They Threw Out the Maid's Daughter, Now She Sits at Their Table novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Room 1904

In the hotel room she goes to throw the card back, and Seo-jun offers six months as his girlfriend.

The hotel's nineteenth floor was silent and smelled of lilies.

Ye-rin stood outside Room 1904 at five minutes to nine with the key card in her fist.

She had not slept.

Her mother had taken a pill and cried herself to sleep under a blanket, and Ye-rin had sat on the rooftop steps in Mapo until the sky went grey, planning what she would say.

She slid the card in the lock, and the door opened onto a dark suite with the city spread out in the window.

Seo-jun stood at the glass with his back to her and his jacket off.

"You came," he said.

"I came to give this back."

She crossed the carpet and put the card on the table in front of him, hard.

He did not look at it.

"You saw," she said. "You stood by that lantern the whole night, and you watched Da-hee do it. And you looked at the hedge."

"Yes."

He said it flatly, with no excuse behind it.

Her anger stopped for a second, because she had expected him to lie.

"Then why am I here?"

"Because I did not say anything last night," Seo-jun said. "And you did. I wanted to see what kind of person does that."

"That isn't an answer."

"The chairman has told me I'll be settled by spring," he said. "That means a marriage to the Seolhwa daughter. Two families, one contract. It's already half signed."

"I don't want it," said Seo-jun.

"Then you should be sorry for her," said Ye-rin.

He almost smiled. It lasted a breath.

"I need a girlfriend the family cannot swallow," he said. "Someone they've thrown out of the house and can't afford to throw out again. Someone who won't kneel. If you walk in on my arm, they'll have to choke on it."

"Six months. You'd be at my side at every dinner. Every foundation lunch. Every Sunday."

"You want me to be a weapon," Ye-rin said.

"I want you to be at the table."

She stared at him.

For twenty-five years the only place she had ever sat in that house was the low stool beside the stove.

"Why would I do that for you?"

"You wouldn't," said Seo-jun. "You'd do it for you. Tell me your price."

She had not planned to name one.

She heard her own voice anyway, steady and clear.

"One," she said. "My mother gets her job back, with a written apology from Madam Gu, and a chair at the Sunday table, not a stool."

"Two. Da-hee apologizes to me in public, by name, where people can hear."

Seo-jun nodded once.

"Three. Six months, not one day longer."

He nodded again.

"And four. If you leave me standing alone in that garden again, I walk."

Seo-jun listened to all four with his hands in his pockets.

"Agreed," he said.

"Just like that?"

"Just like that."

It was too easy, and she knew it.

She turned toward the door.

His hand closed around her wrist before she had taken two steps.

His grip was warm and he held her loosely enough that she could have pulled free.

She looked down.

His thumb had come to rest exactly on her pulse.

She felt it going, hard and fast, and she realized it was not her pulse that was hammering.

It was his.

He stood very still behind her, breathing unevenly.

"You're nervous," she said, over her shoulder.

"I'm tired," said Seo-jun.

But he did not let go, and neither of them moved.

The city went on glittering in the window.

He released her first.

"Be at your mother's door at seven," he said. "Someone will come."

At seven the next morning a black car was parked at the bottom of the Mapo stairs.

A man in a grey suit climbed the five flights with an envelope and handed it to Ye-rin's mother at the door.

Sun-hee read it standing in her slippers with her reading glasses sliding down her nose.

It was on the Ryu Group letterhead.

Baek Sun-hee was reinstated as head cook of the Ryu household with full back pay, effective immediately.

At the bottom, in black ink, was a signature that Ye-rin had seen on every Christmas card of her childhood.

Ryu Tae-gyu.

And underneath, in the chairman's own hand, a single line.

The family will expect you both at dinner on Sunday.

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