I Was Reborn at My Engagement Party, So I Proposed to Someone Else novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Safe

Ji-an opens her father's safe with a code from her first life and saves her mother's house from her uncle, Tae-gyeom names his one condition, and under the deed she finds the Ahyeon-dong file she once signed.

"I'll drive," Kwon Tae-gyeom said, before Ji-an had even hung up.

He had a black sedan at the curb and no driver.

He drove it. Fast, without a wasted movement.

Pyeongchang-dong at midnight is all walls and pine trees and silence.

Except the Seo family gate was open, and a moving truck was backed up to it with its engine running.

Men in grey overalls were carrying boxes across the courtyard.

Her father's boxes. His books. The brass lamp from his desk.

Ji-an's mother was standing on the stone steps in her gala dress and her house slippers.

She had beaten Ji-an home by five minutes. She was holding her own elbows.

And on the top step, with a cigar he wasn't allowed to smoke, stood Uncle Myung-ho.

"Ji-an," he said pleasantly. "Good. You can help your mother pack."

"Put those boxes down," Ji-an told the nearest mover.

The man looked at her uncle.

Her uncle shook his head, smiling.

"This house belongs to Hanseong," he said. "It always has. Your father lived in it because his father let him."

"Your father is dead," he added, in case she had forgotten. "Your mother will be comfortable in an officetel in Mapo. By Monday."

Ji-an's mother flinched.

For seven years she had been a widow, and Myung-ho had never once said her husband's name to her kindly.

In her first life, Ji-an had let this happen.

She had cried in the car, and the next week Jae-hyuk had sat her down in front of her father's safe.

"Open it, Ji-an. Your uncle needs the share certificates. Don't you want to help your family?"

He had made her try for an hour. Her father's birthday. Her mother's. The wedding date.

In the end it was Ji-an's own birthday, backwards.

She had opened it for them.

This time she walked straight past her uncle into the house.

Her father's study smelled of old paper and lemon polish. Half the shelves were bare.

The safe was behind the painting of the sea, where it had always been.

She heard her uncle's shoes on the floor behind her. Then her mother's slippers. Then the movers, curious.

Ji-an keyed in the numbers.

The lock clicked open.

Behind her, her uncle stopped breathing for a second.

There was a thin stack of folders inside, a velvet box of her father's cufflinks, and an envelope from the land registry.

She opened the envelope and read it, all the way through, out loud.

It was the deed to this house.

It had been in her mother's name since the year before her father died.

"He gave it to her," Ji-an said. "Did you know that, Uncle? Or did you just not check?"

Her mother put her hand over her mouth.

Her uncle's face went a dull, mottled red.

"Put the boxes back," Ji-an told the movers. "Every one of them. On the shelves they came off."

The movers looked at each other, then at the deed in her hand.

Then they started carrying her father's books back inside.

Her uncle came very close to her. He smelled of cigar and the hotel's cologne.

"Enjoy it," he said quietly. "You won't enjoy the rest."

"Your father's nine percent stays in the family trust until you marry," he went on. "With the board's blessing. Do you think the board will bless a dog from Myeongsan?"

"The trust says 'on her marriage,'" Ji-an said. "It doesn't say anything about blessings."

He blinked.

"I've read it," she said. "Three times."

She had read it after her first wedding. Too late to matter.

A car door shut outside.

Kwon Tae-gyeom was standing just inside the gate, hands in his pockets, looking up at her uncle on the steps.

He hadn't come in. He'd just made sure he could be seen.

"The Myeongsan dog," her uncle said, loudly, for the movers.

"Vice Chairman," Tae-gyeom said. "You're standing in my mother-in-law's house."

Her uncle looked at him for a long moment.

Then he dropped his cigar on the courtyard stones and left, and his truck left after him.

Ji-an's mother stood there in her slippers, looking at the man by the gate.

Then she did what she had always done with strangers at her door.

"Have you eaten?" she asked him. "Come in. I'll make tea."

He sat at the kitchen table with his knees too high, drinking barley tea out of Ji-an's father's old mug.

Her mother watched him.

"Why did you say yes?" she asked him, finally.

He looked at Ji-an, not her mother.

"Your daughter walked across a room full of people who hate me and held out her hand," he said. "Nobody has ever done that."

Her mother's eyes filled up.

"I have one condition," he said to Ji-an.

Here it was.

"Dinner with my mother. Once a month. She'll feed you until you can't move. Let her."

Ji-an stared at him.

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"No shares? No votes?"

"I don't want your shares, Seo Ji-an." He finished his tea. "I want you to eat my mother's food and tell her it's good."

When he had gone, Ji-an went back to the study to close the safe.

She took out the folders to put them straight.

The bottom one was blue, thick, held shut with a rubber band gone brittle with age.

AHYEON-DONG DISTRICT 3. REDEVELOPMENT PROPOSAL.

Her uncle's name was on the cover.

Across the first page, in her father's square handwriting, in red pen: "NO. Not while I'm alive."

Ji-an's hands went cold.

She knew this project.

In her first life she had signed the demolition order for it at twenty-seven, with Jae-hyuk's pen, without reading a word.

The next winter there was a fire on that hill.

A woman burned to death in house 14.

The news had printed her name, and Ji-an had never been able to make herself read it.

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