TW 2

Chapter 2

His smile seemed to brush away the dust that had gathered over the years.

Fragments of the past—memories she had forced herself to bury and press down—suddenly came flying back, one after another, striking her squarely in the forehead.

The afternoon sunlight spilling through the gymnasium windows.

The light sound of his sneakers going up and down the stairs.

And…

The feel of the letter she had never managed to give him, crumpled up and shoved into her pocket.

Standing face-to-face with that boy again, Danbi felt just as she had at seventeen.

Her breath caught.

Her vision blurred.

Every nerve in her body stood on edge, and even the pain of the chair digging into her back felt painfully clear. An emotion she couldn’t name hung from her heart like a heavy weight, dragging it downward.

Danbi stood at a crossroads.

He had acknowledged her first.

Should she acknowledge him back?

What would be the natural response here?

Oh, hey. Long time no see. How have you been?

No.

Wait.

Was she out of her mind? Speaking casually to her team manager?

Dozens of possible greetings flashed through her mind, but Danbi couldn’t bring herself to choose any of them.

She steadied herself.

They weren’t seventeen-year-olds in school uniforms anymore.

He was the team manager.

She was a member of his team.

The moment she allowed their personal history into their professional relationship, things would spiral into chaos.

And what if she casually said something as an old friend that rubbed him the wrong way?

Her livelihood could be on the line by tomorrow.

No.

Absolutely not.

Here, they could only be Manager Han Hae-il and team member Lee Danbi.

That was the cleanest—and, more importantly, the safest—way for her to handle this situation.

Her heart was still pounding wildly beyond her control, but Danbi desperately forced a calm expression onto her face.

She took a short breath and deliberately erased every trace of the past from her eyes.

Then she opened them wide and put on the most bewildered expression she could manage.

“Excuse me?”

At her genuinely confused-sounding response, one of his eyebrows twitched slightly.

Danbi let her gaze go unfocused, as though she were deliberately blurring the outlines of his face.

“What… do you mean?”

She tilted her head slightly and blinked twice.

That completed the perfect expression of someone who was polite, confused, and had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

For the briefest moment, something flickered in his eyes.

But it disappeared just as quickly.

He returned to his relaxed expression and let a faint smile curl across his lips.

“Ah. I must have mistaken you for someone else.”

His voice was gentle.

And yet his gaze slowly traveled over every feature of Danbi’s face.

A chill ran through her.

Before she knew it, her hands had curled into fists.

“I usually have a pretty good memory for faces, but…”

His eyes remained on her.

“You really look a lot like someone I know.”

There wasn’t the slightest trace of embarrassment on his face.

If anything, he looked directly at Danbi as though inviting her to search her own memory.

As though asking whether they might have crossed paths somewhere before.

But it wasn’t because he believed her act.

He had seen the line she had drawn between them perfectly clearly.

And without saying a word, he was letting her know that he was willing to play along.

Danbi felt a stab of guilt.

But she had already chosen to pretend.

Now all she could do was reinforce the lie.

“Ah, I hear that kind of thing a lot. I just have one of those really common faces, you know? Apparently, I look like everything. I’ve even been told I resemble random rocks lying on the ground. So I totally understand why you got confused.”

“Ha… ha…”

Her awkward laughter lingered in the conference room for a moment before sinking heavily into silence.

Only the dull fluorescent lights and the precarious quiet hanging between them filled the room.

Their eyes met briefly.

Then Danbi hurriedly lowered her gaze.

The connection broke.

Across from her, Hae-il’s smile seemed to deepen slightly.

“Really? Is a face like yours that common?”

“Oh, absolutely. Very common. My features are kind of vague, so… I look like this person, that person, the wall, the desk…”

She didn’t even know what she was saying anymore.

She simply couldn’t stand the suffocating silence.

So she kept rambling, waving one hand in front of her face as though that might somehow block his gaze.

It was a desperate attempt to avoid looking directly at him.

Hae-il rested his chin on his hand and stared at her.

When he leaned his elbow against the table, the expensive watch on his wrist slipped from beneath his sleeve and caught the cold fluorescent light.

The glint of it felt like a blade pressed against the back of Danbi’s neck.

“Fine.”

He paused.

“Then from now on, we’ll at least be familiar faces to each other.”

The way he emphasized familiar faces made Danbi freeze.

She looked at him with an expression that had gone completely stiff.

His eyes seemed to keep speaking to her.

Not to Lee Danbi, the employee sitting here now.

But to Lee Danbi at seventeen.

Danbi stubbornly ignored the signal.

She forced an awkward smile, careful not to let anything show.

Hae-il slowly smiled back without breaking eye contact.

Then, at last, he moved on to the real purpose of the meeting.

Thankfully, every question that followed was strictly work-related.

Danbi swallowed a sigh of relief.

Mechanical answers slipped from between her dry lips.

She carefully chose words that would make her sound as ordinary and boring as possible.

Every sentence was stripped completely of emotion.

Her heart was still jumping anxiously somewhere near her feet, but her voice never wavered.

The voice of Team Member Lee Danbi remained dry and flat.

Throughout the conversation, Hae-il’s gaze stayed on her face.

The corner of his mouth held a strange curve—something between a smile and a smirk.

Danbi did everything she could to avoid his eyes.

Her gaze drifted to the cooling cup of coffee on the table.

Then to the expensive watch around his wrist.

Then to the neatly tied knot of his tie.

Anywhere was fine.

Anywhere, as long as she didn’t have to look directly into his eyes.

But even when she avoided his gaze, the invisible pressure of his presence continued to tighten around her throat.

“I understand. Danbi.”

His voice remained calm.

“I’m still not familiar with the systems here, so if there’s anything I don’t know, I’d appreciate it if you could help me out a lot. You can head back now.”

Those were words Danbi had been desperate to hear.

“Of course, Manager Han! I look forward to working with you!”

She sprang to her feet as though she’d been waiting for permission.

After giving him a deep bow, Danbi fled the conference room so quickly that she might as well have been escaping.

The moment the door closed behind her, she violently released the breath she’d been holding.

It felt as though she had aged several years in the span of a few minutes.

Even as she dragged her heavy legs back toward the office, part of her senses remained trapped inside that conference room.

Trapped with the man sitting across from her.

Hey. Long time no see.

His soft voice refused to leave her ears.

His eyes had made it perfectly clear.

He knew exactly who she was.

He had seen through everything.

How ridiculous must her desperate act of pretending not to know him have looked?

Her heart pounded until it began to ache, tightening painfully in her chest.

She swallowed hard.

By the time Danbi returned to her desk, completely exhausted, her teammates were already waiting.

“Sunbae, what did the new manager say?”

“You were in there for quite a while. Did he give you some kind of skills test or make you solve an example problem?”

“No, nothing like that. We just talked about work. You know, the usual. Said we should look forward to working together and all that…”

Danbi forced the corners of her mouth upward.

The dark circles beneath her eyes, however, looked even darker than before.

Seeing how close to death she looked, Dongjun handed her one of the red ginseng sticks he had been saving.

Teammates were like comrades-in-arms.

When something went wrong, they were the people you stayed up all night with, fighting through the disaster together.

If one person collapsed, everyone else suffered.

So looking after one another’s health was practically a survival instinct.

Of course, underneath it all was the extremely selfish calculation of:

If you collapse, I’m the one who’s going to suffer.

Still, the sentiment was warm.

As Danbi slowly reached for the ginseng stick, impatient Dongjun simply tore the package open and put it directly into her mouth.

While Danbi listlessly sucked down the red ginseng extract, the team’s conversation naturally shifted to an evaluation of their new manager.

“Hey, even as another guy, I’ve got to admit it. He’s seriously handsome. And did you see that suit? With a face like that, he should at least be terrible at coding. Otherwise, it just doesn’t add up.”

The cologne.

The expensive watch.

The neatly swept-back hair.

The sharply tailored suit.

Even his perfectly straight neck and posture.

He definitely didn’t look like a typical developer.

“It’s probably because today was his first day. He dressed up for the occasion.”

Someone sighed dramatically.

“A team manager with a face like that… I used to watch dramas and complain about how unrealistic they were. Where in the world would you find a young, handsome team manager like that at an actual company?”

“Do you think he really got the job through connections?”

“With credentials like his, isn’t it stranger to accuse him of being a nepotism hire? And if he really is the CEO’s son, he doesn’t even look that much like him.”

Danbi remembered the family photograph she had once seen at his house.

Hae-il took after his mother.

His slightly uneven eyes.

His pale skin.

The way the corners of his mouth curled upward when he smiled.

Those all came from her.

“He was tall, though. The CEO is famous for being tall too, isn’t he?”

His build probably came from his father’s side.

The only son of LD, apparently assembled by taking nothing but the best traits from both sides of the family.

Even the kids from that neighborhood hadn’t dared mess with him.

He had always been someone who lived in a completely different world from hers.

“But think about it. If he really is the CEO’s son, the department head won’t be able to push him around. And he’ll probably protect us whenever ridiculous deadlines come down from above.”

The speaker nodded, increasingly convinced.

“Actually… now that I think about it, that sounds pretty great.”

“That’s not the problem. If he’s the CEO’s son, the moment he decides he doesn’t like you, your career is basically over.”

“Ah…”

“Please, please, please let him have a good personality. I’ll pray to Buddha, so you pray to God.”

“Jerusalem! Jesus! Hallelujah!”

Someone immediately clasped his hands.

“Glory, glory, hallelujah~ Please watch over this humble lamb and—”

“Namu Amitabha, Avalokiteshvara… I beg of you. I beg of you…”

The team members began clasping their hands together and offering desperate, completely nonsensical prayers.

If they had been praying for a successful deployment before releasing a program, Danbi might have gladly joined them.

But Danbi knew what Hae-il was like.

So she quietly continued sucking on her red ginseng.

It was a pointless prayer.

“They’re beneath my standards. I don’t even want to deal with them.”

“Isn’t it funny? Even people like that are someone’s precious children. They probably go home and hear things like, ‘My son is the best.’ Their parents are the problem. They fill their heads with confidence when they don’t even know their own place.”

Those sharp words from years ago suddenly echoed in Danbi’s ears.

Those eyes, filled with cold contempt.

That attitude, so thoroughly steeped in arrogance.

That boy is my team manager?

From now on, she would have to see his face every day.

Take instructions from him.

Maybe even have him review her code.

Just imagining it made her feel suffocated.

Unable to resist the sudden impulse, Danbi slammed her head down onto her desk.

Thud.

The impact made a dull sound, but she barely felt the pain.

All she felt was the overwhelming despair of wanting to erase this entire situation from existence.

At the sound, her teammates immediately redirected their prayers toward her.

“Father God, please don’t let our beloved sunbae submit her resignation…”

“Please let her still be fixing terrible code five years from now…”

“Don’t let her selfishly escape development all by herself…”

“I beg of you…”

“I beg of you…”

“May we all be fired together on the same day! After all, coding is the only thing we know how to do…”

It wasn’t particularly comforting.