A Father's Worry
When I first met him, he had been a baby wrapped in a swaddle who could barely hold his own head up. And now he was already taking his first steps.
“…….”
I couldn't manage a single word as I pulled both children into my arms.
My throat felt strangely warm. It wasn't a bad feeling, though. A sweet heat wrapped around me, as if I had just swallowed a mouthful of warm honey water, and emotion surged up inside me.
Words wouldn't come; I only felt the corners of my eyes growing a little damp.
Yet as if he already knew how his dad was feeling without needing to hear it, Reni giggled from my embrace and asked,
“Is Luca walking so well because he ate his mama really hard?”
“Mama.”
I couldn't help bursting out laughing.
“Luca just ate his mama a second ago.”
“Yeah.”
I set Luca on my lap, stroked his hair, and pressed a kiss to his forehead.
“Thank you for always growing up healthy, baby.”
Luca stared straight at me, then beamed and answered,
“Yeah.”
I immediately secured the footage of Luca's first steps from the home camera and passed it to Cassandra, then ordered a baby walker through the Manito App.
Unless it was something I personally used, ordering through the app didn't seem to produce any special effects, but the shipping was fast, so that was good enough.
“Whoa…… Our Luca is amazing. When I first saw him he was so tiny.”
Greg murmured, clearly moved as he watched the video. I deliberately teased him.
“Why is our Luca your Luca?”
“Hey, I've put in some parenting hours too! I've got a stake here!”
While we all watched the brand-new first-steps footage together, Cassandra launched into an energetic discussion with Greg about the editing direction.
I had decided to leave the editing entirely in their hands, so I immediately turned to the things only I could do.
I hung the sign Rachel had brought yesterday at the front entrance, then mounted the photos of the kids and me that Evan had delivered right in the center of the living-room wall.
I had considered taking them home, but someone suggested we turn the milestone moments of our future activities into acrylic frames and build an art wall with them, so we went with that idea.
Acrylic frames weren't particularly expensive, yet their interior impact was undeniable. Once the children's photos went up against the navy wall, the whole space brightened and came alive. From now on I would gladly welcome any good ideas.
Thinking I might add a strip of track lighting to illuminate the photos, I walked the entire office once more.
Today, as on other days, packages had arrived in piles, and the office no longer felt empty and bare.
The belongings brought by the staff—Greg, Cassandra, and Rachel—had also found their places.
On Greg's desk sat an ultrasound photo of Rachel and their daughter; on Cassandra's sat a photo of her with Charlie and a pink mirror. Rachel's desk held a tube of lipstick.
As time passed, both the employees' desks and the office itself would grow fuller and more lived-in.
Even though things were fairly well organized, there was still a mountain of work left.
The recording studio needed soundproofing before any microphones or speakers could come in, and the private room I would mainly use still required lumber ordered to match the floor plan I had drawn today.
Of course we would keep tweaking each area every time we filmed there for a while, but for the first office we had ever owned, I was more than satisfied.
A few days later, on Friday evening, a welcome face came to celebrate the opening.
It was Maria, who had raced over the moment she got off work after receiving my invitation.
“Come on in, Maria. It's been a while.”
“Good heavens. All the old office family is gathered right here!”
Maria exchanged warm hugs with Greg and Cassandra. Seeing how delighted they were even though they had been in different departments made it clear she had been a genuinely good boss.
“Would you like a tour of the office first?”
The place still felt a little unfinished, yet it had taken on enough shape that I wasn't embarrassed to welcome a guest.
If anything, I showed her around with a touch of pride. After hearing her impressions I had to fight hard not to shrug my shoulders and preen.
“It's a sophisticated space. So this is what a young people's start-up looks like.”
When I finally opened the door to the children's playroom, Maria—herself a mother of a seven-year-old and a five-year-old—let out a cry of delight.
And when the two children turned toward the sound, she gasped again.
“My goodness, Luca's gotten so big! And…… are you Reni?”
Luca tilted his head slightly; Reni checked my face once, then smiled shyly and moved behind Luca.
It looked exactly like the way he used to hide behind my legs whenever he met someone new. But Reni, you're bigger than Luca……
Maria knelt so she was at eye level with the children and said,
“Jun, you're a wonderful father. The children look truly happy.”
In the end my shoulders lost the battle against pride and did a little victory dance.
“Luca, do you remember Auntie? We met a few times before.”
Luca tilted his head again. He had seen Greg often enough, but he hadn't seen Maria since I left the company.
Still, when the boy who had been tilting his head suddenly beamed, Maria seemed to find that more than enough.
“I'm so happy.”
Smiling, I closed the playroom door and led Maria to the table.
“Please start with the appetizers. I'll grill the steaks right away.”
Greg served the wine he had brought from home while I began cooking the steaks.
The best thing about an island table was that you could keep talking while you cooked.
After a sip of the richly flavored red wine, Maria looked around at everyone and asked,
“So is the staff just the three of you now?”
“Ah……”
Maria apparently didn't know that Rachel would soon leave her company, or anything about this place.
Well, Greg and Rachel's relationship had been a secret, and Maria wasn't the type to pry.
She would find out soon enough, though……
On this particular matter Greg had more right to speak than I did, so he took the floor.
“I happened to hear something—Rachel might be joining us soon as well.”
“Rachel? Our company's Rachel?”
Sure enough, Maria hadn't known they were dating. She looked a little surprised, then nodded.
“So Rachel is leaving the company after all. Honestly, I had half expected it.”
“What? Why?”
Maria let out a heavy sigh.
“……The truth is, some people were making an issue of her pregnancy. There was even talk of leaving her out of the next promotion round.”
“Ugh, those people are the worst!”
Cassandra flared up, and I glanced at Greg's face. His features had gone hard as well.
“Honestly…… Twenty years ago our company wasn't like this.”
Coming from Maria, who had the longest tenure of anyone present, the words carried special weight.
She gazed into the distance for a moment, as if looking back at some earlier time, then spoke with open regret.
“I spent nearly half my life there, and it's heartbreaking to see it turn so cold and unfamiliar.”
After fuming for a while, Cassandra asked,
“So how are things at the company these days?”
She seemed to have remembered that Maria still worked there and had refrained from adding any colorful adjectives. This time Maria sighed softly.
“You all know the expansion plans from a few years ago fell apart one by one, right? Because of that we missed the chance to catch a rising current, I suppose.”
We had already left, so it was easier for us to hear, but for Maria, who still worked there, it must have been painful.
She gave a bitter smile and added,
“And when a company keeps losing good people like this, I don't know if its future will ever look bright again.”
“If things get worse, have you thought about where you'd go?”
“Well, my age is a little awkward for that.”
Maria was now in her forties, but having had her children in her mid-thirties meant she still needed to earn quite a bit more, she explained.
“If I can't find something right away and there's a gap in the middle of my career…… Just thinking about it gives me a headache.”
Cassandra, who knew Maria's circumstances better than Greg or I did, asked,
“Doesn't your husband make a decent living, though? If he can just hold things together until you find work……”
Maria nodded.
“Yes, luckily his job is more stable than mine.”
Her husband was a university professor, she said.
“Even so, I don't want to dump everything on him, and I have my own career too.”
Maria drained the last of the wine in her glass and smiled faintly.
“It's not something we can solve tonight anyway, so let's drop the gloomy talk and change the subject, shall we?”
“Yeah. Tonight's for enjoying ourselves.”
Cassandra agreed and refilled Maria's glass. I seized the chance to both shift the topic and, if possible, get some advice, and brought up the children.
“Reni will probably start kindergarten in a few weeks.”
“Is that so! At four years old, that's the right time. But may I ask how you ended up taking Reni in as well? I've always been curious.”
“Ah, Reni is……”
She had heard bits and pieces from Cassandra in passing, but only tonight did Maria hear the full story from me.
When she learned I had become the children's godfather and guardian, her eyes grew a little moist.
“Hey, why are you crying?”
“I know. I'm being ridiculous. It's just…… you make me so proud.”
Her oldest was only seven, yet every so often Maria looked at me the way one looks at a grown son or a younger brother who has done well.
“Once a child starts kindergarten you'll have a lot more to worry about. Though you already seem plenty busy……”
“I imagine so. I don't even have a clear sense of what exactly I'll need to do.”
“It's a child's first real social life, after all. Of course it would be wonderful if he adapted perfectly from the start, but if he doesn't, the parent has to be a sturdy pillar for him.”
I nodded with a serious face. I still had no real idea what might come.
Maria smiled gently and asked,
“At four, kids get stubborn and throw a lot of tantrums. Are you holding up okay?”
“Ah, well……”
Since I could read Korean, I had spent a fair amount of time digging through both Eastern and Western parenting blogs looking up developmental stages, and one thing that always came up was the “terrible fours.”
The “terrible fours” is basically the period when children are figuring out their place in the world.
……Of course, the articles also said it was the stage when, if things didn't go their way, they threw tantrums, demanded attention, and even hit their parents—every kind of tyranny imaginable.
It was supposedly because their sense of self was properly forming, yet Reni had been such a gentle, lovely child from the very first moment I met him.
“The most stubborn thing he does is put on mismatched socks every day.”
Everyone around the table laughed, finding it adorable.
“Still, I do worry. Especially if I start thinking maybe he's holding himself back because he's too conscious of other people's feelings.”
He was a child who had, at far too young an age, gone through the misfortune of having his warm family broken apart.
People say kids forget quickly, but a wound is still a wound. Because Reni was so young, the scar would almost certainly remain, and a heart that had once been badly frightened was more likely to carry a nameless anxiety afterward.
When I laid my worries out honestly, Maria gave me a kind smile.
“But Jun, the child really does seem to love you.”