#1.Competent Assist.
A hotel and coffee shop with soothing melodies.
Jiwan roughly rubbed his pale face.
A woman repeatedly wiped away tears in front of a man with a cold expression.
Last night, the woman who was the seventh candidate for marriage and hoped it would be the last, made several calls and sent messages containing earnest confessions of love.
“So, am I really eliminated like this? Just one more time… … .”
“Shall I go over the terms of the contract again?”
Jiwan closed his eyes deeply as if he was annoyed.
Standing at the entrance to the coffee shop, a man glanced in this direction.
It was Woo-seok, the chief secretary.
The phone number that the woman knew was Woo-seok’s, and it was Woo-seok, not me, who had been bombarded with calls and messages all night long.
Not only did he have trouble sleeping due to the dark circles under his eyes, but he also seemed to be burning inside at the thought of searching for an eighth candidate.
“Everyone makes mistakes. Can you please take a look at it just once? “I was so drunk that my true feelings came out without me realizing it.”
“There is no guarantee that I will not make the same mistake again in the future, and the important thing is that I am not a generous person enough to tolerate such a mistake.”
“It was a mistake to call so late at night, but my confession was sincere. “I really like Jiwan.”
It was when Jiwan raised his head and raised the corner of his mouth at the confession of love from a woman he had only seen three times.
Perhaps because of the quietness of the weekday afternoon, I could hear the conversation at the table behind me without intending to do so.
“We’ve only been dating for three months, Mom”.since you kept urging me to get married,I just came here to show you, so don’t tell me to try blind dates again, okay?”
“I did it because I didn’t show it to such a beautiful young lady. Okay, I saw it, so that’s it. It was nice to meet you, I feel relieved now. “Please come visit my house sometime.”
“Yes, I will schedule a time with Young-woo.”
Forcing marriage on men of the right age, whether for children or grandchildren, regardless of time and place, was a ubiquitous repertoire.
After the middle-aged woman left, the conversation between those who remained took an unexpected turn.
“Thank you for your hard work so far. I thought all agency assistant were there, but I never thought I would meet such a great person. They even deal with my friends, my grandmother, and my parents. I was always envious of how well the guys last time viewed Ms. Assist. My grandmother really liked it too. It was really, really helpful.”
“Nothing much to say, I hope Young-woo finds a good girlfriend.”
What happened to the method of responding to pressure to get married? That’s all there is to it.
At the word “assist” heard from across the room, Jiwan coolly glanced at the woman sitting in front of him.
Unlike me, who was completely blind, I was almost jealous of the man over there who had sorted out the situation through an agency assistant.
I heard the woman behind me standing up.
“This is also fate, Mr. Assist. Are you interested in meeting me seriously? Even though I am like this, my job is solid and as you know, my family is okay. My parents and grandmother are a bit weird to me… … .”
The voice of the man who urgently appealed sounded sincere.
“Mr. Park Young-woo.”
Her feminine voice was cool, even cold, making me wonder if she was the same soft-spoken woman.
“I know you certainly have good looks, educational background, and a solid job. Your family is great, as you said. However, as it happens, I am not in an environment where I can hand out my business card to Young-woo’s parents.”
“… … yes?”
“You don’t know anything about me, Young-woo, except my appearance and age, which you received through the Happy Assistant agency, right?”
“You’re a college student and you’re doing this as a part-time job…” … .”
“Yes, I am a person desperate for money, but I am not a person who just lies down anywhere. Make sure to check the place to lie down and check whether it is poop or soybean paste. “I’m also a person who knows my tricks like a knife, so I’ll pretend I didn’t hear what you just said.”
The voice that accurately distinguished between public and private matters was confident.
It was clear that he was exactly the person I was looking for, with a calm voice that excluded personal feelings and a firmness that left no room for a single word.
“I think I’m done with what I wanted to say, so please stand up first.”
Jiwan spoke in a whisper to the woman whose eyes were dripping with regret.
This was enough time to gather my emotions.
“… … “I can still contact you.”
Jiwan shook his head with deeply furrowed eyebrows.
She was a refusal to contact me and a kind of warning not to mess around anymore.
The seventh woman, a candidate for her hand in marriage, stood up.
At the same time, the woman at the table behind me also.
Her hair was tied up neatly and she was wearing an elegant light pink dress.
Height: 163cm, weight: around 48cm. Is she in her mid to late twenties?
Two men looked at the woman walking at an appropriate pace at the same time.
“Do you know someone?”
Before I knew it, Woo-seok had come next to me and was following Jiwan’s gaze.
“Soon now.”
“… … yes?”
“Now let’s find out. Go and get him. “That woman.”
*****
3rd place in Korean business ranking, Bando Group.
Bando Construction and Bando Electronics are located at three-block intervals centered around Bando Tower in Samseong-dong, and Eden Entertainment & Media in Nonhyeon, which is smaller in size among affiliates but cannot be ignored in terms of popularity.
When you think of ‘Bando Group’, you think of Bando Electronics, which is famous both at home and abroad, but Bando construction, which has been rapidly rising in the past three years, has also been a social issue.
Seo Jiwan, the second son of Bando Group and CEO of Bando Construction, is at the center of the issue.
He graduated from one of the most prestigious universities in the United States and earned a doctorate in business administration, and is on a solid path to becoming a manager. Other than being 34 and having an outstanding appearance, he is not known to the outside world.
This was because he was not born into the Bando Group.
There was no one who did not know about the innate loveliness of the CEO of Bando Group.
It wouldn’t be surprising if President Seo’s illegitimate child showed up somewhere, and even Chairman Jang Ho-mook, a key figure in the Peninsula and President Seo’s mother, heard it publicly.
In such a situation, the birth of Jiwan, a child out of wedlock, the year after the birth of Ki-hyuk, the eldest son of Bando Group, had to be kept completely secret.
The child who came to the Bando group as a blood clot left his mother before he even dried up and grew up in a faraway, foreign land.
He was 30 when he came to Korea after studying management at the overseas branch of Bando Group.
It was the moment when a bloody child was completely reborn as a person from the Peninsula.
“No need to say anything else, get married right away.”
Contrary to expectations that the road ahead in Korea would be smooth, there was just one stumbling block.
It was Mrs. Jang Ho-mook, the mother of the president of Bando Group and a powerful figure in Bando Group.
Even at the age of almost 90, his flirtatiousness is sky-high, and President Seo, who is now 70 years old, pretends to die at a word from Mrs. Jang unless it is a woman’s problem. No one can enter from the peninsula without stepping on Mrs. Jang’s threshold. The words were not meaningless.
Mrs. Jang’s position in the peninsula was significant, from being involved in the group’s big and small affairs to distributing shares in affiliates to appointing people to the right positions.
“Don’t you know that marriage is not like lifting spoons at the table?”
Jiwan, the only one who does not bow to Mrs. Jang, is bound to be a thorn in her eyes.
If it was her concubine’s child, she would make every effort to make him look good, so Jiwan behaved in a completely indifferent manner.
Tsk tsk.
As things got to this point, Mrs. Jang clicked her tongue in Anseo-dong, and it was not for nothing that it was her nickname for Jiwan.
“That’s why you don’t eat the spoon on the table very often.”
When reporting to Mrs. Jang, who was watching her grandchildren’s every move, Jiwan pointed out that she often skips meals due to her busy work.
“Tsk, tsk, he seems like a great man.”
The eldest son, Ki-hyuk, who is one year older than Jiwan, was full of ambition.
Even though he held the most important electron in the Bando group, he was anxious not to have anything more.
For example, hotels or entertainment.
Mrs. Jang’s message was that in workplaces that had professional managers without formal representatives, the distribution would be distributed equally according to the abilities of the two people.
To secure his position, Ki-hyuk married Jinhan E&C’s daughter Seohyun and named his wife, Seohyun, to the position of hotel CEO.
Mrs. Jang still clicked her tongue at Jiwan, who was leisurely even though the hotel was taken away right under her nose without any reasonable competition.
Mrs. Jang, swallowing up her voice as it was her limit, had put forward her marriage as her last resort.
She said numerous rumors followed a man who did not take a woman with him until he was thirty-four.
They said he was gay.
There is a reason why he doesn’t even bat an eye at love calls from many women. From the sound of it, scandals with famous actresses are just a way to hide the fact.
With all these rumors, it was natural for Mrs. Jang to pull out her ultimatum, her marriage card.
She said, “Did you ask me to bring some food from home? I wanted the raw meat to be special. “She has become a man in name and appearance, and is born with something that everyone else is born with, so she has no voice to listen to, so she trashes the family.”
She was born with all her men, so her father had to marry her twice, but she could barely hold back.
“The reason you act so arrogantly is because she has a big belly.”
It was a story about my mother, Eunhee.
When Ki-hyuk’s mother, the daughter-in-law and confidant of the Bando group, died of illness, Mrs. Jang named her mother, Eunhee, as the person of the Bando family.
It has been 14 years since she gave birth to Jiwan.
“Do you know what happens if you raise your claws in front of her tiger?”
The clearly exposed toe nails probably represent mother Eunhee.
“Just cut it off and that’s it. “Cut it down so that it can’t be used at all.”
It was hard to believe that he was 90, it was such a powerful display of anger.
“Three months. If you don’t get married within that deadline, not only will you have to resign from your position as head of construction, but your mother, An Seo-dong, will have to come under me. “You don’t want to see your mother bleeding.”
The past three years have been a series of hardships for Jiwan to bring construction, which had been sluggish, to the same level as leading domestic and foreign construction companies.
It has only been three years since she asked her mother to send her to a position as director of an art museum outside of the city center on the pretext of the ball.
The threat to rip out all of Eunhee’s toe nails was probably not for nothing.
He was an old man who was anxious to bring him back to his side.
Jiwan glanced at the woman in a light pink dress pacing in front of the suite window.
I wonder if the woman Woo-seok had managed to catch and bring was unfamiliar with the hotel or wary of me. She looked here and there and settled down in front of the window as far away from me as possible.
Jiwan opened his mouth heavily in front of the eighth and final marriage candidate.
“What would you like to call it?”
The suspicion that she had brought me here to the hotel room to talk about something was clearly visible on her face.
“Please feel free to call me. If it’s not necessary for conversation, then whatever. “You don’t have to call me.”
Jiwan lowered his wide shoulders, placed his arms on his knees, and thought for a moment.
This is because I remembered that the other man called the woman “Ms.Assistant” at the coffee shop.
“Okay, let’s do it. Ms.Assistant.”
