Prenup of a Third Son novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: The Round Table
"Yes," Seo-yeon said.
The Teacher didn't move.
"Teacher. Yes. Wear it."
She nodded once, very fast, and went back out to the tables before Seo-yeon could see her face.
They were married in April, under the mandarin trees in Aewol.
The trees were in flower.
Small white stars all down the rows, and a smell like oranges and honey that got into everything, the silk, the food, their hair.
Seo-yeon drew the tables herself.
Twelve of them, round, set out between the trees on the grass. Every chair the same. No head. No end.
Bo-ra said she had gone mad.
Then she helped anyway, at two in the morning, with a ruler and a bag of shrimp crackers.
The housekeeper fed sixty people from a kitchen built for six and wouldn't let anyone help.
Seo-yeon's mother arrived the day before with four coolers of broth on the plane and fought airport security over every one of them.
She wore pink silk, the colour for the bride's mother.
The Teacher came out of the house on the morning of the wedding in jade.
The silk had kept perfectly in its drawer for thirty-four years.
Pale green, the colour of new leaves, with a dark green ribbon at the breast.
She walked across the gravel in it and stopped, and stood there in the sun, as if she had forgotten how to go on.
Do-hyun was on the step in his grey wedding hanbok.
He came down and offered her his arm.
"Eomma," he said. "Your seat's at the front."
She took his arm. She held on very tightly.
The guests were nobody important, and all of them were.
Bo-ra's father, who danced with Seo-yeon's mother twice and stepped on her feet both times.
Bo-ra's cousin and five engineers from E&C.
They had walked out of the tower behind Do-hyun in November, to build his new company in two rented rooms in Euljiro.
The library committee chair, because the Mangwon library had broken ground in March, on time.
The woman with the orchid brooch, who turned out to be a minister's wife after all.
She told Seo-yeon's mother her noodles were the best thing she had eaten in thirty years.
The new bride came on her own, in a yellow dress, and cried through the entire ceremony and said it was hay fever.
Yu-na sat at table two with her daughter in her arms.
Three weeks old, red and furious, with a fist of black hair and the loudest voice on the island.
At the back, at the last round table, alone, sat Tae-joon.
He had flown down on his own. He had asked Yu-na first. She had said yes, for one hour.
He held his daughter for the first time during the toasts.
He held her very carefully, the way you'd hold something you had been told you would never be allowed to touch.
She screamed at him the whole time.
He didn't give her back until Yu-na came for her.
There was no officiant. Seo-yeon's mother said a few words and then lost her nerve and told everyone to eat.
The Teacher stood up after her.
She held a folded sheet of paper.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of Prenup of a Third Son are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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