Thrown Across the Yard
San kept sitting down and standing up again, checking his watch.
"He said he'd be right back."
For someone who'd made it sound like no big deal, he was taking his sweet time.
Rolling his stiff neck and gazing out the window, San saw villagers trickling past one or two at a time beyond the fence.
"Ha. Can't even step outside."
He had zero intention of earning the woman's wrath by defying her very explicit instruction to stay put. Then again, he couldn't exactly go wandering through someone else's house uninvited either.
Wandering the living room with nowhere for his feet to take him, San stopped in front of the cabinet. There was a photo of Yun-seo, looking young, smiling alongside her grandfather.
"Grinning away like that. How does anyone smile that hard?"
That guileless, sunny smile made his heart knot up all at once.
Most doctors who laid eyes on him either recoiled in horror or looked flat-out terrified. They tried their best to hide it, sure — but when their whole body was visibly trembling, how was he supposed not to notice?
What had nagged at him the entire time was why she hadn't thrown him out yet.
Back when she'd been ready to ship him off to the mainland on the spot, she'd suddenly flipped her attitude without demanding a single explanation. He wondered if playing the pity card had worked, but the more he looked at her, the more certain he was that soft-hearted sympathy had nothing to do with it.
'Your girlfriend wouldn't like it, Mr. San……!'
How could she see through him so completely? She'd gone so far as to invent a nonexistent girlfriend just to avoid getting entangled with him. What on earth was her reason?
San slowly lifted the picture frame. Looking down at Yun-seo beaming uselessly up at him, he narrowed his eyes to slits.
His sharp instincts were telling him something. The doctor was definitely hiding something. It might be a leap, but perhaps something very closely tied to his own memory.
She was a woman who showed him everything except the one crucial core.
Which meant that if he wanted to recover even a single thread of memory, he had to stay right here, glued to that woman's side. Being as much a help as a burden to the doctor — meek, agreeable, careful never to get on her nerves. Above all, the top priority was not getting kicked out of this house.
'……Aftereffects!'
Still, one of the riddles that had been scrambling his brain was solved now. Whenever he looked at that woman, a pounding in his chest coexisted with a strange, uneasy itch — utterly inexplicable until he learned it was an illness, at which point things roughly added up.
But did that damned condition really have to affect his sex drive too? It wasn't like he was simply frustrated. The way his body reacted below the belt at the sight of Yun-seo was mortifying beyond belief.
He wasn't even in love with her, supposedly — so why was he like this?
"Ha. What a headache."
His brain was broken, so maybe it was only natural the rest of him had gone haywire along with it.
San raked his fingers through his hair and let out a long sigh. He was absently fidgeting with the corner of the picture frame when it happened.
"Shouldn't we go get San's boy over there?"
"I'd say so. But if Yun-seo finds out, there'll be hell to pay. It's a bit…… you know, delicate."
The low murmur of villagers' voices drifting over the fence set San's nerves on edge.
"Seein' how them contractor fellas are carryin' on, somethin's bound to kick off today, I tell ya."
He tried to shut his ears and ignore it, but the word contractors stopped his hand dead. Worse, the voices beyond the fence were growing louder by the second.
San stole a sideways glance out the window. His body kept flinching toward the door, and he barely wrestled his reason back under control.
If he barged out on his own, the doctor would definitely give him an earful. And depending on how it went, she might throw him out for good.
"Someone oughta bring the brass knuckles, I'm thinkin'."
"That's the way of it, no matter what. Town hall, then?"
"Yeah, town hall! Town hall's the sure bet!"
But a scolding would be later's problem. Hearing that they planned to bring tools along — that ominous talk — he couldn't just sit pinned in a corner of the house. And the thought of the doctor caught in the middle of that chaos made it all the worse.
His body moved before his mind did. Setting down the frame he'd been toying with, San strode toward the front door, mentally drafting whatever excuse might earn him the smaller lecture later.
"What is this, some throwback to the eighties?"
The low voice swallowed the noise of the yard in an instant.
"What century do you people think this is, sending thugs around to threaten folks? Threaten them."
At that nerve-grating voice, the man whose hand had been reaching toward Yun-seo's face drew back.
Someone grabbed his crouched shoulder and shoved him sideways. He blinked and turned — and there was San, hands jammed in his pockets, looking down at the hired men. Yun-seo's eyes went wide.
"Mr. San? I distinctly told you to stay inside—"
Her flustered gaze darting between the men and San, Yun-seo's thoughts froze mid-sentence.
"Who the hell is this guy?"
It was a relief that San had nothing to do with these menacing hired hands — but that didn't exactly make this a comfortable situation either. The man had his hand raised, ready to strike.
"I'm a patient of Dr. Ko Yun-seo."
San caught the incoming wrist and twisted. Without so much as a grunt of protest, the man was effortlessly subdued, doubled over and wheezing.
"Let go of me, you— what kind of move is that, out of nowhere—!"
"Sorry. Your hand was coming up, so it was reflex."
San gave a flat once-over to the other men flinching forward, then released the twisted arm without ceremony. Freed in an instant, the man rolled his shoulder back and forth, glaring at San with murder in his eyes.
"……We're letting it slide because you're not our business. If you're a patient, go curl up in that clinic over there. We've got business with the residents here."
The man brushed past him and stepped up to Yun-seo again, grabbing her trembling chin as she clutched her phone, still recording.
"Doctor, let's do this the easy way."
A thick wad of paper thrust itself in front of Yun-seo's eyes, blocking her view — fluttering so close it nearly brushed her face. It passed into San's hand in the space of a breath.
San flipped through the stolen documents halfheartedly and let out a scoffing laugh.
"Wow. This is a straight-up scam. A scam."
The thug's face twisted ugly at having his papers snatched away in broad daylight.
"You little— we were cutting you slack because you're a patient, and now you're really crossing the line."
"Pretty sure you crossed it first."
San gave the stack a careless skim, then shoved the papers right up under the man's nose.
"The clauses written here — this isn't even the standard consent form for forming a redevelopment cooperative, is it? Some rural backwater that hasn't even been designated a redevelopment zone, and you're peddling cooperatives? One look and I can tell — this is a private development operator running a con to swindle the residents out of their land."
"Wh-what did you say?"
While the man was reeling, San wrapped a hand around the back of his neck and yanked him close with raw force. For all his bulk, the man — his head suddenly captured — flailed like a paper doll.
Startled, Yun-seo spun toward him.
Was it even possible to spot a fraudulent clause just by skimming it? As she stood there bewildered, the villagers pulled her back toward safety.
"Oh, and there's a special clause too. 'The signee waives all rights to civil or criminal objections arising after contract execution, and shall pay three times the purchase price in damages upon breach'? They buried a poison pill that'd be void on its face anyway — and buried it with such loving care."
At San's voice reeling off dense legal jargon without missing a beat, question marks rippled through Yun-seo's eyes. San turned back to the man and slapped the document bundle against his cheek.
"Wrong address, friend. Before we pile on a charge of false entry in an original notarized deed, do yourself a favor and walk away nicely."
"Ah — screw this!"
The man threw all his strength into shoving San's hand off.
"Go easy on you, and look what happens. Work out or something? Damn, you're strong."
He sneered and prodded San's forearm tauntingly, as if picking a fight. He'd clearly meant it as mockery — but the arm was far more solid than he'd expected, and his hand faltered.
The man forced himself to look calm and gave San a slow once-over, head to toe. Then his gaze snagged on the slippers San had come out in, and the corners of his eyes crinkled.
"But you can't win a fight on muscle alone."
He threw his punch. San, standing there completely unguarded, went flying with a loud thud into the corner of the yard.
"Oh no, San's boy!"
"Mr. San!"
The villagers' faces drained white in an instant. Apparently they'd been quietly pinning their hopes on San, because despair was spreading across all those stomping, wringing faces.
"Agh — that hurts like hell. Did you load up on something? What is your jaw, a boulder?"
While Yun-seo stood frozen, helpless to do anything, the man who'd thrown the punch rolled his wrist around and grumbled.
What do I do. Yun-seo had just set down her phone and started to run toward him — when San, pushing himself up off the dirt, cracked his neck from side to side.
"You were recording, right?"
"……Sorry, what?"
He'd gone flying like a man who wouldn't be getting up for a while — yet his complexion hadn't changed a shade, and he looked almost light on his feet.
"Me, flying through the air. Did you get a good shot of it or not?"