She looked at my plain clothes and called me a custodian, then downgraded me to intern, and told me the executive lift was not for people like me. Nobody in that corridor asked my name or which floor I was going to. A woman advised me quietly to take the service car, and when I asked how anyone reached the floors above sixty one, she said they climbed three flights, twice a day, every day. Secretary Baek laughed and told her that was her own incompetence, and the woman lowered her eyes, and that was the thing I could not let go of. Then the light caught a white watch on Baek’s wrist, one of eight in the world, the one I had picked for my mother-in-law’s birthday and asked my husband to order.
Upstairs she told the corridor she had been with President Han a long time. Then the conference doors opened and Doyun came out and called her Yerin ah in front of thirty people, and asked who had dared upset her, and she pointed at me and said an intern. He looked straight at my face and said nothing at all, and that silence was the entire answer to fifteen years.
I went to the tenth floor, opened the board meeting as incoming chief executive, and the lift policy was struck from the building code of conduct by noon. What I did not expect was the internal audit that followed. Baek Yerin had been signing off on client entertainment for three years under an authority nobody had ever granted her, and the watch appeared on one of those invoices. She was gone within a fortnight. Doyun resigned from the board rather than sit through the review, and the divorce was finished in seven months.
Song Boram, the woman who had whispered to a stranger to spare her the humiliation, runs operations now. She was the only person in that hallway who tried to help someone she believed was nobody.
The watch went back to his mother. She wears it, and she still calls me every Sunday, and she has never once apologised for her son because she knows it is not hers to do.
They spent a morning deciding what I was worth without asking me a single question. I stopped needing their verdict the moment I understood I had never been waiting for it.
