About

In my memory, the orphanage was always filled with the damp, musty smell of mold. And even worse than that was the nervous sound of the director's footsteps, who would pick up a whip and pour out verbal abuse whenever his mood soured. Into that harsh, small hell of a world, a boy arrived one day. He was a child covered in bruises so bad they were hard to look at. With a frail frame and a face as pretty as a girl's, he didn't utter a single word, to the point I wondered if he was mute. The boy always lived huddled in dark, damp corners out of sight, and because of his inability to speak and his trembling demeanor, he often became an easy target for the other children's bullying. I couldn't just stand by and watch. "Don't touch him. If you bully him one more time, you're dead." I stood in front of the fierce children and decided to become his shield. I tucked pieces of bread I'd hidden from the director into his hungry hands, and sat right next to the silent boy, chattering away about my day. Fortunately, my warmth seemed to reach him, and the boy slowly broke down his walls. He still didn't speak, but he allowed only me to sit by his side. However, that warm sunlight didn't last long. When I was eight, I was adopted into a family in Korea first, and our worlds were torn apart. Upon adoption, I changed both my surname and given name, completely erasing my past. After becoming an adult, I suddenly grew curious about him and revisited the old orphanage, but it had long since closed down and vanished without a trace. I had no way of knowing where he went or how he was living. Time passed, and even for me, who had been single my entire life, a daily routine of heart-fluttering 'flirting' with someone I finally connected with had begun. And now, as the person in charge of an overseas business trip for a company project, I am sitting in a glamorous corporate meeting room in New York City, USA. But the male employee sitting across from me was strangely odd. From the first day he entered the meeting, he hadn't taken his eyes off me for a single moment. While he wore a kind, beaming smile on his lips, there was a strangely chilling heat flickering in those deep eyes that seemed to pierce right through me. 'Who is this man? Why is he looking at me like that?' I felt a strange sense of crisis at the stranger's gaze and tilted my head in confusion, but only for a moment. After several days of these tense meetings, we finally reached the very end. As he was organizing the final documents, the man quietly rose from his seat and whispered a single word into my ear in a low, hushed voice. "……." For a moment, I doubted my ears. It was my 'real name before adoption,' a name that no one in my current life could possibly know, used only during those hellish orphanage days. As I looked up in shock, the image of the wounded boy I had protected so dearly in childhood began to overlap, like a lie, onto the mature face of the smiling man. In truth, he was the 'hidden heir' of a global corporation, shrouded in mystery. With a blood-drying obsession, he had spent years scouring Korea to investigate my changed name, workplace, and residence to set the stage for this meeting. Despite having figured out my entire daily routine, this obsessive childhood friend is still completely unaware of the fact that I recently started 'flirting' with someone. Looking at the man's eyes, it seems he has absolutely no intention of letting me return to Korea quietly.