First, Ji Wan covered the woman’s upper body, which was only wearing an inner top, with a suit jacket.

The woman’s fair skin, more dazzling than the white inner, caught his eye, causing him to quickly lower his gaze to the foot of the bed.

On the neatly folded sheet, red stains caught his attention.

He remembered the first item the woman bought when they went to the mart together a few days ago.

He had heard that some people experience severe menstrual pain.

Posts about muscle aches, headaches, and being unable to straighten one’s back, relying on painkillers, often appeared on the company’s blind bulletin board.

It was also the reason for introducing menstrual leave into the welfare system for female employees in the company.

He reached out and touched her forehead.

It’s hot.

As if all the heat in the room came from this small woman.

“Han Team Leader, tell Dr. Choi to come in immediately.”

Recognizing the seriousness of the situation, Woo Seok hurriedly opened the front door and left.

Unable to rummage through the woman’s dressing room, Ji Wan brought out one of his shirts. Even if the doctor came, she shouldn’t be naked.

He wrapped his arm around the woman’s bare waist, raised her upper body, and slipped her arms into the sleeves one by one.

Filling the oversized clothes with one small woman was no task at all, so dressing her wasn’t difficult, but the problem lay in buttoning it up.

Trying to button without looking, he kept fumbling to find the buttonholes, and avoiding that, the buttons kept getting fastened wrong.

Wondering what else he should do before Dr. Choi arrived, Ji Wan’s eyes fell on the sheet he had seen earlier as he looked around the room.

The vivid red bloodstains imprinted on it hurt as if they were wounds on his own flesh.

He wanted to clean it up, but thought it might upset the woman, yet if he left it, others would see it.

After deliberating, Ji Wan picked up Do Eum in his arms and walked towards his room.

He thought it would be better to move locations rather than not being able to touch the sheet.

The woman was small enough to fit entirely in one of his arms.

His gaze fell on the black hair cascading down below her drooping neck.

Unconsciously, he reached out and removed the strands of hair stuck to her white skin one by one.

He shouldn’t have told this woman, who could barely take care of herself, not to have any lingering feelings because nothing would change in our marriage.

This marriage was likely an unexpected downpour not just for him.

Suddenly she had a husband, moved to a new place, and her life changed.

It might have been an unreasonable demand to ask her not to be shaken at all in such a situation.

He should apologize.

But have I ever apologized before?

*****

“It seems she’s overworked, with lowered immunity and a cold on top of that.”

The attending physician, Dr. Choi, examined Do Eum’s peacefully sleeping face for a long time, then asked if she ate meals regularly, saying her nutritional state wasn’t good.

“Surely the CEO of Bando Construction wouldn’t starve his wife, but she’s too thin.”

Since the woman never ate together at the table set for him, he couldn’t confidently say he was doing well.

“I ask out of old woman’s worry, but is there any possibility of pregnancy…?”

“There isn’t.”

This question, more than the previous ones, was answered so quickly that Team Leader Han, who had been standing back a few steps, coughed, ahem ahem.

“This person, how can you be so certain? Newlyweds, young people in their prime, don’t make such bold claims. Don’t rush, the chairman in Anseo-dong is waiting so eagerly for a grandchild.”

Dr. Choi packed her medical bag and left the living room.

“You say there’s no possibility of pregnancy, so I’ll prescribe medicine. But just in case, if it is pregnancy…”

“No, that’s absolutely impossible.”

“Well, even if you say it’s impossible, I’ll tell you just in case, she needs to eat well. Whether pregnant or not, her body is very weak. If they know in Anseo-dong, they’ll come running with tonics right away.”

“Yes, we’ll do that.”

At the answer cutting off his words, Dr. Choi shook his head.

Though he answered nonchalantly, his face turning red up to his ears showed he was quite flustered.

“With this lack of flexibility, no wonder Chairman Jang’s heart is burning up. Don’t come out, I’ll go alone.”

“Team Leader Han will escort you.”

Woo Seok silently followed Dr. Choi.

*****

Long after the asphalt road ended, the black sedan that had been speeding down the unpaved road came to a stop in front of a concrete building.

Into the brightly lit car headlights stepped a middle-aged woman with her hair tied up – Ji Wan’s mother and the director of Choyeon Art Museum, Eun Hee.

Chairman Jang Ho Muk, in neat hanbok attire, stepped down onto the gravel-filled ground.

“You’ve come.”

The greeting was polite, but she didn’t approach too close to Chairman Jang.

Like a daughter-in-law addressing her mother-in-law, neither too friendly nor too distant, just the right distance.

The first time he saw Eun Hee was when she was twenty-four, as radiant as a flower.

Thinking it was love, even if it was a frivolous emotion, he gave her money, land, and even took her, but the young woman with nothing to her name refused to open her heart until the end.

Chairman Jang’s assumption that she would be cunning and calculating, being a woman who had blinded the eyes of a man with a proper family, was proven completely wrong.

In front of Myeong Han, who cried like a child saying he wanted to bring this person home, Eun Hee didn’t even blink.

It was a time when Madam Jang’s force was considerable, enough to make grown men tremble with just one shout.

“She says she’s pregnant. So, what is it that you want?”

Eun Hee, with a slender figure that no one would believe was pregnant if not for her slightly rounded belly, calmly replied.

“Nothing.”

There was already a proper wife, and in three months, the family’s first grandchild would be born.

To Chairman Jang, who believed the more good things the better, if she had asked for a business channel in exchange for adding another grandchild, he would have given it, and if she had asked for a building, he would have given that too.

But to say she wanted nothing without a word, that she would just give birth to the child and disappear.

She was clearly different from the women who clung to his son Myeong Han’s coattails.

The young woman who seemed like she would break before bending easily had now bowed her graying head as a woman in her early fifties.

“You must have had a hard journey coming all this way, Mother.”

“Don’t give me that lip service. I know you find it disagreeable that I keep coming here despite the troublesome journey.”

The only curator of Choyeon Art Museum, Ji Su, brought a cup of pu-erh tea to the table with distinct wood grain.

“Soon, Artist Eon Dong will release three pieces, they’ll be of unimaginable value being released as his days are numbered. One will go to Osaka, another to Germany. The remaining one will come here. Keep it.”

Tax evasion through artworks was a common practice in chaebol families.

It wasn’t difficult to pull off such deception, as it was impossible to know what paintings were bought for how much, and the privately owned collections of chaebol families were mixed indistinguishably with the collections of the museums they operated.

Artist Eon Dong was more famous abroad than domestically, with each piece fetching anywhere from hundreds of millions to billions of won.

“It’s too grand a piece for a small country gallery to possess.”

It was an outright rejection saying she didn’t want to be involved in dirty business.

“Do you think I’d play around with something like this?”

Chairman Jang lifted the pu-erh teacup to his lips.

The warmth on his fingertips seemed to flow down his spine, bringing a fleeting smile to his wrinkled lips.

For a long while, there was no conversation between the two.

“Tsk tsk, like mother, like son, so inflexible.”

With Chairman Jang’s tongue-clicking, the bamboo forest visible through the large window shook violently in the wind.

The summer in the sparsely populated forest was filled only with the sounds of unknown insects and passing winds, so silence fell between the two again.

“You gave birth to a pretty useful fellow and handed him over to me, so consider it a reward. You can think of it as a substitute for not being invited on the wedding day.”

It was the first compliment Chairman Jang had ever given about Ji Wan, who he usually just clicked his tongue at.

After presenting an artwork that would fetch tens of billions, and hundreds of billions in the future, as a gift, Chairman Jang rose from his seat.

“Are you leaving already?”

Eun Hee hurriedly followed the old man.

“Is the construction not finished, or is there no money? With the road all bumpy like that, how can one come with their head shaking?”

Only after giving this bitter remark to fix the unpaved road did Chairman Jang’s sedan disappear into the darkness.

Until even the sound of the car wheels faded away, the graying woman stood there for a long time in the pitch-black darkness.

*****

She opened her eyes.

Even after opening and closing her eyes several times, it was still dark.

Do Eum thought she was still in that room, repeatedly finding and losing memories as if sleeping alone.

‘Now, let’s stop sleeping and get up.’

As she turned her body, a towel fell from her forehead.

When she picked up the towel that had fallen to the floor with a thud, she saw the IV line inserted in her left arm and realized that the place where she had opened her eyes was Ji Wan’s room.

Do Eum just rolled her eyes and barely recalled her last memory.

She remembered taking off her wet clothes after washing, but had she put clothes back on?

Her head spun and she seemed to have collapsed onto the bed…

Suddenly, she recalled the red bloodstains on the pure white sheet.

‘Oh my goodness! Did I clean that up?’

Do Eum immediately pulled out the IV line and ran to her room at the end of the corridor.

She didn’t even notice Ji Wan watching her from his wide-open study door in the middle of the corridor.

Her running steps were unusually energetic, as if she had been hit by something.

Opening the door wide and seeing the neatly folded sheet at the foot of the bed, she let out a sigh of relief.

‘Ah, thank goodness.’

It meant at least no one had touched it.

“Why go to such lengths?”

Startled by the man’s voice that came without warning, Do Eum’s body jerked greatly.

“Oh my!”

Thud.

Ji Wan’s strong arm pulled in Do Eum’s swaying waist and embraced her.

The man’s chest, as hard as a garden stone, was fully felt on her back that had touched it by chance.

Thump thump thump.

It was fortunate that her heart was in front, not on her back.

“As soon as you came to your senses, you pulled out the IV line and ran here, is this such a big deal?”

Even while in Ji Wan’s embrace, her small feet fidgeted, pushing the folded sheet under the bed, then stopped abruptly.

“What, did you wet yourself? Or did you do something worse?”

Feeling Ji Wan’s gaze directed at the sheet she had pushed under, Do Eum’s face turned red.

‘He saw. This man already saw everything.’

With a faint sigh, Do Eum broke free from Ji Wan’s embrace.

‘I thought I hid it well. But it leaked, it leaked.’

Do Eum picked up the sheet, hugged it to her chest, and shouted.

“Did you see? Are you teasing me now after seeing it?”

Judging by her glaring white eyes and demeanor, it seemed her strength had recovered.

“Why are you so desperate to hide what a healthy adult woman naturally does? And what am I teasing about? I was well taught that it’s beautiful and sacred. So stop worrying about it.”

Embarrassed by his serious voice filled with reproach and concern, Do Eum put the sheet in the laundry basket and left the room.

“I wasn’t worried you might not have been taught! I just have, you know, privacy and things I don’t want to show…”

Do Eum trudged back into Ji Wan’s room, the corridor she had run down in a frenzy.