Chapter 8: Exactly What She Said

The photograph reached me before the auction did.

Madam Ahn's niece slipped it into my hand at the door of the Hannam-dong gallery, between two coat-check tickets, with a smile for the cameras.

It showed Tae-seong's hand on my jaw and my fist in his shirt.

"I would hate for the Chairman to see that," she murmured. "Be useful tonight."

"Our guests from Osaka have no interpreter. I'm sure a bride from your trade would not mind earning her keep."

She was thirty, immaculate in white, the head of the Haneul Foundation and Seung-hwan's cousin on his mother's side.

In the first life, she had called me "the translator" for a year.

"Of course," I said. "I'd be glad to."

Her smile widened.

She thought she had pinned me.

The gallery held two hundred donors, a string quartet, and a wall of pale abstract canvases lit from above.

The lots stood on easels at the front.

On a velvet sofa to one side sat the Osaka delegation, a silver-haired chairwoman in a dove-gray suit and her young aide.

They were the other half of the hotel deal, and the reason Madam Ahn wanted me close.

I bowed to them in Japanese.

"Good evening, Chairwoman. I am Jeon Yu-ri. I will be happy to interpret for you tonight."

"Your Japanese is warm," the chairwoman said, with a faint smile. "It is a pleasure."

I sat at her left hand.

Across the room, Seung-hwan stood by a pillar, a glass of water untouched in his hand.

Da-eun was beside him, laughing at something small.

Tae-seong was not there, which was the one thing I had asked of him.

The auction started.

A painter's seascape went for forty million won.

A weekend at a Jeju resort went for sixty.

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