The protector

Heir (flashback)

2024, (still) February

As it had happened with the wedding, even with the choice to have a baby Se-ri realized the extent of the gesture only when it was already made. She wasn't pregnant, no. Or: it was too soon to check.

The morning after that night with Seo-jin, she began to walk around her bedroom, experiencing a killing anxiety. What if Jeong Hyeok would have not accepted the baby? What if he would have gone mad? Why she hadn't thought to him, why the hell she couldn't mind him before doing things, why, when she had to take a decision, that man suddenly became immaterial and unreal and went out of the frame?

All the bad feelings she had had about him came to her mind. Jeong Hyeok walking slightly bent. Jeong Hyeok who maybe, sometimes, had drunk before meeting her. The times she had wondered if there wasn't a laundry service at his hotel and had asked him to bring her all his shirts, because they looked wrinkled and had a smell which wasn't his usual one. His grey, dry skin. The teeth which wasn't white anymore. The death in his eyes.

Feeling drained, with the last strength Se-ri pushed a button asking to her assistant to not be disturbed for one hour. Then went under the desk grabbing a pillow, and cried all her hopelessness out. Damn, damn, damn, what to do if she was pregnant? It was February, would have she been able to travel at the last months of her pregnancy? No, she couldn't not go, taking all the precautions, but she had to tell it to him in person. And how would have he reacted, looking at her with the baby bump?

Jeong Hyeok did not allow her to name Seo-jin. Never, and for any reason, that name could be pronounced in front of him. And when he asked her how did she feel, he always talked as if she had been made prisoner by a malicious ogre. She would have wanted to tell him to calm down, that she was treated like a princess, that he didn't have to worry, that she was now safer than before, when she lived alone. But he always stopped her, and a part of her knew that Jeong Hyeok, somehow, needed not only to not hear her husband's name, though even to think the worst about him, to hate him, and to have a reason for it.

So she had let him think whatever he wanted for his own sake, but now how would have he reacted seeing her pregnant of a man whom he considered little less than a monster? Se-ri broke into a cold sweat.

The situation even worsened when she began to feel the first cramps. She knew that, sometimes, the pregnancy symptoms are similar to the incoming period ones. The nervousness caused her even a sort of nausea, and at that point she bought the pregnancy test, so sure to be pregnant that even if that one was her period week she had no tampons in the new Chanel Seo-jin had given her for her birthday.

For the first time, she had to resort to the emergency box kept in her office, yet she did it with the biggest relief. Then it came the doubt, and the embarrassment. Did she have to tell it to her husband? OMO. Maybe those were information which should have been communicated to a husband, but what the protocol was for a business partner / friend / fake husband?

The CEO decided to manage the thing like she would have done with a business information: sending him a short message to inform that she wasn't pregnant. That night he ordered home sushi from one of the best restaurant, and chatted about everything except the pregnancy. He hadn't even replied to the text.

The following months passed in an alternation of anxiety, bother and stupor.

This last because, differently from what she had expected, at the end of her period Seo-jin tried no approach. On second thought, even the month before he had tried just one approach instead of multiples. Had he maybe calculated her fertile window? No, Seo-jin wasn't the kind of person who knew this kind of things. However, she decided to trust him, and waited for another week.