The Man Who Rolled In — Chapter 4

The man didn't miss the instant Yun-seo wavered. He flashed a grin and rolled both arms in a light stretch.

"Until these wounds heal up, I'll just have to impose on you here. I had a look at that map earlier, and there's no other island anywhere close. No matter how I turn it over in my head, it seems like this is where I was headed when whatever happened, happened. If I plant myself here, my memory's bound to come back quick, don't you think?"

"Even so, if you want to recover your memory…"

"With a beautiful young doctor right by my side, what could I possibly have to worry about? Am I wrong?"

Yun-seo pressed her lips into a tight line.

There was no way she could handle a patient like this — a walking time bomb — at this backwater health clinic on an island she'd washed up on after being all but booted out mid-internship.

She wasn't a neurosurgery or psychiatry resident, and this was practically her first time facing an amnesia patient in the field.

The memory loss she'd learned about in textbooks was nothing like the romantic illness in dramas, where one more knock on the head brings everything flooding back. The prognosis was profoundly uncertain — sometimes it lasted a few hours, other times people spent their entire lives trapped inside fragmented memories.

And in a case like this man's, where he'd forgotten his very identity, it was the worst scenario of all.

Oblivious to the storm brewing inside her, the man continued his stretches, lazily reaching toward the ceiling.

"Patient, please — you just woke up! You can't do that kind of intense exercise. Your wound is going to tear open!"

"Well, what would you have me do? My whole body's stiff as a board."

Despite the grumbling tone, he stopped moving with surprising obedience.

Yun-seo stood staring, dazed, as the wild-stallion muscles all found their places at once — and then he suddenly bent at the waist, bringing his eyes level with hers.

A bead of sweat slid down the line of his jaw and hit the floor with a soft tap. His eyes, fixed on her with his head tilted at an angle, narrowed to slits.

"So why are you so desperate to get rid of me, hmm? Something you're feeling guilty about?"

Her heart plunged straight through the floor at being read so precisely. She ducked past him in a scramble and hurried toward the door.

"Of course not! I-I'm just going to finish your IV, so follow me."

Yun-seo fled into the treatment room, straightened the patient bed, and hung a fresh drip on the stand. When the man trailing behind her dropped onto the mattress, the ancient springs shrieked in protest.

Doing her best to ignore his relentlessly fixed gaze, she took hold of his thick arm.

"While you're on the IV, please try not to move. If you do push-ups like earlier again, something really bad is going to happen."

"No wonder the back of my head's been feeling hot. That's a nasty little hobby you've got there."

"A hobby?! I have to monitor your condition, so it's just a routine check…"

"No need to make a fuss. fussing over a man's body like this — that's not something I'd mind."

"No! You should fuss! Do you understand that you being alive right now is a miracle? A miracle!"

The moment she raised her voice in frustration, the playful glaze in his eyes thinned to something sharp.

"Alive?"

"……I'm sorry?"

"You just called me alive."

He furrowed his brow for a long while, as if hauling up some ancient memory from the depths. Then, suddenly, he murmured with a dazed face,

"Someone used to call me San. Is that my name?"

"San? Your name is San?"

"Yes. The san as in mountain."

"That's great news! You might not have lost everything after all."

It was a small mercy amid misfortune. Having recalled even a fragment of his name gave her hope that the brain damage might not be as bad as she'd feared.

Maybe, she thought, he'd wake up after a good night's sleep with everything back — and it was in exactly that moment that the man spoke again.

"Right, then."

The man curved his narrowed eyes into a crescent and murmured, low and slow.

"Then it's only a matter of time before I remember why I ended up looking like this. And who the bastard is that dumped me here."

His voice had dropped into something savagely quiet, and a chill shot down her spine, every hair on her body standing on end.

What happens after the memory comes back? Is he really planning to hunt down whoever did this to him and take revenge?

If it came to that, it was painfully obvious no one would be safe — not just Yun-seo, who had cracked his skull with the stretcher, but the grandmothers who'd failed to hold it steady, too.

She watched him warily as he rolled his head side to side, joints emitting a menacing, grinding pop. Recalling the monstrous push-ups from earlier, a horrifying thought crossed her mind: he could genuinely fold her in half like a sheet of paper if he wanted to.

"So where exactly is this place?"

"Eep! S-sorry?"

Her heart was pounding hard enough to punch through her eardrums, and his sudden question startled a hiccup right out of her.

"It's…… Jeollanam-do, hic! The southernmost tip, hic!"

"What did you do wrong? Why are you hiccupping all of a sudden?"

San raised an eyebrow and stared at her. Yun-seo shook her head violently and clamped her mouth shut. Only after holding her breath until her face went blotchy red did the hiccups finally subside.

"……I m-must have swallowed wrong. It's Yanggido. A small island at the very southern tip of Jeollanam-do."

"Yanggido."

San repeated the name and gave a slow nod. He looked down at Yun-seo, who was trembling like an aspen leaf, and curled his mouth up into a lazy smile.

"Nice name. So we're agreed, then — I stay here a while. I heard that if I go out there, someone might end up dead. Surely the good doctor doesn't have the heart to throw me out."

"Of course not! It's just…… we need to run a full workup first. There could be problems somewhere we can't see, and…"

"I'm perfectly fine. Nobody knows my body better than I do. And staying here means I'll remember my name soon enough — good all around. Ah, about the treatment fee…"

Letting the sentence trail off, he surveyed the shabby interior of the old clinic from end to end, then tipped his chin at the yellowed fluorescent light dangling from the ceiling and the door that creaked on its hinges.

"I don't have a won to my name right now, so why don't I pay with labor instead?"

"I'm sorry?"

"From the looks of it, there's a thousand things that need fixing around here. Let's just help each other out. You're the one who saved my life, and I'll be your personal workhorse."

"The one who saved your life…… me?"

Yun-seo's eyes, still turning the words over in a daze, wavered wildly, unable to find their footing.

"What do you say?"

Maybe this was actually a blessing in disguise.

If she sent him back to the mainland now and he recovered only half his memory before coming back for revenge, she knew she'd die on the spot without even the chance to explain herself.

And if he really did end up collapsing in a gutter someday, abandoning him would haunt her for the rest of her life — as a doctor, and as a human being.

That's right. They say people from the underworld live and die by loyalty.

Maybe branding herself as the savior of his life was the only way to keep breathing.

If she fed him well and let him rest while he stayed on the island, then even once his memory returned, he surely wouldn't point a blade at her.

In a word: from this moment on, she needed a tearful, desperate lobbying campaign for survival. But before that, there was one problem she absolutely had to deal with.

"Must have been rough managing a place like this all by yourself. This building's on its last legs."

Yun-seo furrowed her brow at the man as he picked apart every corner of the clinic with his eyes. If she was going to live alongside him, that insufferable way of addressing her needed to be exterminated first.

"Excuse me, San-ssi."

At her call, the man turned his head with deliberate slowness. Merely meeting his eyes made the air grow suffocatingly heavy — but she pinned down her twitching mouth and forced out the most natural smile she could manage.

"P-please don't call me 'agassi.'"

"Then what should I call you? Madam?"

"No — not agassi, I mean (n-no, just) Doctor."

He cocked a single eyebrow. That fleeting change in his expression sent her heart plummeting once again.

"Doctor?"

Could it be he didn't like the title? But whether it was because of his looks or not, she couldn't shake the uncomfortable feeling of being turned into some hostess bar girl every time he addressed her that way.

Yun-seo summoned her courage and put force into her voice once more.

"Yes, Doctor. Call me agassi one more time, and I'll f-fling you onto the next boat off this island, I mean it."

"Ah."

Only then did the man seem to realize there was a problem with his choice of words, and he winced.

"My apologies if that offended you. Guess it's a phrase that stuck. A habit, apparently."

He tapped his mouth lightly with one huge hand — then abruptly leaned forward, closing the distance until he was right in front of Yun-seo's nose. With his face dipping toward the name tag pinned to her chest, her breath caught in her throat and she froze, unable to even step back.

His breath brushed her cheek at close range. His gaze flicked up, ever so slightly, and an eyebrow arched.

"Dr. Ko Yun-seo."