The Problematic Helper (Completed Main Story) - Chapter 16
First, Ji Wan covered the woman’s upper body with his suit jacket over her inner wear.
The woman’s fair skin, more dazzling than the white inner, caught his eye, so he hurriedly lowered his gaze to the foot of the bed.
On the neatly folded sheet, a red stain came into view.
He remembered the item the woman had bought first at the mart they visited together a few days ago.
He had heard that some people suffer from severe menstrual cramps.
Posts about muscle pain, headaches, and being unable to straighten their backs, relying only on painkillers, often appeared on the company’s anonymous Blind board.
This was also the reason menstrual leave had been introduced to the company’s welfare system for female employees.
He quietly reached out and touched her forehead.
It was hot.
The heat in the room seemed to be coming entirely from this small woman.
“Director Han, tell Dr. Choi to come in immediately.”
Realizing the seriousness of the situation, Woo Seok hurriedly opened the front door and stepped out.
Unable to rummage through the woman’s dressing room, Ji Wan brought one of his own shirts. Even when the family doctor arrived, she shouldn’t be half-naked.
He wrapped his arm around her bare waist, lifted her upper body, and slipped her arms one by one into the sleeves.
Fitting a small woman into an oversized shirt was no trouble at all, and dressing her wasn’t difficult, but the problem was buttoning it.
Trying not to look while buttoning meant he kept fumbling to find the holes, and trying to avoid that meant the buttons kept going into the wrong holes.
Wondering what else he should do before Dr. Choi arrived, Ji Wan glanced around the room and his eyes landed on the sheet he’d seen earlier.
The vivid red bloodstain soaked into it hurt him as if it were a wound on his own flesh.
If he cleaned it up, she might feel bad, but if he left it, others would see it.
After hesitating, Ji Wan suddenly scooped Do Um into his arms and carried her to his own room.
If he couldn’t touch the sheet, it was better to simply move locations.
She was small enough to fit perfectly in just one of his arms.
His gaze fell on the black hair cascading messily down below her limp neck.
Without thinking, he reached out and gently removed strand by strand the hair stuck to her pale skin.
To a woman who could barely take care of herself, he shouldn’t have said that nothing would change in their marriage and told her not to have any lingering attachments.
This marriage being an unexpected downpour wasn’t just for him.
Suddenly having a husband, moving to a new place, her life completely changed.
Asking her not to be shaken at all by that might have been an absurd demand.
He should apologize.
But had he ever apologized before?
*****
“It looks like exhaustion lowered her immunity and she caught a cold on top of it.”
The family doctor, Dr. Choi, examined Do Um’s sleeping face for a long time before saying her nutritional condition wasn’t good and asking if she was eating meals on time.
“Would the CEO of Bando Construction ever starve his wife? But she’s too thin.”
Since the woman never ate with him at the table set for him, he couldn’t confidently say she was doing well.
“Just to be sure, is there any chance of… pregnancy?”
“No, there isn’t.”
This answer came much faster than the previous one, and Director Han, standing a few steps back, cleared his throat awkwardly.
“This person too, why so certain? Newlyweds, young and full of vigor—don’t make bold claims like that. Hurry up instead. The great Chairman in Anseo-dong is waiting so eagerly for a grandchild.”
Dr. Choi picked up his medical bag and headed to the living room.
“Since pregnancy is impossible, I’ll prescribe medicine. But just in case, if she were pregnant…”
“No, that will absolutely not happen.”
“Fine, even if it won’t happen, I’m just saying—you need to eat well. Pregnant or not, her body is very weak right now. If they find out in Anseo-dong, they’ll come rushing with tonics right away.”
“Yes, alright.”
At the answer that cut his words short, Dr. Choi shook his head.
Though he answered casually, his face was red to the ears—he seemed quite flustered.
“So inflexible, no wonder Chairwoman Jang’s heart burns with worry. Don’t see me out, I’ll go alone.”
“Director Han will see you out.”
Woo Seok silently followed behind Dr. Choi.
*****
After the asphalt road ended, the black sedan sped for a long while on an unpaved road before stopping in front of a concrete building.
Into the bright beam of the car headlights stepped a middle-aged woman with her hair tied up—Ji Wan’s mother and director of Choyeong Art Museum, Eun Hee.
Chairwoman Jang Ho Mook stepped down onto the gravel floor in a neat hanbok.
“You’ve come.”
Her greeting was polite, but she did not approach Chairwoman Jang closely.
It was exactly the right distance—neither overly warm nor distant, as a daughter-in-law should treat her mother-in-law.
The first time she saw Eun Hee was when the woman was twenty-four, in the full bloom of youth.
She had given money and land, thinking even cheap affection was love, and eventually possessed her, yet the young girl with nothing stubbornly refused to open her heart.
Chairwoman Jang had assumed a woman who blinded a married man would be cunning and shameless, but that assumption was spectacularly wrong.
In front of Myeong Han, who cried like a child saying he wanted to bring this woman home, Eun Hee didn’t blink an eye.
It was a time when Chairwoman Jang’s presence alone could make grown men tremble.
“She says she’s pregnant. Fine, what do you want?”
If not for the slightly rounded belly, no one would believe the slender Eun Hee was pregnant. She answered calmly.
“Nothing.”
There was already a legitimate wife, and in three months the firstborn grandson would be born.
To Chairwoman Jang, who believed the more good things the better, if she asked for one business or one building in exchange for an extra grandchild, she would have given it.
Yet she said she wanted nothing—just to give birth and disappear.
It was a completely different path from the women who clung to her son Myeong Han’s legs.
The once young and unyielding woman had now grown old, her hair turning white.
“You must be tired from the long journey, Mother.”
“Spare me the pretty words. You dislike that I keep coming here despite the difficult road—I know that very well.”
The only curator of Choyeong Art Museum, Ji Soo, brought a cup of pu-erh tea to the table with its visible wood grain.
“Soon, Painter Eondong will release three works. Since they’re being released near the end of his life, their value will be beyond imagination. One will go to Osaka, another to Germany. The remaining one will come here. Keep it.”
Using artwork for tax evasion among chaebol families was an open secret.
No one could tell how much a painting was bought for, and since privately owned collections mixed indistinguishably with museum collections, such deception was hardly difficult.
Painter Eondong was more famous abroad than in Korea, with each work priced from hundreds of millions to tens of billions of won.
“It’s too grand a piece for a small rural gallery to possess.”
A flat refusal—she did not wish to be involved in dirty dealings.
“Do you think I’d play tricks with this?”
Chairwoman Jang lifted the teacup to her lips.
The warmth rising to her fingertips flowed down her spine, and a faint smile appeared on her wrinkled mouth.
For a long while, neither spoke.
“Tsk tsk, like mother like son—both so inflexible.”
With Chairwoman Jang’s tongue click, beyond the large window the bamboo forest swayed noisily in the wind.
Summer in this secluded forest consisted only of nameless insect chirps and passing breezes, so silence returned between the two.
“You gave birth to a fairly useful fellow and placed him in my path, so take this as a reward. Or consider it compensation for not being invited to the wedding.”
[A fairly useful fellow.]It was the first time Chairwoman Jang, who always clicked her tongue at Ji Wan, had ever praised him.
She offered a gift worth billions—eventually tens of billions—and rose from her seat.
“Leaving already?”
Eun Hee hurriedly followed the old woman.
“Is the construction not finished, or is there no money? With the road in that state, how can anyone come without their head shaking?”
After finally scolding about fixing the unpaved road, Chairwoman Jang’s sedan disappeared into the darkness.
The middle-aged woman stood in the pitch-black darkness until even the sound of the car wheels faded completely.
*****
She opened her eyes.
No matter how many times she opened and closed them, the darkness remained.
As if sleeping alone, she had fainted, so Do Um thought she was repeatedly finding and losing memories in the same room.
‘Now, stop sleeping and get up.’
The moment she turned over, the cloth on her forehead fell.
Thud. Picking up the cloth that had fallen to the floor, she saw the IV line in her left arm and finally realized she had woken up in Ji Wan’s room.
Do Um rolled only her eyes and barely retrieved her last memory.
She remembered coming out of the shower and taking off her wet clothes… but did she put clothes back on?
Her head had spun and she collapsed onto the bed…
Then suddenly, the red bloodstain on the pure white sheet came to mind.
‘Oh no! Did I clean that up?’
Do Um yanked out the IV line and ran out of the room, dashing down the hallway to her own room.
Halfway down the hall, she didn’t even notice the wide-open door to the man’s study or that Ji Wan might be watching her from inside.
Whatever had hit her, her running steps were unusually energetic.
She flung open her bedroom door and saw the neatly folded sheet at the foot of the bed, letting out a huge sigh of relief.
‘Phew, thank goodness.’
At least no one had touched it.
“Why are you going this far?”
Startled by the man’s voice without warning, Do Um’s body jumped.
“Mom!!”
Thud.
Ji Wan’s firm arm caught the staggering Do Um around the waist and pulled her in.
The man’s chest, as hard as garden stone, pressed fully against her back.
Thump thump thump.
Thank goodness her heart was in the front, not the back.
“As soon as you regain consciousness you rip out the IV and run here—was this really worth all that?”
Even while held in Ji Wan’s arms, her small feet fidgeted, trying to push the folded sheet under the bed, then froze.
“What, did you pee? Or something even worse?”
Feeling Ji Wan’s gaze follow hers down to the sheet she was pushing, Do Um’s face flushed red.
‘He saw it. This man already saw everything.’
With a soft sigh, Do Um slipped out of Ji Wan’s arms.
‘I thought I hid it well. Failed, completely failed.’
Do Um grabbed the sheet, clutched it to her chest, and yelled.
“You saw it? You saw and now you’re teasing me?”
Judging by her fierce, glaring eyes, her strength had returned.
“Why get so worked up over something a healthy adult woman naturally does? What is there to tease? I was taught it’s beautiful and sacred. So stop worrying about it.”
At the serious voice filled with both reproach and concern, Do Um felt unnecessarily embarrassed, tossed the sheet into the laundry basket, and left the room.
“I wasn’t worried you’d be ignorant! I also have, you know, privacy and things I don’t want seen…”
Muttering, Do Um trudged back down the hallway she had sprinted through and entered Ji Wan’s room.
Male lead reborn without memories — but he still falls for her.
The person he finds displeasing in this life turns out to be his cherished wife-master in previous life…
Xie Zhi and Fang Xianxing who had known each other for less than three days through a blind date sat in the same car in front of the civil affairs bureau. They had a disagreement and failed to get married.
Xie Zhi immediately took out his phone, slid through his contacts, and randomly selected the next marriage candidate.
The woman snatched his phone and hung up. Looking at his phone wallpaper, she awkwardly changed the subject: “An ancient painting, eh? It looks pretty good, it’s just that the person in the painting looks a bit like me.”
When he heard this, he sarcastically mocked her for being so delusional, completely unaware that, the person in front of him was the reincarnation of Wen Ru, the famous prime minister of Yuan Shun whom he most admired…
The female CEO who doesn’t want to get married with a divorce agreement in hand × The male archaeological researcher who will only get married if he’s sure he can get divorced
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