Everyday Life (6)
Heo Min-woong said he had an urgent appointment and hurried off at once.
He’d dropped everything and come running just because I called. I couldn’t help thinking I ought to treat him better from now on.
Dongho-senior wasn’t a victim, but he said he wanted to watch the show, so he followed Hong Gyeongseok to the police station. Hyuk-su-senior went with him to get Dongho-senior’s signature on the insurance application.
Once the commotion died down, the mood naturally shifted into one of winding down.
And so the wedding afterparty, where an insurance broker and a con artist had sat at the same table, finally came to an end. I moved with Jin Se-yeon to a nearby beer bar.
“It’s still here. We used to come here all the time.”
I nodded.
“You did like drinking. The seniors were shocked when they saw you put it away.”
“I can’t drink like that anymore. That was then.”
Jin Se-yeon rested her chin on her hand, as if the old days were drifting back to her.
“Isn’t it strange? The kids we used to hang out with a few years ago are getting married now.”
“Yeah.”
We clinked our glasses.
“Think Gyeong-tae and Hanbyeol will be happy?”
“They will. They’ll probably have three kids.”
That had been the case in the first timeline.
Jin Se-yeon looked at me and asked, “Do you really work at Continue Capital?”
“Yeah.”
“How? Isn’t it incredibly hard to get in there?”
“Well…”
It hadn’t been all that hard. Since I was the one who founded the company.
But explaining that would take far too long, so I decided to leave the details at that.
“How did you meet Vice President Heo Min-woong?”
“Through work. Hong Gyeongseok already gave you the basic rundown of how Continue Capital and Hwaan Energy got tangled up, didn’t he?”
Surprisingly, Hong Gyeongseok’s story had been mostly accurate. The only thing he’d left out was that he himself hadn’t actually been there.
“From what I saw earlier, you two seemed pretty chummy.”
“Ah! That was all him acting on his own.”
Just to be clear, I didn’t go around calling just anyone brother. And if we went by age before my regression, I was the older one anyway.
I asked her, “How’s the broadcasting work?”
“I like it. It suits me too.”
Now that she was an announcer, her diction and voice had changed from the last time I’d seen her.
“I hear you’re really popular.”
I’d looked her up earlier, and for a rookie announcer she was surprisingly well-known. She was already hosting six regular programs, radio included.
Jin Se-yeon waved it off. “Popular? Please. Compared to Jiyu, I’m nothing.”
Whether you were an announcer or an entertainer, pretty faces alone didn’t make someone famous. You needed a certain charm and individuality that could catch people’s eyes.
It wasn’t just because she was my ex-girlfriend—Jin Se-yeon really was attractive, not only in looks but in personality too.
Her being the cousin of the popular singer Jiyu helped as well. Two gorgeous cousins from Korea University made for excellent booking material, it seemed.
For some reason, the Korean entertainment industry loved an academic pedigree.
“That’s impressive. It can’t have been easy quitting a stable job to take a shot at broadcasting.”
For the record, she’d originally worked at Yuseong Electronics.
“You quit a stable job too.”
“Mm.”
My case was a little different.
Jin Se-yeon traced the rim of her beer glass with a finger and said, “That Primus Fund thing…”
“Ah! You don’t need to worry about that. I didn’t expose it because of you.”
I had no idea why she’d reached that conclusion, but I made sure to clear it up so there’d be no more misunderstanding.
Jin Se-yeon looked confused. “Th-then why did you do it? You fought with the chairman’s son and even quit your company because of that incident, didn’t you? It had nothing to do with you.”
“It was something I had to do.”
I thought back to the first timeline.
What happened with Primus had been partly my fault too. And that had bound me for life.
Come to think of it, even though so much time had passed, I don’t think I’d taken a single real step forward after that.
But this time, I’d resolved the problem before it could grow any larger. Thanks to that, I could move on as lightly as if I’d finally finished a pile of overdue homework.
After staring blankly for a moment, Jin Se-yeon covered her mouth and burst out laughing.
“Pfft! Ah—what? I was the only one who misunderstood?”
I smirked. “That doesn’t mean it had nothing to do with you. Was I supposed to sit still while a junior of mine was being cheated?”
“Honestly, I’d been waiting for you to contact me.”
“Really?”
What? I was supposed to have reached out?
Come to think of it, I didn’t think I’d contacted her separately in the first timeline either.
“You really do seem a lot different from before.”
“How so?”
“I guess… you seem much more grown-up.”
It made sense that she’d feel that way.
After all, ten years had passed for me in the meantime.
Jin Se-yeon smiled brightly. “Anyway, thank you, Miru.”
I smiled back. “For what? Seeing you doing so well makes me happy too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Watching the future turn out better for someone because of me was a genuinely satisfying feeling.
After all, Continue Capital had already crushed more than a few companies over the years.
There were plenty of people whose lives had been ruined because of me, so it only made sense that there’d be a few who ended up doing well thanks to me, too.
* * *
I came into the office around lunchtime and found Dongho-senior already there.
“How did it go yesterday?”
“I signed up for accident insurance and cancer insurance for Hyuk-su. I used to think insurance wasn’t really necessary, but now that I’ve actually taken some out, I feel a lot more at ease. I looked into it, and my parents have already got all sorts of policies in place, so it’s probably time to sort things out. Hyuk-su said he’d do a full insurance remodel for them. My life planner, Hyuk-su, really became our family’s life planner.”
“……That’s not what I meant.”
Why was he going on and on about something I didn’t care about in the slightest?
“Ah! Hong Gyeongseok? That was incredibly entertaining. It was worth following him all the way to the police station. Do you know how much he scammed people out of?”
“How much?”
“Over four hundred million won. Apparently Professor Yoon Joo-hyung put in eighty million too.”
“What? I thought he was always stressing the risks of financial fraud in his lectures.”
“Exactly. And yet he still got scammed by one of his own students. That’s why you shouldn’t teach black-haired beasts anything.”
“……”
Dongho-senior launched into a speech that amounted to a full-throated denial of public and private education in Korea, then told me what had happened at the station.
Hong Gyeongseok hadn’t started his scam yesterday. He’d been running it for months. People he was already friendly with had put money in long ago, and he’d even handed out fund prospectuses and subscription contracts.
All of it had been fake, of course.
Rather than apologize for deceiving people, Hong Gyeongseok shamelessly claimed that he could just make the money back and repay them later.
The victims filled out complaint forms on the spot, and given the scale of the losses, Hong Gyeongseok was arrested immediately.
“If we hadn’t been there, who knows what would’ve happened? We probably saved several people.”
“It’s a huge relief.”
In the first timeline, he’d swindled thirty billion won through a coin pyramid scheme. If we’d left him alone, how much more would he have ripped off?
“Still, Continue Capital really has become famous. The fact that he could make so much money just by using our name…”
Honestly, it wasn’t easy for a private equity fund to become famous.
We weren’t selling products with logos on them like a conglomerate, and we weren’t running TV ads either.
Even MKK Partners, Korea’s largest private equity fund, ranked fifth among the country’s business groups, and most people didn’t even know a company like that existed.
Its chairman, Kang Myeong-guk, was a legend in the Korean private equity world, but even people in finance usually only knew his name, not his face.
And yet Continue Capital, despite being founded so recently, was already famous enough that no one in the industry didn’t know us.
That was just how the world worked. It always prized the private equity fund that could tank a stock with a single report and dismantle a chaebol group more highly than one that quietly acquired solid companies and helped them grow.
Because the former was far cooler.
“So when are you going to tell them?”
“Tell them what?”
“That Continue Capital is yours.”
“Is there any need to?”
“Well, if you bragged about it, you’d probably just get calls asking to borrow money.”
Being in the public eye came with all kinds of annoyances. And even if I didn’t go around shouting it from the rooftops, people would find out eventually.
Dongho-senior nodded. “Ah! I can’t believe Jiyu’s singing at the wedding. She was even prettier in person.”
“You know her too?”
“Of course I do. When I was working in that faraway America like a salt-field slave, I got through it by listening to Jiyu’s songs.”
I had to be at the office, but there wasn’t much for me to do.
Rockhart-CEO and Syd were handling the actual work anyway. All I had to do was wait for the incidents I remembered to happen.
Dongho-senior suddenly laughed while looking at his phone.
“What’s so funny?”
“Check this out. It’s hilarious.”
The clip itself was only mildly amusing, but paired with the background music it became uproarious. It was about a minute long.
Lately, these short-form videos had been all the rage.
“Wait. This video…”
“You’ve seen it too?”
“Yeah.”
It had been famous in the first timeline too.
“The background music sounds kind of familiar. Who sang it?”
I asked, speechless.
“You’re seriously asking because you don’t know?”
“Yeah. Who is it?”
“Wow, how can you not know that?”
“Why? Is it a famous singer?”
“……”
Was this man even human?
While the two of us were talking, Kim Beom-seok came into the office.
“What’s the occasion? You haven’t even been answering calls lately because you’re working on music.”
“How’s the music work going?”
“Actually, I do have something to talk to you about because of that.”
“What is it?”
Kim Beom-seok looked at us and said, “A talent agency contacted me a few days ago.”
Dongho-senior asked, “What kind of agency? A real-estate planning outfit? Did they tell you to invest because they’ve got good land?”
“An entertainment agency. Why would real-estate planning even come up here?”
“Then why are you bringing up an entertainment agency? What did they contact you for?”
“They asked if I’d sign with them.”
Dongho-senior looked shocked. “Wow! Seriously? So are you going to become a singer now?”
“I was already a singer.”
“I mean are you really going to make it as one, then.”
“Then what am I now, a fake singer?”
Just listening to the two of them made their friendship obvious.
That was the sort of conversation men had.
“But why would an agency suddenly want to sign you?”
“Well…”
Kim Beom-seok had been doing music since he was young, and in college he’d even been active in an indie band.
He’d released a string of exquisite self-written and self-composed songs back then, but unfortunately they hadn’t drawn much attention.
Still, he’d apparently had a small but devoted following of listeners who enjoyed them.
The situation changed because of the video Dongho-senior had just been watching.
The creator had uploaded it with the chorus of one of Kim Beom-seok’s songs, “Farewell Letter,” playing in the background without permission.
But the video turned into a meme and spread like wildfire, and the song ended up becoming famous along with it.
People who’d first clicked out of curiosity or boredom listened once, then kept going because they liked it. Now “Farewell Letter” and several of his other songs were surging back up the streaming charts.
Dongho-senior was astonished.
“Oh! I was just watching that video. The song playing in the background was yours? No wonder the voice sounded familiar!”
“……”
It wasn’t easy to be that uninterested in a friend.
When Kim Beom-seok gave him a cold look, Dongho-senior replied with complete confidence, “You know I only listen to female singers. But with girl groups, I can tell every single voice apart no matter how many members there are. I guess you could call it perfect pitch?”
Dongho-senior proudly advertised that utterly useless and pathetic ability, then asked his friend, “So what are you going to do?”
Kim Beom-seok let out a sigh. “I’m still thinking about it.”
“What’s there to think about?”
“I’m busy with this work too. I think I should focus more on this for now.”
“Oh! So you’ve started feeling some loyalty to the company already?”
Kim Beom-seok glanced at me and said, “I was already full of it.”
Well, this was Continue Capital, a firm that was being hailed as the best private equity fund on Wall Street.
With such a bright future ahead of it, it made sense that he wouldn’t want to neglect his work here.
But if he’d bothered to mention that an agency had contacted him, then he must still want to keep making music, right?
I nodded and said, “As I promised before you joined, you can do both. No one says you have to choose just one career.”