PHUW 71

On nights when he had that same nightmare again, he didn’t even have the courage to walk outside in the dark, even with Gom-i. After agonizing for a while, he finally put off going home and spread out a spot to sleep in the convenience store’s storage room until morning. The next day, when he told the owner, the owner said lately he also found the night streets frightening, and if it was fine with him, he could sleep in the storage room anytime. He even brought over a folding bed from his own house.

He put a GPS tracker for pets on Gom-i and kept watch. It wasn’t as if Gom-i went far on his walks. He just wandered near the yard of the cafe across the street. Worried he might have eaten rat poison, he checked the area thoroughly during the day, but there was nothing dangerous. Instead, there was a bowl of food for stray cats. That had to be what was drawing him at night.

“Hey. Are you so hard up for food that you’re stealing meals from poor cats on the street? Do I not feed you? Do I not give you treats? Do I not give you chews? No wonder you keep gaining weight even with all the walking. A dog stealing cat food will get fat.”

He scolded him and switched him right away to diet kibble. And every time Gom-i came back from outside having eaten something, he got furious at him. Bit by bit, Gom-i stopped sneaking cat food, and soon he wasn’t eating anything given by strangers. But once in a while, he smacked his lips as if remembering it. It was suspicious, but he let it slide.

Since he scolded him so often, he let Gom-i walk whichever way he wanted on their walks. Normally he preferred going up the mountain, but today he headed toward the campsite. Haeri let him go to see how far he would go, but Gom-i didn’t stop and kept walking straight ahead.

Soon they came to a familiar place. It was near the dog training center and shelter Jeong Mok had been building. Haeri’s heart pounded, and his body stiffened slightly. Unlike him, Gom-i was absorbed in sniffing new scents.

Haeri thought about turning back. But Gom-i caught some scent that caught his attention, and he dragged his nose across the ground. He was so focused that even when Haeri asked what he was looking for, he didn’t look up. The leash was pulled tight as he forced his way forward, and Haeri eventually gave up.

When they reached the construction site, Gom-i finally lifted his head and stared at it. The blue delivery truck wasn’t there.

“They’ve almost finished.”

Last time, only the framework was up. Now, the door frames were in place and the tiling was finished. It looked close to completion.

Gom-i, curious about the site, kept trying to go inside. Even when Haeri told him to stop since they’d just be in the way, he wouldn’t budge. Instead, he lost interest in the walk and kept circling near the site.

“Huh?”

A man coming out of the building recognized Haeri.

“You came before, right?”

He looked familiar. He had said he was the foreman.

“Hello.”

Haeri bowed his head, and the foreman leaned out and peered around over his shoulder. Haeri turned too. No one else was there.

“Are you looking for someone?”

“You came alone? Where’s Director Jeong?”

The foreman answered his question with another.

“I didn’t come with him. Isn’t he here?”

“No. Not here.”

“Oh, I see.”

“And you came without even knowing that?”

First he asked if he came together, then he mocked him. He had always disliked this man without reason. Jeong Mok had been particularly cold to the foreman too.

“How would I know where he goes every time.”

“You said you lived together, and you don’t even know?”

“We moved, we don’t live together anymore.”

“Really? Well, that makes sense. Commuting from there would be a pain. It’s not like he’s short on money either.”

The foreman nodded to himself, then let out a small laugh.

Haeri felt that same odd feeling as before, like when he had met that old man who knew Janggun. The talk moved as if both of them were skipping over something they both knew.

“I should’ve realized when that uptight guy said he had business and wouldn’t be coming for a while. Someone else came instead. I thought he’d be better than Director Jeong, but he was much worse. I can’t deal with those Hyeonsan people.”

“Hyeonsan…?”

The subject veered off strangely.

“You don’t know Hyeonsan Construction?”

“Of course I know Hyeonsan. You mean this project is theirs?”

“The one funding it is from Hyeonsan.”

But there wasn’t a single Hyeonsan logo anywhere at the site. He also remembered Jeong Mok telling him that he had personally designed and supervised the project. He had said the investor was his cousin.

“What? So his relative works at Hyeonsan?”

Muttering to himself, Haeri heard the foreman snicker again.

“Where else would the nephew of the Hyeonsan chairwoman work if not at Hyeonsan? When I saw him wandering around in shabby clothes like some stray, I thought maybe he was some family outcast, but turns out he wasn’t.”

“What?”

Haeri was startled.

“The nephew of the Hyeonsan chairwoman?”

What nonsense was this. Just then, Gom-i was pulling weeds and chewing on them, so Haeri quickly pried his mouth open and yanked them out.

“Why are you so surprised? You think I wouldn’t know? I’ve been doing construction labor for thirty years. Maybe I don’t know other companies, but I know the faces of everyone in construction. Jeong Mok. Father, Jeong Yeongil. Mother, Noh Heejae. Aunt, Noh Seongjae, the Hyeonsan chairwoman.”

He had no idea. His jaw dropped, and his eyes went wide. The passing breeze dried his mouth, and even his eyes stung.

“You really didn’t know? You lived with him.”

The foreman looked at him with suspicion, assuming of course that he knew. That was when Haeri remembered how Jeong Mok had once brushed it off by saying he was just a younger brother.

“Oh. Well. Haha.”

So Haeri also laughed awkwardly and glossed it over.

“You thought keeping quiet from others meant I wouldn’t know? What, you think I’m stupid?”

The foreman gave him a scolding look. He assumed Haeri was pretending not to know. Haeri was annoyed, but if he said seriously that he didn’t know, the man would only make a bigger fuss, so he held it in.

“Of course not.”

He laughed it off as if it was nothing.

Woof!

All of a sudden Gom-i barked. Haeri and the foreman turned their heads at the same time. A worker stepped out from behind the van that had been carrying laborers.

“Hey Jang. You disappeared for a while, what were you doing back there?”

“I was sleepy so I had a cup of coffee and a smoke.”

He lifted an empty paper cup and stuffed in the cigarette butt he had just finished. Then he glanced carefully at Haeri before slowly walking back toward the building.

“You really can’t take your eyes off them even for a moment. Easy money doesn’t exist.”

The foreman snapped, making sure Haeri heard, then went back into the building.

After that, Haeri half-forced Gom-i, who didn’t want to leave the site, to head home.

As soon as he got inside, he pulled out his phone and searched the news.

Hyeonsan Jeong Mok.

The last time he had searched for Jeong Mok, the only result had been some trendy monk. This time it was different. There were floods of articles about Vice Chairman Jeong Mok, suddenly rising as the new face of Hyeonsan Group. The faint hope that it might be someone with the same name was smashed by the photo in the article thumbnail.

Even from a picture the size of a fingernail, there was no mistaking it. It was Jeong Mok. The man who had lived with Haeri, always wearing plain T-shirts and track pants.

He had always looked good in anything because of his build. But now, dressed in a luxury three-piece suit, he was on another level. At a glance he looked like someone from a different world.

“It’s really him.”

He didn’t feel like reading any more. He dropped his phone with a thud and sprawled on the floor.

“Ha. Unbelievable.”

He let out a laugh that was half a sigh, then rolled across the cold living room floor and clung to Gom-i.

Gom-i, sulking because he hadn’t been able to finish his walk, slapped his tail on the floor. Normally Haeri would have soothed him, but this time his own mood was too low. Whether Gom-i liked it or not, he pulled the dog’s thick body into his arms.

“Even when I think about it again, it’s real.”

Empty sighs kept escaping him.

Looking back, he realized he didn’t know a single thing about Jeong Mok.

‘Did he cover it up on purpose, thinking I’d cling to him if I knew he was a chaebol?’

Come to think of it, with Song-i too, he had deliberately left it vague so it could be misunderstood as a girlfriend.

“His personality is really… really so damn strange.”

He twisted Gom-i’s fur for no reason.

What kind of person did he think he was, to treat him like that? Haeri fully understood why the foreman had found him unpleasant. Experiencing it himself, it left him feeling rotten.

As he rolled around irritably, he suddenly felt an ocean’s distance between himself and Jeong Mok.

‘He’s probably forgotten all about me, right? Was there ever even room for him to remember me in the first place. Just the whim of a rich man, that’s all.’

Now that he knew Jeong Mok was a chaebol, it made sense why he had treated him well at first and then suddenly thrown him out. A man with money, his sympathy had simply run dry. Taking care of another person was one thing, but looking after someone else’s dog was another.

He pretended not to be curious anymore, pretended to be cool about it, told himself to adjust his mindset. But he felt bitter. Was he the only one who had been sincere? Thinking it over like that, he found himself pathetic.

‘We’re both men, so even if there were feelings, then what? Start dating? You can get past gender, but not the gap between rich and poor. You idiot.’

It was so absurd that Haeri felt ridiculous and even laughed at himself.

“In the end I just stayed with him for a while, that’s all. Why am I attaching meaning to it. Pathetic. I might not have a family, but I’ve still got pride.”

He deliberately said it aloud.

“A chaebol wouldn’t even care about one hundred million won. It was severance pay, settlement, and consolation money put together, so I deserve it. It’s not like I’d get any real severance. So why thank him. I don’t need to. I don’t need to.”

Acting half-crazy on purpose eased the heaviness in his chest a little.

Gom-i sulked in his own way, and Haeri sulked in his, and they spent the afternoon like that.

***

“Hey, I told you to be more thorough.”

The foreman, younger by a few years, barked at Jang as if age didn’t matter. Every time, Jang would brush it off with a sly “Well, that can happen,” but inside he was boiling.

‘Bastard. He thinks being the foreman makes him king?’

Even as he scowled, Jang did as he was told. He couldn’t afford to get fired.

Bzz, bzz, bzz.

His phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out and saw the name [Lee Ducheol]. His heart sank. Jang glanced around. No one was looking his way. He carefully answered.

–Fuck, where the hell are you?

The voice on the other end cursed right away. He was angry but fear held him back. Jang gulped.

“I’m at work.”

–You know the deadline was yesterday, right?

“Oh, was it?”

He answered lazily, and the man scoffed.

–Oh, was it? Fuck. Hey, Jang. This is a problem. I’ve let it slide because you’re a regular, but what if I show up at your house today?

“Hey, why are you like this, brother? I told you I’ll pay it all.”

–Brother? Don’t give me that shit! When the hell are you going to pay me! Fuck!