The Grand Temptation (Completed Main Story) - Chapter 84

Listening to Aide Kim’s words, Yuli carefully opened the book.

Maybe somewhere in its pages lay a trace of her mother, So Yeon. Her mother wouldn’t have expressed it overtly, but perhaps there was something nonetheless?

[Aide Kim said it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to meet Congressman Jung Tae Hyuk once.]

At Aide Kim’s continuing words, Yuli quietly nodded. Assemblyman Chae was right. She did want to meet Congressman Jung in person, just once.

In the end, she changed her mind and decided to attend. After hanging up the phone, Yuli quickly skimmed through the book.

Since it was still work hours, she couldn’t read thoroughly—only hastily glancing over the contents. Most of it described how he’d become involved in student activism and what had driven him into politics.

The personal sections only recounted his impoverished childhood and the anecdote of how he’d met his current wife. Yet even so, Yuli easily found traces of her mother, So Yeon.

Congressman Jung Tae Hyuk, who’d lost his father early and grown up with only his mother, wrote that due to his difficult circumstances, he’d never even dreamed of having a birthday party.

In his sixth year of elementary school, when even seaweed soup with beef was out of reach, fried shrimp appeared on his birthday table—freshly cooked, crispy fried prawns made from live king prawns, no less.

His family had been so poor they couldn’t even afford pork in their kimchi stew, so young Jung Tae Hyuk was utterly astonished. Only later did he learn that his mother had gone to the predawn fish market to do odd jobs and brought back those very prawns.

Though she must have been exhausted from housekeeping all day, his mother had still gone out to work before dawn just for her son. In his autobiography, Congressman Jung wrote that he’d cried, overwhelmed by his mother’s immense love.

“Huh.”

Yuli let out a quiet sigh as she closed the book.

—Do you think it’s easy to clean and fry each live shrimp one by one? Maybe once or twice is doable, but doing it constantly—that takes real love.

At first, Yuli had denied those words when Jae Ho told them to her, but gradually, she’d begun to wonder: maybe, just maybe, her mother had loved her father a little after all. But it seemed that hope had been in vain.

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