I Was Reborn at My Engagement Party, So I Proposed to Someone Else novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: My Old Room

"No," Ji-an said to Jae-hyuk. "But I'll be standing on it."

His smile stayed.

He took his hand off the elevator door, and it slid shut between them, and he went down alone.

They took the next one.

Tae-gyeom didn't say a word all the way to the lobby. When they got to the car, he stood with the door open and looked back up at the tower.

"He's going to do something," he said.

"I know."

"Then we're going to be there when he does."

Ji-an's mother met them at the gate in Pyeongchang-dong on Wednesday afternoon with her sleeves rolled up and a list.

Tae-gyeom's whole life came in one van.

Four suits, all black. Six black shirts. A box of books. A coffee machine. Nothing on the walls.

"This is all?" Ji-an's mother said, staring into the van.

"I had a lot of windows," he said. "I didn't need much else."

She looked at him.

Then she marched him straight into the house and up the stairs, past Ji-an's old room, and stopped in front of her late husband's study.

She opened the door.

The books were back on the shelves where the movers had left them. The brass lamp was on the desk. She had put fresh flowers by the window.

"You'll work in here," she said.

Tae-gyeom stood in the doorway and didn't go in.

"Mother. This was his."

"He'd have liked you." She straightened a book that didn't need straightening. "He liked people who read the whole contract."

He looked at her for a long moment.

Then he bowed to her, properly, from the waist, the way you'd bow to a teacher.

She went pink to the ears and told him to fix the front gate, because it had squeaked for seven years.

He fixed it in twenty minutes with a can of oil and a screwdriver from the drawer of her husband's desk.

Ji-an's mother stood on the steps with her arms folded and opened and shut the gate four times herself, to be sure.

"Good," she said. "Dinner's at seven. I hope you eat fish."

"I eat anything."

"Then you'll eat a lot."

At dinner she told him she had reopened the foundation's housing relief fund that morning.

"For the eleven houses on that hill," she said. "Real money this time. For lawyers and moving costs, for anyone who decides to go. And repairs, for anyone who decides to stay."

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