The Man in the Wrong Place
In a room lit by the same floral lamps that had been fashionable in the nineties, a room right next to Hankook University Hospital, Choi Jae-woo was hammering away at his keyboard in obvious panic, calling out to his teammate over voice chat.
“Kid, want me to pull?”
“My skill’s not ready yet. Just three more seconds.”
He’s gaming again.
I had no idea what the appeal was, but Choi Jae-woo loved this game enough to sink money into it without blinking.
“Three, two, one. I use it?”
“Yep.”
“Now!”
Tap, tap.
— You were defeated by the enemy.
Bam!
“Hey! If I’d dodged with E, you were supposed to pull right then! What the hell are you hooking at?!”
“Why is it my fault when you’re the one who messed up? Damn it, you’re yelling so loud Mom might come in. Good luck, lol!”
“What? This bastard just rage-quit!?”
After agreeing to the dodge, Choi Jae-woo queued up for the next game.
Until he found a match, he idly scrolled through his smartphone—then, all of a sudden, his face went grave and he hit the call button.
On speakerphone.
What did he see?
“Jae-woo. What’s going on this late at night?”
“Ho-jun, are you with your girlfriend right now?”
“No. Ji-min went overseas with her family.”
“...Her family?”
“Yeah. I just called her a little before I talked to you. Why?”
“Haa.”
Raking a hand violently through his hair, Choi Jae-woo sent two photos.
“Ho-jun, I sent them on KakaoTalk. Take a look.”
“Huh? O-oh.”
One was a selfie taken in the bar of an overseas hotel by someone who looked like one of Choi Jae-woo’s acquaintances.
The next was a picture taken in the same bar, zoomed in far enough to show a middle-aged man and woman tangled together with no shame at all.
“A med school classmate posted that he was visiting Tokyo, and in the picture, your girlfriend was right there.”
“...Ji-min?”
“Do-hyuk might not know her well, but I’ve eaten with her a few times too, so I thought maybe I was seeing it wrong and asked them to zoom in.”
I was willing to chalk it up to saving one human life.
But then.
“There was a man there she absolutely should not have been with.”
“……”
“We only ran into him twice, sure, but he’s the bastard who acted like such a complete piece of shit to me and Do-hyuk.”
His face really did leave an impression.
Even at our high school graduation.
Even when we graduated from university.
He was the man who, after deciding friendships by parents’ jobs and wealth, had thrown his son Min Ho-jun’s diploma in front of us as if it were trash.
Choi Jae-woo laughed like a man possessed, then abruptly stopped.
“Ho-jun, this man.”
“Don’t say it.”
Again and again, as if the words could be erased if he repeated them enough, he begged me not to say it.
“...You.”
Because he was my best friend, I knew him well.
Min Ho-jun already knew his father had been unfaithful.
And until Choi Jae-woo found out, he had been denying it, avoiding it, refusing to face it.
Swearing viciously at the other woman and at Ho-jun’s father, Choi Jae-woo clenched his fist.
“This is exactly why I say that once men get old, they should all be tied up. You and Do-hyuk laughed at me, but look at me now—tie them up, and suddenly the world gets so much cleaner.”
I understood what he meant when he threw out that worthless joke. In his own Choi Jae-woo way, he was trying to comfort Min Ho-jun.
Just seeing the past had taken me time to steady myself; I couldn’t even imagine what Ho-jun must have been feeling.
“Jae-woo.”
“...Yeah?”
Less than ten seconds later, a muffled sob broke through the speaker.
“...What am I supposed to do?”
Ho-jun, who was usually broad and steady as a bear, let out a broken sound.
“How am I supposed to keep living? How...!”
Choi Jae-woo sprang to his feet and grabbed his car keys.
“I’m bringing a whole box of soju, so wait for me. And don’t call the other woman or that bastard father.”
Don’t hang up.
I’m off tomorrow anyway.
Tell me everything that happened up to now.
Click.
The damp heaviness in the air faded, and my head gradually cooled.
“How could he even think about committing adultery with his future daughter-in-law?”
I couldn’t make sense of why something like this had happened to Min Ho-jun, who looked at the world with such warmth.
Shouldn’t good things happen to people who live decently?
Is this world only supposed to keep turning if you stab it in the chest, twist its organs, and wring it dry?
Then I wanted to carve half of this deranged world away.
One incident that had struck me and my mother kept every corner of my body groaning ten years later, and the visions that came of me being held in someone’s arms, hearing the sound of bone slicing and feeling my heart burn while a foul, choking smoke surged up around me, had come for days on end.
Toot-toot.
The call connection tone rang out.
“Ah—!”
I hit the power button and scrubbed a hand over my face.
I wasn’t even thinking straight.
Like an idiot, I’d rushed to call before I’d even settled myself.
How am I supposed to tell him something he never even said out loud?
Unlike me.
I stared blankly at my hand, where heat was still blooming.
The world was full of things that made no sense.
Some people killed in order to live better than they did now, and killed again to erase their own shame.
Others, even if it meant their own deaths, threw their lives away because if they were human, they had to help.
“What you see isn’t everything.”
Just like me, who could see the past.
Maybe not. No, the world is unfair.
Article 11 of the Constitution, which says all citizens are equal before the law, does not mean absolute equality, but relative equality.
It weighs rational grounds.
It permits certain forms of discrimination.
It grants only formal equality of opportunity.
Even that could be bought off into acquittal if you were good enough at lawyering, and you could whine about not understanding why the past was being dragged up, hurl abuse at the victim, and go on living as if nothing had happened.
The one who committed the crime—
I clenched my fist and steadied the emotions that had rushed over me without warning.
This time, I swore I would protect him no matter what.
“If Ho-jun asks me to take the case, what am I supposed to do?”
Since this happened after the adultery law was abolished, the only real option would be a civil suit.
“Wait. The first solo case I handled after joining Continent was similar, wasn’t it?”
In that case, the victim’s husband had already been involved with the mother-in-law before the victim ever met him, and the victim had met her fiancé through the mother.
“The difference between that and Ho-jun’s case is whether they were married or not.”
There was precedent, so this was even more workable.
“I don’t know whether Ho-jun will actually hire me.”
Until I received the mission, I’d better dangle a little bait in front of him first.
Before meeting Min Ho-jun, I’d bring it up casually—something like, “Lately there’s been a cheating case on shorts that’s so ridiculous it makes your head spin,” then ask him what he would do.
I’d tell him the case I’d handled before was similar too, and that back then, besides filing a complaint, I’d let the rumor spread to the husband’s hospital and to the places the mother frequented, because it was the kind of thing an affair partner would be seen at often.
It was small-bore punishment, if you could even call it that.
“Ho-jun would be horrified, so I’ll say I handled it legally because the client wanted it that way.”
I didn’t know whether a wounded heart could grow new skin over it, but if it gave him a reason to keep living, then it was worth trying.
I scrolled up through the group chat.
“You were quiet all day yesterday, and now I know why.”
I should have paid a little more attention.
If I had, Min Ho-jun wouldn’t have had to suffer in silence.
Chiding my own stupidity, I moved my fingers.
Tap, tap, tap.
“The case is all wrapped up, so let’s get together sometime.”
Immediately, a KakaoTalk reply came in.
It wasn’t the person I’d intended to message, but still.
“Cha Do-hyuk, how the hell could you dump me like that?”
“Dump you? I even politely shut the car door for you.”
“(profanity)”
I laughed.
“If you were just going to say I was sick and leave, what was I supposed to do?”
“I told the driver I wasn’t sick, and I even showed him Hankook University Hospital’s website!”
The man who says humans are creatures made of misunderstanding and prejudice really did sound deeply wronged.
Still.
What is Choi Jae-woo doing that he still hasn’t gone to sleep?
It should have been more than enough time for him to get home, so what was he up to? Had he gone to Min Ho-jun’s place to pick up the car? No way—Choi Jae-woo, who drifted wherever his feet took him, wouldn’t do something like that.
Unless something urgent came up that needed a car, he’d probably leave it parked for days again.
I typed, “Go wash up and sleep already,” then stared at the lingering number 1 beside the message.
“Haa.”
Knowing Min Ho-jun’s personality, he was the type to message without showing any sign of it, yet he still hadn’t replied even after work hours.
“Maybe it’s just the busiest day before the summer recess, so his answers are delayed?”
I added, telling him we should hang out together if he didn’t go anywhere during the recess.
I figured Min Ho-jun would probably send me a message when he had a break from work, since he was a judge.
Meanwhile, I thought about how to punish his father and the other woman even more brutally.
“The old man has so much in his hands, he’s got that much more to lose.”
Snap.
First, I’d ruin his reputation.
I’d complained that preparing a wedding should never take more than six months, but in the end, that turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
I didn’t know whose name the venue for the autumn ceremony had been contracted under, but if it was Min Ho-jun’s name, the first step was to cancel it immediately.
After I finished imagining that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to leave the venue alone and instead play a video of the father and the other woman’s filthy behavior during the wedding itself, I moved on to the second concern: Ho-jun’s safety.
“It’s been five years since Ho-jun was appointed judge, right? He’s been interested in an LLM in the United States for a while, so maybe this is a good chance to take some time off.”
I clicked into the LLM application page on the LSAC site.
The list of documents I needed was longer than I’d expected.
An English transcript, an English graduation certificate, a sealed transcript request form, and a separate document with the staff member who issued the certificate listed on it.
On top of that, TOEFL and recommendation letters.
...He won’t have a TOEFL score.
The recommendation letters were easy enough; I could just go ask the professors to write them.
For law majors, there was almost never a need for English scores except when taking the bar exam. Even the English requirement for university graduation could be satisfied by submitting the English score report from that exam.
Determined to build a scenario where Ho-jun and I went to take TOEFL together, I opened my phone.
What the hell.
“He still hasn’t looked at it?”
The time we’d agreed to have dinner with Auntie was drawing close, but Min Ho-jun still hadn’t read my message.
The same went for the private message asking where he was going during this recess period.
Worried that something else had happened, I wondered if he was working overtime again today.
That would be just like model student Min Ho-jun.
He was the kind of man who, whenever he saw a victim, wanted nothing more than to restore that person to the life they’d had before the harm was done.
“There’d be no reason for him not to contact me otherwise.”
No matter how badly his parents dug into his chest, he was the sort who would keep working without taking even a half-day off.
“Just in case, I should send Choi Jae-woo a message too, telling him to call me if he can get in touch with Min Ho-jun.”
He was probably asleep, of course.
Click.
The office clock struck eight.
“I should switch my phone to silent while I’m at it. I don’t know when someone might call.”
I turned off the air conditioner and started tidying the office, when I heard the creak of a door opening.
“...?”
When I turned my head, a stranger who wasn’t quite a stranger stood by the doorway.
“Whew, Attorney Cha! Why is the door always locked every time I come here?!”
“...Mr. Lee Seon-dong?”
No, his face...?
Lee Seon-dong, the man who had been locked up in detention after being framed as a serial sexual predator, looked completely different from before.
Instead of those bent glasses, he wore contact lenses now.
His dull, sleepy eyebrows had sharpened into bold, defined lines.
Even the double eyelids and the subtly changed contour of his face made him look like a different person entirely.
So where did the soft, harmless Lee Seon-dong go?
A celebrity had stepped out of nerd-life and into the room.