Did You Sleep With Her?
It had been one of the three questions he'd thrown at his wife.
Who Ko Dong-seok was.
And yet he had never expected this—not even a little. Ko Dong-seok had stepped forward and shown his face first.
The private room was sized just right for a party of four. A lunch special had already been laid out across the table: a traditional Korean course meal at thirty-eight thousand won a head.
"Thank you so much for coming out like this. I know how busy you must be. I was genuinely worried I might be overstepping—that this whole thing was an imposition."
Ko Dong-seok kept talking in a voice of elaborate courtesy, his eyes fixed on Yoo Kang-soo.
Kang-soo was faintly unsettled. What, exactly, had possessed this man named Ko Dong-seok to invite him to lunch? He couldn't begin to guess.
The man wasn't young. He wasn't Ji Hye-in's age, either. Whatever he was, he didn't look like someone in his forties.
"Would you care for a drink?"
"Haha... no. I have to drive."
Kang-soo gave a light wave of his hand as he answered.
"Hye-in—how about a glass of ginseng wine, at least?"
The man named Ko Dong-seok had slipped, quite smoothly, into casual speech with Kang-soo's wife. But the age gap between them was so obvious that Kang-soo felt no particular urge to make an issue of it.
"Yes... I'll have a glass of ginseng wine."
Hye-in picked up the overturned ceramic cup in front of her and held it out to Ko Dong-seok with both hands. He poured from the ceramic bottle; she received it the same way, both hands cupped around the vessel.
Ko Dong-seok sat on one side of the table. Across from him, Hye-in and Kang-soo sat side by side.
The meal began. Ko Dong-seok started with the weather, then moved on to the recreational sports association. It was an entirely different organization from the incorporated association where Hye-in worked, he explained first, but they were related enough that the two groups interacted often.
"If it's not too forward... would you mind if I asked your age? I'm forty-seven."
Kang-soo volunteered his own age first, then asked for Ko Dong-seok's. The truth was, that was what he wanted to know most of all.
"Ah—I'm sorry. I should have introduced myself properly from the start. I'm not very good at reading a room, I'm afraid. The introduction's late. I'm fifty-one."
"I see. But if you're fifty-one... that's a completely different generation from my wife. Ten years apart. Isn't it a little strange, carrying on like friends?"
Kang-soo wasn't interrogating him. His voice was perfectly even.
Back when he'd been a military police investigator, he'd been as rough-voiced and borderline insolent as anyone in the job. That much was true. Four years of insurance-fraud investigation had flipped that completely. He'd learned immediately that you couldn't survive in that world without keeping your head down, and he'd changed accordingly. Con men weren't stupid. You got nothing out of them by barking.
"I'm sorry. They say a man shouldn't stoop to tie his shoes in a melon patch. My behavior has been... problematic. I truly apologize. In fact, the reason I asked to see you today was to apologize for exactly that. That's why I arranged this."
Kang-soo asked it again, his voice still perfectly even.
The tone was calm. The question was not.
"H-honey... that's... that's rude..."
Hye-in, who had been sitting in silence, took her husband's arm lightly as she spoke.
"Ko Dong-seok. It's fine. Be honest with me. You know Yeom Seong-bong too, don't you? Which means you already know exactly what my wife has been up to. Her body's already been soiled—what's one more man? What's two? Am I going to kill you over it? Or let you live? So how about it, Ko Dong-seok? Did you sleep with my wife, Ji Hye-in, or didn't you? Answer me straight. Right now. You tell me the truth today and I'll let it go. But if I find out later that you lied, I won't sit still. Because if you lie to me now, all this lunch amounts to is you sitting here running your mouth at the husband of a woman you've already fucked."
"…………"
Ko Dong-seok had no answer at all.
Kang-soo still couldn't see the picture. He couldn't begin to guess what was going on inside this man named Ko Dong-seok.
At Kang-soo's words, Ko Dong-seok—who hadn't touched a drop until then—picked up the ceramic bottle of ginseng wine, poured it into the cup in front of him, and knocked it back in a single swallow. Only then did he open his mouth.
"You would have heard my name from Yeom Seong-bong. I heard he used it, too. No—I know that man myself. I know exactly how badly Hye-in was sexually abused by him. That's why I tried so hard to get her away from him."
Kang-soo picked up his water glass and drank.
An acquaintance had become that gentleman, then Director. And Ms. Hye-in had become simply Hye-in. The titles kept sliding. Which meant that whatever the two of them called each other when they were alone might not have come out yet at all.
Yeom Seong-bong had told a similar story—that he'd gotten Ji Hye-in away from Ko Dong-seok. And now Ko Dong-seok was saying he'd gotten her away from Yeom Seong-bong. What the hell were these men doing, passing another man's wife back and forth like this?
"Look. Ko Dong-seok. Stop talking about Yeom Seong-bong and talk about yourself. What exactly is your relationship with my wife? You haven't slept together, but you eat together and go to karaoke? You're not even dating. So why do you go around calling another man's wife Hye-in-ah, like she's yours to name?"
Ko Dong-seok's expression hardened, just slightly.
"I—I'm sorry. I called her by name without thinking. The truth is, given the age difference, I usually just call her Hye-in. Casually."
"Why casually? Why so close? And when the two of you go to karaoke—what do you even do there? No matter how I turn it over, I can't make sense of it."
"I've been a widower for some time now. So Hye-in has been a conversation partner of mine for... several years. And in the middle of that, I heard she was being blackmailed by a man. I told her she didn't need to give in to that kind of threat—that she should ignore his calls. And then that lunatic went and detonated the whole thing on you."
Kang-soo hit back at once.
"It's not as if he fabricated something that never happened. My wife was sleeping with that bastard. I received the video."
"Hye-in didn't sleep with that man because she wanted to. She was being blackmailed. He filmed them every time they were together, then used the photos and the videos to threaten her—said he'd tell her husband. And in the end, he actually did."
It was a perfect defense of everything the wife had already said—so perfect it sounded as if the two of them had rehearsed it.
He never wavered. Not once. Ko Dong-seok held the line and insisted on his own innocence, and Kang-soo, watching him, felt a flicker of reluctant admiration. From the moment they'd sat down until now, the man hadn't shown a single shift in emotion. He hadn't gotten excited. He hadn't raised his voice. Even when Kang-soo had thrown those provocative questions at him, one after another, Ko Dong-seok hadn't flinched. He'd kept that same even tone the entire time.
This one isn't ordinary.
After the three of them had finished that awkward lunch, Kang-soo didn't feel as if anything had cleared. If anything, he felt more blocked than before. But on the surface, he didn't let a trace of it show.
Then, a few days later, as Kang-soo was leaving for work, his wife Ji Hye-in spoke up.
"Honey... I have another company dinner the day after tomorrow."
"Will Director Ko Dong-seok be there too?"
"Yes, of course. He's one of our members. The director said you seemed like a really good husband. Thank you for treating him with courtesy to the end. Some of the questions were too much, of course... but I'm genuinely grateful you were polite."
Kang-soo answered in a dry, indifferent voice.
"Anyway. I'll be away on a business trip this time, so don't come home late like last time."