Moving?
"I am seriously stuffed!"
"Me too... I can barely move."
"Ice cream, and then a whole snack-bar feast on top of that...! We ate like royalty today! There is no way I can manage dinner once I get home!"
Yumi, Jiyu, and I all had mouths shining with grease. We had gone far too hard on the fried food at the snack bar—though, since I was the one who had ordered so much, we had still left some behind. Give us a little more time and we probably could have finished every last piece, but we were running up against our meeting and had no choice but to leave.
"Hana, take care, then!"
"Bye-bye!"
I sent Jiyu and Yumi off first, and watching them go left me a little envious. Maybe it was because I lived so far out, but getting home took forever. Forty minutes to nearly an hour by car did not even make sense. It was an absurdly long commute to school. I could always sleep at my second house, but that place was far too bleak.
With no one there but me, it felt as if a ghost might come creeping out at night. It was absolutely not because I had woken before dawn, been too scared to go to the bathroom, and cried. I slept alone when I stayed in the building, too!
I had sent the message from my phone. I had already texted her back at the snack bar, once we were done eating, but Maru still needed a little while to arrive. Until then I had no choice but to kill time at some random playground in a nearby apartment complex. If I had known it would turn out like this, I never would have sent Jiyu and Yumi off first...
Every so often I caught myself wishing everyone from our company would just move into the building in Seoul. They all lived in Seoul anyway, so would they not actually prefer it? Most of the employees lived there, after all. Driving all the way out to the edge of Gyeonggi Province had to be something of a nuisance, did it not?
"Hana!!!"
I saw Maru come pelting toward me from far off, completely out of breath. The moment I spotted her, I leapt off the swing and ran.
"Maru!!!"
Like a family reunited after years apart, she swept me into a fierce hug, then scooped me up and headed for the car.
"Did you have a blast with your friends today?"
"Yeah. We played a ton."
"Then let's go home!"
Being carried along in Maru's arms was happiness itself, though getting home would still take a while. I had not been going to school for long, but the thought of commuting like this—back and forth, the way other people went to work—for six whole years made the world go black before my eyes. I would have to tell the boss. I had put up with it until now, but I could not take it anymore.
There was the second house, of course, but sleeping there alone had started to frighten me. Get up at dawn to use the bathroom, and it felt as if a ghost would spring out of the dark. Maybe becoming a child had made me timid. I used to be someone who handled dark places just fine.
"We're moving the company building?"
"That's right. The chairman decided it, so I think Hana ought to be told as well."
After sending Hana back to her room, Maru heard something shocking in the office. Every employee in their office at the Starlight Research Institute—the entire department—was relocating to the building in Seoul.
"Then what about the researchers who were already here?"
She was curious what would become of the researchers working in this building. As a new hire, Maru was not particularly close with the institute staff. For one thing they worked on entirely different floors, and there was rarely any reason to see them. The employees on the tenth floor of the Starlight Research Institute did no research-related work at all. Their duties concerned Hana, and nothing else.
"The original research staff will probably just keep working here, won't they? They were already here long before Hana showed up."
Maru could not smother the joy rising in her. Driving from Seoul all the way out here was misery, and it was not that she disliked Hana, but those endless trips to and from school wore on her too. Three or four hours behind the wheel had become her everyday life. Move Hana to the building in Seoul, though, and that time would shrink dramatically.
From what she had heard, they were buying a building close to Starlight Elementary, which might cut the school run to about ten minutes by car. That was near enough to walk—not that anyone would ever actually let Hana walk.
"But we only go to Seoul if Hana wants to. If she says she doesn't want to go, we stay right here."
The department head said it with a faintly regretful look. The department head lived in Seoul as well, so transferring the workplace there would have been nothing but welcome. Paju sat far enough from the city that the trip in both directions was a bit much.
"Oh... is that so?"
Maru's heart hammered. They would move if Hana wanted to, but not knowing the girl's mind left a thread of anxiety in her. Still, Hana whined every single day about how inconvenient the long car ride to and from school was, so the odds of Seoul were high. Maru had been with her longer than any of the other staff.
She had even filed a report once about Hana complaining daily that the commute to Starlight Elementary took too long. Headquarters had probably caught on to how Hana felt, which was why they were moving her home this time. Living in Seoul herself, Maru prayed the girl would make a good choice.
"These are the buildings suitable for you to purchase, Chairman."
Kim Sehee studied the properties on the list her staff had brought, one by one. They were office towers in Seoul's station districts, and the prices were staggering. Even the cheapest building on the list sat in the six-hundred-billion-won range—hundreds of millions of dollars. Still, between the real estate she already held and a dividend drawn from what Starlight Food had earned, it was a sum she could comfortably bear.
Sixth daughter or not, distant as she was from succession in the Starlight Guild and its companies, she was a direct blood descendant of the guild. She had power enough. Of course, had Starlight Food not been thriving, she could not have bought any of them. There was no need to overextend. What would she even do with an office tower that large?
The Starlight Food she had run last year had been a modest midsize firm with no use whatsoever for a building of that scale. It would have been absurdly out of proportion, the wrapper dwarfing what it held. Operate a tower that huge out of a midsize company, and people would have laughed in her face. Now, though, the story was different. They finally had enough employees to justify a large office building.
"Hmm..."
From a list of dozens of towers, Kim Sehee pulled out the ones that caught her eye. The final decision, of course, would be Hana's. The buildings the staff had gathered were all much of a muchness, which made the girl's choice the one that mattered. Without the plants Hana had created, Starlight Food was a company that would go completely under in a single day.
It was hardly an exaggeration. Given everything they had already set in motion, lose the plants and bankruptcy would follow at once, leaving Kim Sehee penniless. So many contracts were already signed that the penalty clauses were no laughing matter—sums that even the child of a chaebol family could not cover. Not that any of that would ever actually come to pass.
Starlight Food's headquarters currently stood in Paju, placed there by Kim Sehee's own decision, born of nothing more than her desire to see Hana often. Now she meant to leave Paju for one of Seoul's districts, to be nearer the girl.
Judging by the locations, Gangnam or Seocho District looked the most promising. The buildings there stood close to Starlight Elementary, where Hana went to school. In any case, she herself was the majority shareholder of both Starlight Food and the research institute, free to handle them as she pleased. Moving headquarters was entirely hers to decide.
The employees would hardly object. Most of the people working at Starlight Food lived in Seoul. Given the nature of the company, which ran farms, they would still have to head out on frequent field assignments even with a headquarters in the city. But having the main office in Seoul was an extraordinary perk. Far better to return to a headquarters there after a hard day's labor than to drag themselves all the way out to Paju.
"Thank you for your work. You may go."
Kim Sehee dismissed the employee who had brought the list of buildings. She would spend the rest of the day doing nothing but choosing one for Hana. She could not know which building the girl would like, of course. Unable to step inside Hana's heart, she let a little regret slip free.
Should she simply take the whole stack and show it to Hana? She set the thought aside. The first cut had to be hers. Hana was still a child and would not know much about buildings. She was only a third grader, after all.
And so long as the main plants kept thriving without trouble, there was little to worry about even if Hana moved. They had stayed alive even during the stretch when she had vanished, so only if terrorism—or something truly beyond anyone's control—left the main plants withered or dead would they have to uproot her and move her all over again.