Left on Read
I checked the mail from the errand agency.
The results of my request weren't included in the email itself — just a link to a site and the password I'd need to enter it. When I logged in, the volume of material waiting for me was frankly enormous.
'Huh.'
Honestly, I hadn't been expecting much. It hadn't been that long since I'd placed the request.
'The kids haven't gotten rusty, I see.'
While I browsed the site in a satisfied mood, the errand agency sent along a roundabout, rambling message that practically reeked of them checking my reaction.
The message was wrapped in a dozen layers of polite hedging, but I understood it at once.
'So they haven't recovered the bugs yet.'
Unlike Haru Finance, which dealt exclusively with celebrity clients, Mindo Errand Center was a mainstream operation that had widened its net to include ordinary customers. And precisely because it operated out in the open, it was actually harder to run than Haru Finance.
One misstep could land you in a legal tangle with a client, so you had to be extra conservative with anything that left a paper trail.
'They can't exactly come out and say they're conducting the investigation through flat-out illegal methods.'
They must have written the message so obsequiously because they were worried I'd treat them like con men. But I knew the errand business inside and out, and I knew full well that this wasn't the kind of job that wrapped up in one clean stroke anyway.
'It's not like swiping a page or two of paperwork.'
Sneaking into someone's home or car to plant a listening device — and then recovering it — carried far more risk than people imagined. If a few days of listening turned up nothing useful, they'd sometimes plant a person nearby, and getting close enough to the target could take as long as half a year.
'Still, at this volume? This is more than decent.'
A small wave of relief washed over me. I'd worried that everyone might have turned into a pack of idiots without me around.
'All those years of feeding and training them weren't wasted after all.'
Thanking my lucky stars, I went through the files with a fine-tooth comb.
— Date of Birth: 20XX.04.21 (25 years old)
— Family: Yoo Tae-ho (father), Lee Seul-myeong (mother)
— Career: Began working as a child model at age 2; officially debuted as an actor at age 5 and has remained continuously active since.
— Physical Notes: Listed as 180cm on portal sites, but a 20XX medical checkup records 181.2cm. Has dimples when he smiles.
I skimmed quickly past the basic facts I already knew. The real substance began on the next page.
— Age 16: His middle school homeroom teacher filed a "Suspected Child Abuse Report" against Yoo Seul-ho's parents; it was buried at the principal's review stage, and the teacher was transferred to a backwater post shortly after.
— Age 17: Withdrew from high school. Began preparing for the qualification exam through homeschooling.
— Age 18: Three-month involuntary admission to a psychiatric hospital (kept strictly confidential). The facility operated a closed ward at the time and has since shut down. Confirmed to have been committed with the parents' consent. No official records remain; a discreet interview was conducted with a nurse who worked there.
— Ages 20–24: Multiple confirmed diagnoses of depression and anxiety disorder, along with an extensive history of prescriptions.
— Age 25: Records show he was preparing to file for a court injunction restricting or suspending his parents' parental rights — then withdrew it.
'Whoa.'
The contents hit harder than I'd expected, and for a moment I couldn't find my voice.
The prescriptions hadn't surprised me much — I'd more or less anticipated that when I first opened my eyes in Yoo Seul-ho's body. His bedside table had been buried under sleeping pills, along with a mountain of antidepressants that had clearly been sitting there, untouched, for ages.
'But hospitalization? I never saw that coming.'
I stared at the words parents' consent and involuntary admission for a long moment.
'Having depression isn't anything special...'
Especially for a celebrity. It was an illness ordinary people struggled with all the time.
But preparing to have his parents' parental rights legally restricted? That was anything but common.
'Hmm.'
The next section contained the thing I'd been most curious about: how on earth Yoo Seul-ho had ended up signing with Star Actors.
The moment he became a legal adult, Yoo Seul-ho had fled into the military like a man running for his life. When he got out, he refused to renew his contract with his existing agency — the one, in other words, that his parents belonged to.
As he met with several other agencies while shopping for a new one, his parents found out. Tapping their considerable influence in the industry, they intervened, and nearly every agency turned him away. It didn't stop at rejection, either. Supposedly there'd been an instance where a rep was mid-meeting, all smiles and positive energy, when they took a phone call from someone — and promptly shoved Yoo Seul-ho out the door.
And that was how he'd scraped his way into Trash Actors. No — Star Actors.
"Following his transfer to his current agency, conflict with his parents is presumed (the media has not mentioned their son in over a year)."
Reading that line set my mind working.
He'd changed agencies at the start of last year, so he would have been twenty-four. So the conflict with his parents had been escalating since then, and by the beginning of this year he'd been looking into having their parental rights restricted.
'Then something made him abandon the filing — and in the end, he made that extreme choice.'
The final section held something I hadn't even asked for: Yoo Seul-ho's social connections from his school days. My request had focused on whether his personal relationships had shifted in the last three years, but apparently they'd come up so empty that the investigators had dug all the way back to his school years.
The gist of it: he'd had plenty of friends as a kid, but from his late teens onward he'd lived almost entirely alone. Throughout his career in the industry he never attended a single private gathering, and after switching agencies last year, he hadn't interacted with anyone besides Hyun Jin-gae and the company's staff.
'Whew.'
Yoo Seul-ho's loneliness seeped out of those dry, matter-of-fact sentences.
'I guess I'd better not give him a hard time about drinking weird health drinks anymore...'
Right. If that's all he had to sustain himself, no wonder he clung to it.
'One thing's for certain now — his parents are out of their minds.'
Yoo Seul-ho's search for a new agency had almost certainly been about putting distance between himself and his parents. But how could he have known they'd stoop that low? His parents had worked every halfway decent place in the industry, so they must have assumed their son would eventually give up and crawl back into the fold.
Who could have imagined he'd sign with a garbage company like that?
'So that's when things truly fell apart.'
Hyun Jin-gae had said so. That Yoo Seul-ho had knelt in front of his family home for three days without eating a bite, begging, until he collapsed.
I didn't know the full story yet, but one thing was clear — this was no ordinary relationship between a parent and a son.
'If it were me, I'd have cut them off without a second thought.'
And yet, even as I said it, I wasn't sure I truly could. I'd never had parents. Claiming I'd act any differently in a situation I'd never lived through was pathetic arrogance on my part.
'He survived parents like those — no wonder a cesspool like that agency couldn't break him?'
At first, I genuinely couldn't understand it. The Star Actors staff were idiots, sure, but why would they dare treat Yoo Seul-ho — the son of that household — like dirt? Now, though, the picture came into focus.
The staff had surely been decent to him at the start. But when he kept taking their overreach without protest, they pushed further and further. That's how people are. When someone you'd always assumed was above you ends up beneath you, every little discovery that they're less than you thought makes you hunger for more.
'He's been through a lot, huh.'
Set against those brutal words — child abuse, psychiatric hospital — was a photo of Yoo Seul-ho smiling brightly. I stared at it in silence.
I felt sorry for the kid.
For a fleeting second, a thought brushed past: what if Yoo Seul-ho had truly hated acting? Then was it right for me to earn my living through it going forward? Of course, the thought lasted all of a second.
'So what if it's "wrong"?'
If he hated it that much, he shouldn't have handed me this body.
Complicated thoughts? I'll pass.
"Aargh, Boss! This guy — he got in without triggering this!"
"Who?"
"The client who ordered the background check on Yoo Seul-ho. Ha — how the hell did he miss this trap?"
"What are you talking about? Missed what?"
Hwang Tae-jun, the youngest member of the outfit, scratched his head furiously.
"You have to enter a password to even open the report site, right? That's the whole trap. Entering it lets us verify the requester's IP and all sorts of other data. But this guy read the whole thing without ever typing in the password."
"That's possible? How?"
"It is, technically. If you mess with the formatting a little... Ha, but how would a regular person even know to do that? Unbelievable. First time I've ever seen someone like this."
A colleague who'd been listening closely to Hwang Tae-jun tilted his head. The kid came off a little dim, but when it came to computers, he was frighteningly good. And someone had slipped past that?
'Something's off here.'
The colleague told Hwang Tae-jun to dig up the client's identity, whatever it took.
"Why? So we can squeeze money out of him? I mean, judging by the lump sum he wired, he's not exactly broke."
"No, you idiot. Use your head. Does this guy strike you as normal? The fact that he ordered a background check on a celebrity from us in the first place is strange. You know that dummy identity I set up for the errand business?"
"Yes, sir."
"I've swept pretty much every errand agency in the city with it, and not a single request about Yoo Seul-ho came in anywhere. Someone who spends money like this — why on earth would he use only us? Something's wrong. He might even know we're Haru Finance."
"Gah."
At his colleague's words, Hwang Tae-jun went white and bit his lip.
"Then what do we do? The contact info from the request won't trace, the payment came through a cutout, and now he's dodged our trap on top of it."
"Whoever ordered a background check on Yoo Seul-ho is, by definition, someone connected to Yoo Seul-ho. Comb through every related acquaintance and narrow down the candidates. It might be an overreaction, but better safe than sorry. Got it? I don't care if the errand agency gets burned, but Haru Finance cannot. That's the Big Boss's asset."
"......Yes, sir. I'll get to the bottom of it, no matter what. Boss!"
Hwang Tae-jun gave a firm nod — grimly resolved, driven by the conviction that he could not be the one to destroy everything the Big Boss had spent his whole life building.
Before I knew it, a full month had passed since I'd arrived in Yoo Seul-ho's body.
The first proper day of filming was only days away.
And today, this was what I received from the contact saved in my phone as "Mom."
The messages that followed were just as crammed with sentences engineered to wring guilt out of anyone who read them.
The instant I finished reading, here is exactly what I did:
"Hello, PD. This is Yoo Seul-ho. Would it be all right if I came by to watch the set today?"
That's right. I read it and left it on read.