, for Min-ho — a man living his first romance — a scene like this could only leave a foul taste. Of course he was angry.
He leveled one last frosty glare at Yu-gam.
"And you — ex-husband, current husband, whatever you claim to be, it doesn't matter. Jae-kyung is going to marry me, so keep that in mind."
Yu-gam gave a shrug of his broad shoulders and flicked the certificate with one finger — tap, tap.
"Oh, I'll remember. I'm rather fond of doing things by the law, you see."
After Min-ho left the restaurant, the ring case sat between Yu-gam and Jae-kyung — open, abandoned, forlorn.
Yu-gam studied the ring with perfect calm, as if nothing at all had happened.
"Did you run off because you coveted a cheap trinket like this? You took money for your first marriage too. You really never did break the habit."
So much time had passed that she had forgotten — but that trademark cynical lilt, that low-pitched voice, was stirring something awake in some corner of Jae-kyung's memory, piece by piece.
"Honestly. If you're the chairman of the Eui-tae Foundation, kindly refrain from personal remarks."
Jae-kyung bent over the business card and the documents he'd handed her, studying every line. Yu-gam, for his part, stared unblinkingly at her face glinting beneath the lights.
"Seo Jae-kyung. I have never once forgotten my wife. On paper, the two of us never even parted. Did you really think changing your name would keep you hidden from me?"
"By what right are you looking for me? Write up the divorce papers again."
Yu-gam gazed down at her sitting there, white as ash, and murmured low.
"Today, we start over. I wanted to see — what my runaway wife looked like. And you wanted to see me too, didn't you?"
Jae-kyung doubted her own ears. Surely she hadn't heard that correctly.
He's on some kind of psychiatric medication — that's what the live-in staff used to say. Have his delusions hardened so completely that he came looking for the wrong woman entirely?
On the morning she had signed the divorce papers, her husband made himself brutally clear — that having her near him disgusted him — and he had thrown her out before the contract term was even finished.
With trembling fingertips, Jae-kyung clicked the ring case shut. She apologized to Min-ho, who had to be badly shaken, and slipped the little box into her bag — she would have to return it.
Yu-gam watched her every movement with languid eyes, then let out a soft, scoffing laugh.
"Five years apart, and you're looking slicker than ever. I always knew you were shameless, but — dump your husband, run away, then so adorably stage a sham marriage with some other man. You really are a talent."
Jae-kyung squeezed her eyes shut, swallowing down everything she wanted to throw back at him.
"And how am I supposed to believe you're my husband? Papers like that can be forged a hundred different ways."
"...Proof, then."
The gaze Yu-gam fixed on her carried a peculiar familiarity — strange enough to raise the hair on her arms with déjà vu.
"Shall I tell you how, every time I held you, this ice-block body of mine melted scalding hot? Or about the thick little mole beside your right breast? Shall I go on?"
"...That's enough. Stop it."
The married life she had buried came surging back, and shame scorched through her. Jae-kyung's body flushed hot all over again, as though she'd come down with a fever.
"Still burning up, I see."
The hand of the man beside her drifted toward her forehead, and she flinched backward out of its reach.
"I'll be... going ahead now."
"Don't. Come out with me. As it happens, there's a staff dinner tonight — I'll be needing my secretary."
"A staff dinner? You need an entertainment secretary who suits your tastes?"