The Chaebol Family Drowned Me, So This Time I Wrote the Contract novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Banpo

At a street-food tent by the river, Yu-ri and Tae-seong confirm they both remember dying and plan the engagement dinner.

We did not say anything until we were out of the tower's shadow.

Tae-seong walked beside me with his hands jammed in his jacket pockets.

He kept glancing at me sideways, checking that I was still there.

I took a taxi to Banpo because I could not think of anywhere else.

He rode in the front seat and gave the driver the address himself.

When the car stopped, I understood why.

The river park was bright and ordinary on a September morning.

Joggers ran past the water.

Families spread mats on the grass.

And above it all, the long gray span of Banpo Bridge, with the rail intact.

"I can't look at it," I said.

"Then don't." Tae-seong stepped between me and the view. "Come on. There's a tent."

It was a pojangmacha, a street-food tent with orange plastic walls and four stools, set back from the path.

A woman in her sixties stood at a steaming pot of fish cake skewers.

She wore a visor and a flowered apron, and she looked at us both with open suspicion.

"Tae-seong-ah," she said. "You never come before noon. Who is this? Sit. Both of you, sit."

"Ajumma, this is Yu-ri."

"She looks like she hasn't eaten since last week." She plunked down two paper cups of broth. "Drink."

I drank.

It was salty and hot, and my eyes stung.

She went back to her skewers, but I saw her watching us in the steam of the pot.

"When did you wake up?" Tae-seong said, very low.

"At the table. The pen was already in my hand." I held the cup in both palms. "You?"

"In my shop, at six," he said. "My phone said the fourteenth of September. I was holding a wrench."

"The fourteenth of August was the bridge."

"I know."

He turned his cup around once on the counter.

"I got to the tower because I thought if I stood at the gate, I could say it to you again. Before you signed."

"You said it last time too," I said. "In the lobby."

"I said it badly."

"You said it twice," I said. "Once in the lobby and once on the phone."

"And you didn't listen, and I should have said it ten times."

He rubbed his thumb along an old scar.

"I let you walk out of that lobby."

"I was twenty-six and I needed three hundred million won," I said.

"I know."

"Don't," I said. "I'm not going to spend this morning deciding whose fault it was."

He looked at me for a while.

Then something eased across his shoulders, small but real.

"Who drove?" I asked.

"What?"

"At the end. I remember a car, the rail, your arm. I don't remember who was driving."

"I was. They said I was." His voice went flat.

"The brakes went at the top of the bridge."

"I'd serviced that car myself two days earlier. Someone knew exactly when."

"Madam Ahn's driver," I said.

"Maybe."

"Maybe not only him."

He nodded once.

"You died first," he said. "I felt your hand let go before the water came in."

I had to put the cup down.

The ajumma clattered a ladle against the pot, loudly, to let us know she was listening.

"Whatever you two are quarrelling about," she announced, "you don't quarrel on an empty stomach. Eat the tteokbokki."

"We aren't quarrelling," Tae-seong said.

"Then why are your faces long?" the ajumma demanded. "Is she pregnant? Did you lose money?"

"Ajumma," he said.

"I only ask. Eat."

I ate.

It was the best thing I had tasted in a year, or in two.

Tae-seong's mouth moved in something close to a smile.

"Rules," I said, when my plate was empty.

"Rules?"

"We tell each other everything about the bridge. Anything we remember, anything we notice. No keeping it back to protect the other one."

"Agreed." He did not hesitate. "And you tell me the moment someone in that house does anything."

"The moment."

"Then start. What do you know that I don't?"

"The engagement dinner is a week from Saturday." I kept my voice level.

"A Gangnam hanjeongsik hall, forty relatives and business partners."

"Madam Ahn gives me a bracelet in front of all of them," I said.

"The Haneul bracelet. The jade one."

"She clasps it on my wrist herself. Two days later it's missing from her case, and I'm the thief who took it."

His jaw set.

"That's how she built the first story," he said. "A thief, and then a leaker, and then a woman running away."

"Yes."

"She'll do it again," he said.

"She will. The same dinner, the same bracelet. She has no reason to change it."

I turned the paper cup in my hands.

"She doesn't know she's being watched."

"Then the dinner is our first move," he said.

"What do we do with a bracelet?"

He thought it over.

"Only one voice in that family has ever stopped Madam Ahn in front of a room," he said. "My grandmother."

"The Chairman's mother."

"She raised me. She's eighty-six, and she holds one fifth of the Haneul Group in her own name."

He stared at the river.

"The Chairman has to ask her for every vote. If she's seated at that dinner, nothing sticks to you."

"Then ask her to come."

Tae-seong was quiet.

"I can't," he said at last. "She hasn't let me through her gate in eight years."

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