Did I Not Mention It?
James made excuses for his future brothers-in-law, who were being compared to him for no good reason.
“Ah, Chairman. You raised your sons well, and they turned out well too. They aren’t causing any trouble, and they’re working at the company like decent men. Besides, they’ve been putting in real effort there.”
“Hmph. After everything my prospective son-in-law has accomplished, what did you expect? Was I supposed to keep my standards low?”
It was because James, who had built up his own capital and taken over a company through his own ability, inevitably made the two sons look shabby by comparison.
“Yes, yes. It’s all my fault.”
“You two watch and learn properly!”
“Yes, sir!”
“Yes, Father.”
After that, the two of them could barely say a word, like sheaves of barley straw that had been laid out to dry. They only opened their mouths when it was time to eat.
“The company seems to be entering normalization now... so what’s next?”
“Oh, we’re still a long way from normal. It’ll be quite a while before the stock price returns to where it was.”
“What’s the market cap at now?”
“It’s risen to 7 trillion won, but to get back to where it was before the base station accident, it still needs to climb another 5 trillion.”
“That’ll be quick.”
“Come on. Can you really be satisfied with that? I’m thinking at least 20 trillion.”
Kim Seong-oh nodded at James’s greed, which couldn’t be satisfied with merely restoring the company’s former glory.
“Of course you should be! But isn’t the method the real issue?”
“Telecommunications has no choice but to merge with AI in the future. That goes for bio and automobiles too. A telecom company’s growth potential is tied to the development of modern technology. As time passes, it can only keep growing.”
“Then what about the recent massive investment in facilities?”
“If you want to fly when everyone else is still crawling, you have to start building up your body now.”
“Ha! That’s exactly the mindset a manager needs.”
“In that spirit, let’s have a drink. Please take good care of me, Chairman.”
“No, I should be the one asking that. Hah. Go on, give us a toast.”
“Yes, sir. To the vision of ST Group and TY Group moving forward toward the future as one!”
“Excellent!”
Jeong-ho and Ju-ho quickly raised their glasses and clinked them together at the chairman’s toast.
“......”
“......”
As long as Chairman Kim was there, the two of them never got a chance to speak.
“If the booth for the Consumer Electronics Show has been confirmed, then I take it you’ve been to the States?”
“Yes. I also had time to build ties through exercise with the club members. Thanks to the golf membership card you gave me before, I managed to avoid embarrassment.”
“Golf?”
“Once I learned it, I found it surprisingly enjoyable.”
James had learned golf while traveling back and forth between the United States and Korea, and by now he had built up enough skill to keep pace with amateurs. Perhaps because he had trained his body so thoroughly in the meantime, it hadn’t been difficult to pick up.
“You should have come to me first if you were going to learn golf.”
“Let’s definitely go out for a round together sometime. I’ll make sure to put you in your place.”
“Pfft. You’ve only been learning for a few years, and you think you can put me in my place? You sure are full of yourself.”
“Wouldn’t it be boring for you if I came at you without this kind of confidence?”
“Hahaha. True enough. There’s plenty of fun in beating some fool who rushes in not knowing a thing.”
The whole meal went on in a warm, cheerful atmosphere.
* * *
“Chairman. We younger folks are going to go somewhere else for a second round.”
“Future son-in-law! What’s this? You’re leaving me out because I’m old?”
“Chairman, this is the first time we’ve met, and we haven’t even had a proper conversation. Please let me have today, just this once.”
“Tsk. No matter what you say, I just can’t bring myself to dislike you.”
“Thank you, Chairman.”
Kim Seong-oh had smiled brightly at James, but when he turned to his sons, his face grew fearsome.
“You two treat your brother-in-law with proper respect. Got it!”
“Yes, sir!”
The two of them only let out a breath of relief after Kim Seong-oh got in his car and disappeared from view.
“Hoo.”
“Haa.”
At their sighs, James chimed in.
“The Chairman is pretty strict, isn’t he?”
“...Not really.”
“He’s fine.”
“Now it’s just us, so relax.”
“......”
Jeong-ho had no intention of ever speaking down to him.
“No, really.”
“Why not? I’m telling you to take it easy. Don’t you like me?”
The second son, Ju-ho, answered James’s question.
“If we got casual with you, we’d be dead. Please go easy on us.”
“......”
Chairman Kim really does love his children.
James thought that raising children strictly was one expression of love.
He must have drilled manners into their heads from the start so they wouldn’t go astray.
That way, they wouldn’t be swallowed by money and could maintain a normal way of thinking. By contrast, the children of other chaebol families lived buried under wealth until they began to think that bizarre, twisted ideas were perfectly normal. That was how crimes like assault and drugs got added on top of the basic belief that money could make anything happen.
And the bigger they grow that way, the more they become the sort of chaebol who naturally accept political and judicial collusion.
“I’m just jealous, honestly.”
Like when he had met Kim Seong-oh and Hwang Ji-hye before and envied Su-ji, he now felt nothing but envy for the two men who had grown up under a strict father.
“If you lived with our father, you wouldn’t be saying that.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Exactly. I guess I just never had a father like that.”
“......”
“......”
The two of them had already guessed that Choi Jeong-san, who had come up in the conversation earlier, was his father.
“Even if I had, he wouldn’t have become a good father like Chairman Kim. You can see that from how his kids turned out.”
“Ahem.”
“Uh...”
They had nothing to say to that. Tae-jin’s drug scandal and Yeong-jin’s recent assault, which had made the news, were directly tied to James.
“It’s still light out, so let’s just have a simple beer.”
“We know a place. Let us take you there.”
“Please do.”
* * *
James found the bustling bar in the college district they led him to extremely to his liking.
“Oh. There was a place this good around here?”
“We come here together sometimes. It opens early too.”
“But if it’s this good, why are you only meeting one another?”
He had meant it as a question about Su-ji, asking why they were meeting alone without her, but Jeong-ho just grinned and held up his phone.
“We called Su-ji before coming here too.”
“Haha. Good thinking.”
The three of them had taken a spot in one corner of the place when Su-ji pushed open the door and came in.
“James oppa!”
“You’re here?”
As soon as Su-ji entered, Jeong-ho and Ju-ho both made comments about how she was immediately looking for James.
“There are two older brothers standing right here...”
“There’s a reason the saying about a daughter belonging to another family exists.”
Only then did Su-ji turn to them and offer a quick greeting.
“Hello, big brothers.”
“Now you see us?”
“Father called me out all of a sudden today and gave me such a scolding, you wouldn’t believe it.”
At their groaning, Su-ji looked at James with eyes full of concern and asked,
“Did they scold you too, my darling?”
“Me? I’ve never had that history.”
Jeong-ho and Ju-ho muttered in obvious offense.
“She’s worried about him when we’re the ones who got chewed out because of him?”
“James hyung, just when did you start dating her?”
His relationship with Su-ji had begun in LA two years earlier, but Chairman Kim Seong-oh and his wife had been told that the two had been introduced through family connections.
“The Chairman introduced us personally. About a year ago, was it? Right?”
Su-ji nodded in agreement.
“That’s right. Mom and Dad introduced James oppa to me personally.”
“What? So there wasn’t even permission in the first place...”
“Since they introduced us themselves, they call him a prospective son-in-law. Sigh.”
“Oh my. Father called our oppa his prospective son-in-law?”
“You didn’t know? He already treats him like family.”
“Earlier he gave a special order to treat him properly as a brother-in-law.”
The corners of Su-ji’s lips twitched as she fought back a laugh that was about to burst out.
“Sounds like he’s over the moon.”
“And he has every reason to be. Your boyfriend got him a profitable affiliate, didn’t he?”
“Heehee. You heard that too?”
“And then you play innocent and take my officetel too?”
“Why wouldn’t I take what was already given to me? I never even told Dad that Ju-ho oppa chased me because of the affiliate issue, did I?”
“Give it back!”
Su-ji stuck her stomach out and said,
“I already sold it and used the money to buy delicious food for my darling, so tough luck.”
Listening to the three of them, James felt that old sting of envy again.
Having siblings really is nice.
Thanks to his foster parents in the United States, he had come to know what parental love was, but the existence of siblings who had grown up together from childhood was a realm James could scarcely imagine.
“You’re a grown woman, and you still can’t say proper things?”
“Aah...”
Only then did Su-ji return to a demure manner.
“James, forget it. Erase it from your memory!”
“...Okay.”
Once the commotion settled, Jeong-ho asked the question he had been curious about.
“Hyung. Just how much money had you accumulated in the United States?”
“Yes. I was really curious too. How did you swallow TY Group in one bite...?”
With no reason to hide it, James told them plainly.
“When I decided to acquire a company in Korea, I was holding about 2 billion dollars...”
“Oh...”
“Oh...”
After that, he swallowed Choi Jeong-san’s hidden slush fund, and the investments he had made together with the club members were substantial as well.
“By the time the acquisition was done, it had grown to 7 billion dollars.”
“Gasp!”
“...Wow.”
“There were a lot of investments in between. Same as now.”
At James’s words, Su-ji’s head turned with a creak.
“W-wait, how much? 7 billion dollars?”
The total assets Su-ji had known James to have had stopped at 2 billion dollars.
“Did I not mention it?”
“No. You didn’t.”
“Must have slipped my mind.”
“There are things you forget and things you don’t!”
But James still thought of financial assets as nothing more than numbers.
“It’s not that important anyway.”
“How is that not important?”
“That kind of money doesn’t matter as much as you do, Su-ji.”
“......”
At James’s sudden, direct words, Su-ji blushed and clammed up. But Ju-ho latched onto the opening as if he had caught the perfect one.
“Ooooh. Hyung’s skill is insane. Su-ji lost. She lost.”
Jeong-ho added his own comment.
“No wonder the Su-ji who used to be so high and mighty fell for him so completely.”
“Hey, cut it out! Let’s liven the mood up a little, okay?”
Embarrassed, Su-ji raised her voice and ordered drinks.
“Can we get a round over here!”
After that, James took the lead in the drinking session.
“I worked as a magician in the United States... would you like to see something?”
“Huh?! Right, I saw that in the papers.”
“You said you worked in Las Vegas, didn’t you?”
As TY Telecom’s acquisition exposed James’s identity, his past activities had also been reported in the papers.
“My oppa’s magic is seriously incredible. You’ll be shocked when you see it.”
Su-ji was brimming with confidence.
“Let’s keep it simple and do a card trick.”
“Sounds good!”
“This should be fun.”
James held out both empty hands over the table, then turned his palm downward for an instant before flipping it back over.
Snap.
A deck of cards had appeared in his previously empty palm.
Ju-ho watched closely, trying to spot the trick, but he couldn’t begin to guess where the cards had come from.
“Whoa. Where did the cards...”
“All right. It’s a simple trick, so pick one card.”
Ju-ho studied the cards James had spread face down on the table, then picked one and pulled it out.
“I’ll take this one.”
“Keep it safe so I can’t take it back. My hands are so fast you might not even notice if I stole it.”
“Hmph. As if.”
Ju-ho clutched the card firmly and shoved it into his pocket, determined not to let it be taken.
Then James had Jeong-ho and Su-ji each choose a card as well.
Once the card selection was done, James touched the remaining deck and tilted his head.
“Huh?”
Su-ji thought, for the first time, that maybe James’s card trick had actually failed, and asked,
“Why? Did something go wrong?”
“Wow. This time I really got you. You took all my cards.”
“Huh?”
James looked at Jeong-ho and Ju-ho and said,
“I said I’d give you one each, but you took three each.”
Ju-ho was certain that couldn’t be true.
“I definitely only took one...”
But when Ju-ho pulled the hand out of his pocket and looked at the cards he’d taken out, there were three.
“...Huh?”
After Ju-ho, Jeong-ho pulled out his own card as well and only then realized he had three too.