I thought the large piano in his master room was just for decoration. I had never seen him sitting at the piano, let alone playing it.

But now, Seo Jun was captivating So Yeon’s eyes and ears, showing that this was not the case.

What on earth couldn’t this man do? She thought his fingers were just pretty, but his hands played the piano at a professional level.

It was nearing the end of Seo Jun’s first performance.

A waiter approached with a trolley tray, placing a dessert plate on the table, followed by handing So Yeon a bouquet of 108 roses.

Inside the bouquet was a card the size of a palm.

As the waiter retreated, So Yeon checked the contents of the card first. At the top of the opened card was a laminated note with handwriting similar to her own, and at the bottom was another handwritten message.

As Seo Jun’s piano playing gently tapped her auditory senses, So Yeon carefully read the card from top to bottom.

“Be happy wherever and whenever. I’ll take away your sorrows and pains. I’ll become a happy person too. Mr. Tae Seo Jun… goodbye.”

“This, this is…!”

Isn’t this the note I left him on the day we first met! He’s kept it all this time?

But that wasn’t all. At the bottom of the card was his response to her note.

“Hello, you like it! You don’t know how my heart has been burning black all this time because you kept running away? What you took wasn’t my pain and sorrow, but things very precious to me. Among them, Eom So Yeon was the most precious. I want to scold you harshly for that, but know that I’ve let it slide thanks to Hyun Woo. So Eom So Yeon, just be happy by my side now. And I still have more to say, but I’ll have to tell you that myself.”

So Yeon could almost hear Tae Seo Jun’s voice from his neat handwriting. When So Yeon finished reading the card and looked at Seo Jun with dazed eyes, he had already risen from the piano bench and was standing in front of her.

“What are you, no, I mean, this note is what I…”

It seemed like a proposal, but So Yeon, whose mind was in a whirl, couldn’t quite grasp the situation and stammered incoherently.

What stopped her trembling voice was Seo Jun’s soft voice.

“I love you, Eom So Yeon. I will love only you forever.”

“…!”

So Yeon’s clear pupils, which had been wandering helplessly, stopped on Seo Jun’s face as he professed his love.

“This means that.”

He was a man who was very fast at everything he did. Seo Jun fastened something around So Yeon’s neck with a click.

So Yeon realized there was a sparkling jewel on her neck as she felt the accessory being fastened. Her eyes, looking down at it, perfectly reflected the dazzling brilliance emanating from the diamond.

“When did you…”

The jewel emitting a lustrous light was incredibly beautiful, but the overall heart shape of the pendant, imagining Tae Seo Jun thinking only of her while choosing it, stirred a deep emotion that touched So Yeon’s tear ducts.

Seo Jun wiped So Yeon’s tears with his thumb. However, his following words only stimulated her tear ducts more.

“Oh no. I’ll do even more from now on. Try running away again because you’re tired of me loving you too much. I’ll search the earth like combing through hair and definitely catch you.”

Tae Seo Jun’s sudden and direct confession was as intense as a predator striking with its front paws. But the hidden meaning was sweet enough to melt the heart in an instant.

“Why are you making it impossible for me not to cry? Why would I run away? I won’t do that anymore… sob…”

So Yeon cried loudly.

Every time she gave up first, it was self-defense, thinking that loving him less before loving him more would hurt less. But that paled in comparison to crying because she missed him so much, crying thinking she might never see him again, crying even though she had firmly decided not to cry. She cried every time because of Tae Seo Jun.

Because she thought it was a love that could never come true.

But the tears flowing now were the opposite of those sad tears back then. It was crying that burst out of joy, being able to love Tae Seo Jun to her heart’s content and being loved by him fully.

“I didn’t like it either. Turning my back on you. Moving away from you. How much do you think my heart hurt having to leave…”

So Yeon spoke intermittently in a tear-soaked voice. The story he didn’t know because she hadn’t been honest.

“You shouldn’t have left. You should have told me your feelings.”

“How could I do that? Who is Tae Seo Jun? To me, you were a tree I could never climb.”

As So Yeon spoke, swallowing the tears pooled on her lips, Seo Jun’s black pupils trembled finely, spewing out regret.

“That’s your problem. Why do you underestimate yourself?”

“Then if I had said I liked you on the day we first met, would you have seen me as normal?”

“Then what about me? What about me who liked you from the moment I first saw you?”

“I guess we weren’t normal. Both of us.”

Seo Jun, who had closed his mouth for a moment, burst into a dejected laugh, and So Yeon smiled faintly.

Seo Jun pulled So Yeon into his arms and cradled her small, round back of the head. And he finally found the scar hidden in her long, glossy hair and traced it with his fingertips.

The scar he was touching now was a trace of the terrible accident that had caused Eom So Yeon to hover between life and death because of him, a scar that had formed because he couldn’t protect her. Unable to explain his apologetic and complicated feelings, Seo Jun only reddened his eyes.

“But you still like me.”

“Yes. Not just like, but tremendously.”

Despite crying, her answer was strikingly determined. Moreover, she smiled prettily with her red nose and eyes brimming with tears.

“I hope you’ll continue to be like that.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll stick to Tae Seo Jun like gum for the rest of my life, until you’re sick of me.”

Satisfied with So Yeon’s words, Seo Jun smiled and said playfully,

“Please do that. Stick close to me. Even if you become ugly with puffy eyes from crying so much.”

“Do you like me that much?”

“Won’t my beauty stand out more with an uglier Eom So Yeon by my side?”

“Are you going to keep teasing me?”

“What can I do when teasing Eom So Yeon is the most fun?”

At his mischievous words, So Yeon’s tear-stained eyes narrowed sharply.

“I hate you!”

“Really?”

“Of course I’m lying.”

“Heh…”

Seo Jun chuckled.

Liar Eom So Yeon, his heart, struck by his woman’s lovableness, was unbearably ticklish.

It was an afternoon when the autumn sunlight was particularly bright.

Inmates in yellow prison uniforms filed out into the prison yard. It was sunbathing time, so everyone gathered in small groups in the center of the stands, but Jung Hwa refused to mix with them, curling up alone in a corner at the end of the steps.

A moment later, a female guard approached with quiet, quick steps and called out Jung Hwa’s inmate number.

“Number 574, you have a visitor.”

“……”

Jung Hwa lifted her empty eyes and then stood up, silently following the guard.

It was her third day here. With no family or relatives, and even close acquaintances turning their backs on her as if she were a stranger before the trial was even over, it was completely unexpected that someone would come to see her.

Jung Hwa entered the visiting room with a numb expression, having lost all hope, and couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw the person in front of her. The person who claimed to be her mother, whom she had last seen at her father’s funeral. Just like then, she sat there looking at her with a refined appearance.

As Jung Hwa sat down across the glass partition, her birth mother, Song Ji Young, softly uttered her daughter’s name.

“Mi Gyeo… no, Jung Hwa…”

Almost saying “Mi Kyung,” Ji Young quickly corrected herself and took in her daughter’s appearance for a long moment. Thinking that her mother’s affectionate gaze was probably pity, Jung Hwa disliked it and deliberately spoke coldly.

“Why did you come here?”

“A mother came to see her daughter, what’s wrong with that?”

“Huh… Now you’re a mother?”

Jung Hwa let out a scornful laugh followed by a retort.

Mom disappeared when I was 8 years old. After that, how many years did I live under my father’s abuse, simultaneously receiving scorn and pity from the neighbors? Who was it that left me in that hellish pit?

The person who claimed to be my mother left home and didn’t care about the child she abandoned for twenty years until now.

Why on earth would someone who’s been living well with her remarried husband appear now, calling herself a mother, when her daughter has lost everything? As Jung Hwa poured out that resentment with a cold gaze, Ji Young slowly opened her lips, which had been trembling.

“…I had blood cancer. If I had continued living with your father, I probably would have died without even receiving treatment. I left the house to survive, not to abandon you. I couldn’t take care of you in that condition, so I had no choice but to leave alone… But it seems I wasn’t destined to die, as my condition gradually improved. The hometown friend who helped me in every way then is now my husband.”

No matter what the situation, knowing full well what kind of person her father was, wasn’t leaving her young daughter behind the same as abandoning her?

“Why didn’t you just kill me before you left? What that crazy person did to me…”

Yoo Byung Hwan forced his daughter to do exactly what he had done to her. Making her work as a housekeeper for his company’s president just to look good. Who would have thought a father would make his own daughter do such a thing?

“Actually, I would drop everything and rush to wherever you were, whether it was a fan signing or a filming location. I missed you so much that I had to see you like that. That’s how I went to your trial too. No matter how bad a person is, I never thought he would do that to you… I don’t know about anything else, but I’m going to appeal your father’s accident case.”

How devastated she was when she heard her daughter’s testimony during the trial. Ji Young brought up that story that she could hardly speak of directly.

“I may not understand others, but I fully understand why you did what you did. I haven’t forgiven your father yet either. One day I saw your beautiful face on TV, and I thought you had grown up well. But…”

That wasn’t the case. She had secretly attended Yoo Byung Hwan’s funeral out of gratitude for at least taking good care of you, but that wasn’t it. So how could she, with all her sins, appear before her daughter? But Ji Young came because she wanted to convey this message no matter what.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. But Jung Hwa, this mother has never forgotten you for a moment.”

Though it wasn’t worth responding to, Jung Hwa, feeling too wronged about the time she lived like an orphan without a mother, shouted angrily.

“Why are you making such meaningless excuses now! Is it because I’ve become miserable that you want to play the role of a mother now? Is that how you want to ease your guilty conscience? I don’t need any of it, so don’t ever appear in front of me again!”

Jung Hwa yelled angrily, turning her gaze to the side and staring at the visiting room door. As if she might dash out of there at any moment. It was then that her mother’s sad voice was heard.

“I love you… Jung Hwa…”

“…!”

“I love you…”

“……”

“I love you…”

The moment she heard her mother’s love, which she had never felt or heard in her entire life, Jung Hwa’s eyes wavered. And as those words kept coming, the harsh energy in her eyes crumbled in an instant.

“Sob…”

She had always thought she was alone, but that wasn’t the case.

That fact couldn’t change the reality that everything had fallen apart and only darkness remained in her life, but it felt like a ray of light seeping into the shadows, warmly caressing the frozen ground.

“…You should go now.”

Jung Hwa, wiping her wet eyes with her sleeve as if she had never cried, stood up, and Ji Young, who had been staring at her pitiful daughter endlessly, shed tears of regret.

“Alright. I’ll just watch you go in and then leave…”

Jung Hwa, who had taken a few steps towards the door, turned back at her mother’s tear-soaked voice.

“Um…”

“Yes, Jung Hwa…”

Ji Young fixed her affectionate gaze on her daughter’s gaunt face, as if telling her to say anything.

“Will you come again?”

“Sob… Of course! Why are you asking something so obvious? If it’s okay with you, I’ll come here every day.”

“Even if I can’t get out at all or it’s a very long time from now, will you wait until I get out of here?”

“Of course, of course… This mother will wait for you anytime.”

“……”

Step, step… Clack!

As soon as her mother finished speaking, Jung Hwa left the visiting room without replying and walked down the long corridor of the prison. The warm expression of her mother, who seemed willing to do anything she asked, kept lingering before her eyes. She paused for a moment and gazed at the bright sunlight shining through the iron bars.

She had wanted to be loved by everyone but ultimately failed to gain that love. But there was someone who loved her fiercely.

Even if everyone pointed fingers at her calling her a bad seed, even if she cursed herself as a bad woman, there was one person who could never do that, and it seems she had forgotten that all this time.

My eternal ally… I have a mother too.

Just with that thought, Jung Hwa felt like her completely blocked airways were finally opening up a bit.

“Hah…”

At last, a deep sigh escaped through her teeth.

It was the most comfortable breath she had ever taken since being born into this world.