Chapter 17
Chapter 17
"Have you reported this to the Chairwoman?"
Did she just say "Chairwoman"?
The word hit Shin So-hee strangely.
Pairing "Chairwoman" with Sara, this young, pretty girl with no family, gave off a deeply unsavory vibe.
Now that she thought about it, a child with no family living in a mansion like this instead of an orphanage was odd from the start. No matter how large an inheritance she received... weren't there legal limits on what a minor could actually use? Putting aside any questions about sexual orientation, she was just an ordinary teenager who didn't know much about the law.
But even if she didn't understand the financial side, she knew all too well how ugly the word "Chairwoman" could sound when associated with a teenage high school girl. Of course, neither Shin So-hee nor any of her friends had ever gone off to meet with "chairmen," "company presidents," or "big brothers", but she'd still heard stories. On the news, in passing.
...The kind of arrangement people called "sponsorship," for instance.
The thought soured her mood in an instant.
Why?...She couldn't quite say. But even without knowing what this "Chairwoman" actually looked like, she felt certain the person couldn't be normal.
She was beginning to understand, little by little, what had been going through the mind of that girl who'd refused the car, insisted on walking home, and climbed over the wall.
She didn't know the exact circumstances, but wasn't this girl Sara essentially a doll held captive by someone called "Chairwoman"?
Living alone in a house this enormous was probably thanks to that Chairwoman's wealth. And the fact that Sara lived alone in such a huge place, under such thorough surveillance—
...What am I even thinking about.
Shin So-hee let out a quiet sigh, careful not to let anyone notice. No one had heard her thoughts, but her face burned.
Delusions this elaborate were practically an illness. And to have such bizarre imaginings right in front of the person herself—
If Sara was an adopted daughter and the bond simply hadn't formed yet, she might call her "Chairwoman" exactly for that reason. Or she could be the child of the Chairwoman's friend, or a distant relative. If she thought it through logically, there were plenty of mundane explanations, which made her feel like smacking herself on the back of the head for jumping to such... inappropriate conclusions.
"I'll take your coat."
Still flustered, when the maid spoke those words and reached for her cardigan, Shin So-hee let out a small, embarrassed noise, "Ah, um...", which only deepened her humiliation.
The mansion was certainly magnificent. Hadn't someone mentioned the building had been used as a department store a century ago? It was much smaller than what "department store" conjured up in the modern imagination, but it was still a residence so vast that an individual living there would have far more unused space than occupied rooms.
The interior was lavish but not excessive. It felt somewhat empty with so few people around, but honestly, being invited to a place like this was worthy of years of bragging rights.
"......."
Sara could easily have flaunted the fact that she lived here, and no one would have thought it strange. Yet the same girl who'd been spouting all kinds of nonsense outside with an utterly unguarded expression, shifting her face this way and that without a care, went completely blank the moment she stepped through the doors. When she addressed the household staff in formal speech, there was even a certain coolness in her manner, so unlike the way she'd argued earlier.
Just from that attitude, from that expression, it wasn't hard to tell that Sara didn't particularly like this place.
...Again, that earlier unpleasant delusion began crawling back up, slow and insidious.
*
Yu Ha-neul considered herself fairly smart.
And she had grounds for thinking so. She'd studied hard throughout middle school, hard enough to enter Hwayeong High School at the top of her year. To be honest, the school didn't exactly have a reputation for being difficult to get into. If you had money, you could find your way in somehow.
But ranking first among those "wealthy students" was a different challenge. Plenty of them coasted on their parents' money and did no real studying, but at the opposite extreme, Hwayeong High School's top-tier students had parents who threw money at every cram school and private tutor imaginable. Yu Ha-neul had placed first among kids who, thanks to endless prep and laser-targeted tutoring, had essentially seen the exam questions in advance.
It didn't matter if her classmates refused to acknowledge it. She intended to keep piling effort on effort and prove herself against everyone who looked down on her.
And because she was that kind of person, she'd already gathered a fair bit of information about Ye Sa-ra.
On the day she'd first gotten to know Sara, she'd gone home and searched Sara's name online. If the students at Hwayeong High School really did come from families that occupied major positions in Korea's business world, she figured Sara's name would appear somewhere on the internet.
That guess turned out to be right.
There wasn't much information about Sara personally. At most, a few childhood photos circulated online with captions like "Top 1% Beauty in the ROK Business World." Until today, she hadn't understood why there was so little to find. Now she'd experienced it firsthand and knew. The sparse online presence was almost certainly controlled by the person Sara had called "the Chairwoman."
She hadn't been able to dig up much on Sara, but she'd seen plenty about that "Chairwoman." Chairwoman Choi Na-kyung, who held the world's largest company by market capitalization, Yujin Group, in the palm of her hand.
The woman who had remarried the previous chairman, Sara's father, then inherited his stake in Yujin Electronics and became the chairwoman herself.
...Was she tormenting Sara, the other heir?
Wasn't that why Sara had climbed the wall today, because she wanted to escape from the suffocating grip of constant surveillance?
Yu Ha-neul tried to imagine it. A life in this vast world where the only faces she ever saw were people the Chairwoman had chosen, where she couldn't even decide her own route home, where the only people she could truly trust were a handful of school friends.
Pictured that way, even this sprawling mansion began to feel like a cramped, confining cage.
"I'll take your coat."
She was lost in thought when someone behind her spoke abruptly. Turning, she found a woman with a cold expression in a maid's uniform looking at her. She had Sara's coat draped neatly over her left arm and was regarding her with formal politeness, but maybe it was just her imagination, because the look in her eyes didn't seem remotely polite.
A gaze that felt almost... suspicious.
Yu Ha-neul had experienced moments like this before. That sudden prickling sensation when meeting someone's eyes. She was often quick to pick up on the negative emotions others directed at her. The frequency was somewhat irregular, but she'd never once regretted trusting that instinct.
"Oh, um, I can manage on my own..."
Having never had anyone take her coat before, Yu Ha-neul reacted on reflex, but after one look at the maid's piercing stare, she quietly turned around.
For now, following the rules seemed like the safest approach. The number of people here who felt approachable was vanishingly small. Not just the maid, the staff waiting by the dining room doors and the men in black suits watching from the mansion's entrance all sent that same prickling gaze her way.
...Had Sara been walking on eggshells like this the whole time?
Yu Ha-neul looked at Sara's face, which at a glance betrayed no emotion at all, and thought:
If Sara ever said, in her own words, that she wanted to escape this place—then she would lend her whatever meager strength she had. No question.
*
Admiration is born from ignorance.
A child who admires firefighters and dreams of becoming one usually doesn't know the mortality rate or the working conditions. People who envy corporate salaries rarely understand the institutional injustices endured behind those paychecks. Those who aspire to be prosecutors or judges, to become enforcers of the law, are often appalled by the ugly realities they discover once they actually land the job.
Money works the same way. Those who don't have it admire those who do, but they can only guess at the side effects.
Lee Su-a was no exception.
Even the least perceptive person could easily sense that something ugly was happening behind the scenes for a girl like Ye Sa-ra. Just from what her father had told her, Su-a could already begin to imagine what sort of things that "Chairwoman" had been up to.
Of course, she couldn't know the reasons precisely. Adults seemed to have no interest in sharing the more explicit, more serious details with their children, and Su-a's father was no different.
But kids weren't stupid. And growing up around those moneyed adults, you eventually learned to piece things together from the "less explicit, less scandalous" stories they let slip.
So... well, like most problems in this world, Sara's situation most likely came down to money.
After she remarried the chairman, he died. The estate was divided between his daughter and his wife. The daughter was still a minor, and a minor couldn't freely access inherited assets. So someone had to manage it all.
Follow that logic, and the conclusion was obvious: Chairwoman Choi Na-kyung of Yujin Group was very likely maneuvering to seize her adoptive daughter Ye Sa-ra's fortune.
Why that maneuvering had led to isolating a person, she didn't know.
But at least judging by the present circumstances, that plan had completely failed.
Even in such a situation, Sara hadn't lost her confidence. She carried herself with unwavering poise. If anything, she acted as if she couldn't care less about the other kids who ostracized her.
And already, the walls that had been built up around Sara were slowly crumbling. No one could say if they would come down completely, or if they would only widen a little before swallowing up the few people who'd managed to get close—closing back up, stronger and more impenetrable than before.
It was possible that Lee Su-a herself would end up trapped inside those walls. In fact, ever since she'd started spending time with Sara, her relationships with the friends she'd known since middle school had already begun to drift. Her parents didn't seem to have noticed yet, but if she kept associating with Sara, she might get called aside and warned, just like back in middle school.
...Admiration is born from ignorance.
Lee Su-a still didn't fully understand just how harsh and bitter the things Sara had endured really were. She didn't yet grasp, in any concrete way, how lonely it must be to live alone in such an enormous mansion.
But she admired Sara for holding onto herself through all of it.
Unlike herself, who'd gotten scared by a few words from adults and quietly agreed to turn a child into an outcast, Sara always faced fear with her head held high. In Su-a's eyes, that was breathtaking.
And so, she decided to keep admiring her, just a little longer. To keep following.
"I'll take your coat."
She wasn't as natural about it as Sara, but Lee Su-a did her best to mirror what Sara had done—removing her coat and handing it over with as much composure as she could manage.
She felt the maid's eyes flick briefly across her face.
Did she look nervous? She probably looked nervous.
Reaching Sara's level of calm would most likely take a much longer time.
Honestly, she didn't know how long she could keep following in those footsteps. She might experience just a fraction of what Sara had endured, half of a fraction, even, and want to run.
But still.
Lee Su-a held onto a hope.
That someday she too could stand before Sara with that same composure, that same dignity, and confess the wrong she'd done. She hoped for that day.
What was going through Sara's mind right now as she followed the maid, expressionless?
*
Ah, I really overdid it today. The exercise, and climbing the wall on top of that. Getting lost and wandering around forever.
Too much for one day in Ye Sa-ra's body.
...Then again, maybe I'm hungry enough that I can have an extra piece of steak tonight?