The Chaebol Family Drowned Me, So This Time I Wrote the Contract novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Clause Nine
Yu-ri wakes on the morning of the signing, crosses out the clause that doomed her, signs, and takes the disowned cousin's sleeve in the lobby.
I died on a bridge with my hand on a dead man's sleeve.
The car went through the rail, and the river came up black and cold.
His arm was across my chest all the way down.
Then I opened my eyes, and there was a pen in my hand.
I was sitting at a long glass table on the forty-first floor of a tower.
Morning sun lay across a contract.
Across from me, Seung-hwan was reading his phone.
He was thirty-two, the third-generation heir of a chaebol, and he had not looked at me once since I came in.
In the corner, his mother, Madam Ahn, folded her hands in her lap and smiled.
I knew that smile.
She had worn it the day she gave me the hotel folder.
In the first life, I signed this page at nine o'clock to clear my father's debt.
Three hundred million won, left behind by a translation agency that failed.
Two years as the heir's wife in name only.
Eleven months later, Madam Ahn put a stolen deal sheet in my bag.
Every news site in Korea said I had sold the Haneul Group to a rival.
They found my car in the river.
They said I had run away with a man.
It was morning again, and I was twenty-six, and nobody had lied about me yet.
My hand wanted to shake.
I laid the pen flat on the table until it stopped.
"Miss Jeon," said the company lawyer. "If you would sign on the last page."
"I'll read it first," I said.
Seung-hwan finally glanced up.
"It's a standard form," he said. "It was sent to you last week."
"Then it will not take long."
I turned the pages slowly.
Last time, I had only checked the money and the dates.
This time I went line by line.
Clause nine was near the end, in the same small type as everything else.
The wife shall hold, on behalf of the household, such documents as Madam Ahn may entrust to her.
I read it twice.
That sentence was how the folder had come to be in my bag.
"Is something wrong, dear?" Madam Ahn asked.
Her voice was warm and unhurried.
"Clause nine," I said. "I'd like it removed."
"Oh, that's only a courtesy." She waved a hand. "Someone trusted must keep the family's papers. It's an honor."
"I'm sure it is, Madam."
"A wife who won't carry her own household's papers," she said, "is hardly a wife."
"I'm a wife on paper for two years," I said. "I'd rather carry none of its papers, and say so in writing."
The lawyer cleared his throat and looked at Seung-hwan.
Seung-hwan set his phone face down.
"You are negotiating," he said.
"I'm reading."
His eyes stayed on me a moment longer than they had in an hour.
They were dark, cold and tired, and I knew them well.
In the first life, I had spent a year trying to make them warm.
"Strike it," he told the lawyer.
"Seung-hwan," his mother said.
"It's two years, Mother." He did not look at her. "Let her have her line."
The lawyer slid a clean copy across the glass.
I drew one hard line through clause nine with the pen from my hand.
I wrote my initials beside it.
Then I signed the last page, Jeon Yu-ri, in full.
Madam Ahn's smile did not move.
Only her fingers shifted on her knee, once.
"The transfer to Mr. Jeon's creditor will be made today," the lawyer said.
I bowed to him, and to Seung-hwan, and last of all to his mother, exactly as deeply as I had the first time.
Not one thing in my face told her I had done it before.
The elevator took a long time to come.
When the doors opened on the lobby, a guard in a dark suit was holding a man back by the arm at the gate.
"I told you, sir, you are not on the list," the guard said.
"I know I'm not," the man said. "I'm only asking whether the Chairman's guest has come down."
He was thirty-three, tall and lean, in a gray work jacket with grease worked into the knuckles.
Ryu Tae-seong.
The Chairman's nephew, cast out of the family eight years ago.
In the first life, he had stopped me in this lobby and told me, awkwardly, to be careful of Madam Ahn's folders.
I had thought he was a bitter man who wanted me to quarrel with the family.
I had walked past him.
He turned his head and saw me.
His face changed.
He did not look at me as a stranger would.
He looked at me and went completely still.
The guard was still talking.
I crossed the marble floor with the contract's pen still in my hand.
"Ryu Tae-seong-ssi," I said, low and clear. "Banpo Bridge. Eleven-forty."
The color went out of his face.
"You too," he whispered.
I took hold of his sleeve, exactly where my hand had been on the bridge.
"Excuse us," I told the guard, and walked him out through the front doors.
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