Yoon Hye-jin (Shin Min-a), an intelligent and pretty dentist living in the big city, loses her job after she righteously accuses the corrupt head doctor of profiteering. She embarks on a trip to the idyllic seaside village of Gongjin, where she meet...
We open on beautiful arial shots of boats and water, and then zero in on a woman running along a bridge. She’s passed by a group of runners, and pushes herself until she passes them. She arrives at her apartment building and holds the elevator door for another woman (cameo by Kim Jung-eun) to get on. The other woman strikes up a conversation, chatting away about visiting her daughter who lives in this building and works at a company. It turns out they’re not only headed to the same floor, but adjacent apartments, and the visiting woman nags in a motherly fashion over the takeout boxes outside our heroine’s door.
Some time later, our heroine breezes out of her apartment and heads to work, and we learn that she’s a dentist: Doctor YOON HYE-JIN (Shin Mina). Her first patient has already arrived, and to her surprise it’s the same woman from the elevator. The woman explains that her daughter paid for the appointment, seeming both proud and a little embarrassed.
After the woman leaves, Hye-jin notices the new magazines that are being set out in the waiting room – and one advertisement in particular catches her eye. It’s for a pair of expensive shoes that she’s been waiting to buy once they go on sale. (Though the tech remarks that Hye-jin can more than afford them at her salary.)
Just then, Hye-jin is called into her boss’s office to discuss the patient she’s just seen. Her boss takes her to task for not recommending extra treatment, but Hye-jin stands by what she’s already prescribed. Her boss doesn’t press the matter, but Hye-jin finds out later that the patient has been removed from her care and reassigned to her boss instead.
Hye-jin immediately confronts her, listing off a number of times her boss has prescribed more treatment than necessary to get more money, adding, “It’s doctors like you that make people suspect dental clinics of overtreatment.” She recites the Hippocratic Oath, which her boss doesn’t appear to recognize and then quits on the spot.
Later that night, she meets up with her friend PYO MI-SUN (Gong Min-jung) for drinks. She’s already purchased those shoes she was eyeing, and sits hugging the box as she tells Mi-sun the whole story. Mi-sun is surprised that Hye-jin went so far as to introduce the patient to another clinic, since her lifelong motto has been to focus solely on herself. Pointing to the shoes, Mi-sun asks what Hye-jin plans to do now with no job and bad credit. Hye-jin just hopes she can get a job that pays well.
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Hye-jin wakes up the next morning to an angry text from her former boss. To her horror, Hye-jin realizes that last night she’d drunkenly posted online about the incident. She frantically tries to delete the post, but can’t remember her password. (Hahaha the ones she tries are “AngelicHye-jin” and “LovelyHye-jin1004” – “1004” being a homophone for “angel.”) That’s when she gets an alert that almost 7,000,000 won (about $6,000) is scheduled to be withdrawn from her account. She screams in frustration.
We skip ahead a couple of weeks, when her application to another dental clinic is rejected, likely due to her ex-boss spreading rumors about her. She sighs as another text notification pings, assuming it’s another credit card bill, but it’s actually a reminder that today is her mother’s birthday. She looks sadly at her family picture taken on a beach.
