The Chairman's Call

"Baek Kang-ho stopped by, you say?"

Ji-ae arrived at the bazaar later than Mu-young had expected. By then the event was all but wrapped up—she might as well have come just to stamp her seal on it.

The star of the show always makes her entrance last, Hye-sook quipped, tossing the remark Mu-young's way before vanishing with the staff from her own office. As usual, the cleanup fell to Mu-young alone.

As she loaded boxes and checked that nothing had been left behind, Assemblywoman Min drifted aimlessly around her—an unmistakable sign that she had something to say. Mu-young was not the sort of aide who hovered and fussed over her boss's moods the way others did. Min herself liked to preach a flat, horizontal office culture, and on that front, the two of them saw eye to eye.

"She said she happened to be passing by and stopped in."

Mu-young replied in passing as she tucked in the last item and shut the trunk. She knew perfectly well that the assemblywoman had already heard the whole story from someone else—that was precisely why she'd come over. Even so, she saw no reason to volunteer the truth.

"Is that so? Her schedule had her somewhere else today… Well, how curious." Ji-ae let the words trail off with a faintly meaningful smile, leaving room for more. Mu-young understood, of course. From Min's position, it was natural to feel hostility toward Baek Kang-ho, the rising star of the ruling party. The two of them had gone head-to-head on a terrestrial debate program not long ago, and the aftershocks were still rippling through.

Given all that, Kang-ho showing up out of nowhere at a Citizens' Party bazaar was bound to raise eyebrows—and suspicion. Especially since, word had it, he'd met Mu-young separately in the lounge, as if arranging a private sit-down with the party's chief aide. Whatever the two of them had discussed, curiosity could hardly help but sharpen.

But Mu-young's mouth was a sealed vault. Unless she owed someone an answer, she never spent a single insincere word on speculation. Ji-ae gave up with something like resignation and pulled her bag off the passenger seat.

"I have an appointment. I'll grab a taxi just up ahead."

"Not at all. I'll drive you where you're going."

"You've worked hard all day—are we really going to make you play chauffeur to the very end?"

To Mu-young, driving her was simply what was due. But Ji-ae seemed to have concluded that if she wasn't going to hear what she wanted to hear, there was no point riding along. For all that she didn't keep a secretary in tow, Mu-young had tried to look after her to a reasonable degree; Ji-ae, however, drew a hard line on anything personal. Then again, Mu-young couldn't fault her. In most offices, that very routine of escort and ceremony was how aides burrowed deep into a lawmaker's private life—only to betray them, or play the spy. It happened all the time.

Ji-ae waved a hand and left the venue, walking down toward the side street. Watching her boss go, Mu-young climbed into the car a beat too late, and a long sigh escaped her before she could stop it.

"Hoo…."

The truth was, she had no memory of what she'd been thinking for the entire bazaar. It was hard to deny that it had started the moment Baek Kang-ho left.

'He's going to propose marriage.'

'I'd like you to refuse, Ms. Lee Mu-young.'

Ms. Lee Mu-young. The instant that name left his mouth, her heart had pounded. She'd assumed she could take it in stride—that assumption, it seemed, had been pure arrogance. Why, after all this time, did she still feel like this?

Or was it simply because that was the first time she'd stood face-to-face with him since? She had seen that face to overflowing, but only on television screens—ever since the day the man who was supposed to be a prosecutor abruptly crossed over into politics and became a first-term lawmaker.

Yeouido was a world at once vast and suffocatingly small. It wasn't as if she'd never wondered whether their paths might cross. But she hadn't expected this.

Above all, what stunned her was the issue he'd raised. Marriage, of all things—suddenly, out of nowhere. And with a request attached: that she be the one to refuse it. She couldn't begin to guess why his grandfather, old Baek Hee-sang, would speak as if he truly intended to make such a proposal.

Everything was a tangle of questions. She didn't know the Baek patriarch. She had never met him. Why a man like that had handpicked her as a granddaughter-in-law in the first place was the very first mystery. And Baek Kang-ho, who had dropped this bomb in her lap and walked away, was no less baffling.

'Frankly, I doubt a woman like you would welcome a grasping, power-hungry creature like me as a husband. Am I wrong?'

He pressed the refusal on her again, coaxing her toward it. Mu-young let his words hang for a long moment before she answered.

'You do seem to have an accurate grasp of yourself.'

'That's one of my virtues.'

Without a flicker of discomfort, Kang-ho admitted it outright, the corner of his mouth lifting in a brief smirk. His blunt, unhesitating delivery was exactly as it had been before. He had never been the type to worry about courtesy, appearances, or shame.

Headlong—that was the word for him. In a prosecutor's world, and then in the National Assembly, that attitude must have been a considerable asset. Even mid-conversation, she could practically see the paths he carved out for himself.

Standing before the first love she'd met again, Mu-young had let herself drown alone in old feelings—while the man in front of her remembered nothing of any of it. Only now did she truly understand how wretched that was.

Then her mind snapped back. Marriage. Even without his request, it was a decision she would never have wanted for herself. Because they were finished. In the cruelest way possible.

Having settled on that conclusion, Mu-young turned the ignition. At that moment, a chime rang out from her bag. She pulled out her phone and checked the screen. An unknown number.

She hesitated briefly, then pressed the call button.

"Yes. This is Lee Mu-young."

—Good afternoon.

A middle-aged man's voice she didn't recognize.

"…May I ask who's calling?"

Wariness rising in her, she spoke after a slight delay.

—I'm calling from the office of Chairman Baek Hee-sang.

A dark shadow fell across Mu-young's eyes.

"Hey, can't you just sit still for one minute?" Jae-woo chided, not looking up from the morning paper. The person fidgeting restlessly in front of him only raised her voice in reply.

"How can you be so calm? This is your own son we're talking about."

Hye-seon stared at her husband with an expression of pure disbelief.

"Exactly—his business, not mine."

Jae-woo folded the paper he'd been skimming and took off his glasses. Unable to sit still, Hye-seon turned toward the window that faced the annex. By now, her father-in-law, Baek Hee-sang, would be in a private meeting with the woman he'd summoned as a prospective granddaughter-in-law.

Watching a woman walk through the great front gates, Hye-seon watched with narrowed eyes, openly disapproving even as she studied her. The trousers of that perfectly tailored suit alone were displeasing.

A first audience with old Baek, and she couldn't even manage a proper two-piece? Just thinking about where to begin schooling the girl made her head throb. And yet nothing was decided yet. There was no law saying the woman had to marry in. Hye-seon held on to the hope that the girl might refuse, and stood her ground.

"What if they actually get married?"

"Then they get married. What's the problem?"

Jae-woo offered the remark with the serenity of a bystander. Hye-seon's sharp gaze flew at him like a thrown dart. If she pushed any further, the nagging would only intensify for months, so for the sake of domestic peace he felt he at least had to probe what his wife was really feeling.

"You don't like her that much?"

"Isn't it obvious? After everything I did to raise Kang-ho!"

He should have seen that coming; Jae-woo's brow creased deep.

"I'm not dismissing you because you didn't bear him yourself."

Hye-seon's anger, as always, swerved straight into grievance.

"Pairing him with some girl who has no family, no parents—"

"Honey."

His wife had finally crossed the line, and Jae-woo turned firm. Hye-seon's face said she had long since tired of his fastidious moralizing, and she shot right back.

"Did I say something wrong? We should be scrambling to find him a wife who'd actually help him, and instead they want to seat a woman with nothing to her name—and the chief aide of a dead-and-buried party, no less—at his side?"

"He's a grown man. It's his call to make. If he were the sort to marry because his father told him to, he wouldn't be sitting where he is now. All we have to do is play the parents and go along with whatever he decides."

Having dispensed his moral-textbook advice, Jae-woo carried his paper off toward the study. Even virtue can be a sickness, as the saying went. Hye-seon did her best to cool her flushed face.

She hadn't remarried knowing he was that kind of scholar-gentleman, but still—there were limits. In the end, venting would only give herself the ulcer, she thought, and bit down on her lip.

Jae-woo entered the study and opened a book yet again. He'd been born incapable of going even a short while without reading the printed word—that compulsion was in his nature. Thanks to it, he had spent long years on the bench as a judge and risen all the way to Chief Justice, before briefly stepping into politics because he could not defy his father's will.

But after he challenged for a second term and slid to a heavy defeat at the polls, he shouldered all responsibility and bowed out of politics cleanly. If anything, his face had looked relieved as he did so. These days he kept a quiet profile as an advisor to a law firm.

The truth was, he'd never hungered for position. His father, finding such a son disappointing, had tried every means to seat him somewhere permanent, and had inevitably hit a wall. And in a corner of his heart, Jae-woo carried a quiet guilt—that it was perhaps his own shortcomings that had let his father's ambitions drain away into his grandson, Kang-ho.

That was that, and no was still no, wasn't it? Hye-seon decided she would die before she ever understood a man like her husband, and fixed her attention only on the phone in her hand.

A notification soon lit up. A report had come in to her. As her eyes ran down its contents, Hye-seon's face drained white—then turned the color of ash.