Only Happy When It Rains

Chapter 10: Epilogue

In the end, the prophecy had turned out to be true in more ways than one.

From their one-month anniversary onwards, Tin and Can grew into an unbeatable team, a true power couple that became the envy of many in their social cycle – yet no amount of spite and scheming games could ever touch their core.

The ice blocks around Tin's personality had melted at an astonishing speed, and at Can's side, he had soon grown into a confident and smart young man, who, like his husband, wasn't afraid to show heart and compassion, without ever turning into a scared pushover again. And if he did, rumours had it that his husband would know how to knock sense into him in a way that Tin loved.

In this way, Can marrying Tin had assured the survival of this generation of the Medthanan family, even though the next one would not spring from them, but from Tul and his wife.

Both Tin and Can doted on their nephew, and made sure Phupha wasn't poisoned by the venom that had long run through the family.

But the prophecy also came true in the sense that Tin's parents had taken it – though not quite as pleasantly as they had expected. If they had known all of it, they would probably not have invested so much into making it come true, despite the positive outcome in the end.

A few months into their marriage, when Can had failed to find a job elsewhere, his father-in-law had offered him a starting position at the Medthanan Group.

At first, nobody had expected much from Can – after all, Tin was one of the heirs apparent, and Can was just the husband. But while Tin had doggedly followed his academic career with no intention of joining the family business, Can, through a series of strange bouts of luck – that had not actually been luck as much as Can's unmistakable instinct for unusual opportunities – had soon found himself at the helm of a new, innovative subgroup of the conglomerate.

That was when Can had discovered the irregularities in the conglomerate's bookkeeping – the tax evasion schemes, the bribes, the dirty business... and – much to Tin's continuous wonder – Can had gone on to stare down not just Tul, but the entirety of the Medthanan family, everyone who had stakes in the company – until all of the dirty business had been dragged to light, confessed, apologised, and legally dealt with.

The Medthanans' lawyers were very fortunate during that time.

At first, Tin's parents had cursed their youngest son's husband for being so... annoyingly ethical, thorough and determined – but when, half a year after the end of Can's crusade, a group of investigative journalists started to uncover all the skeletons in the closets of the Medthanan Group's most notorious competitors, the Medthanan's public image had shifted rapidly, from a reviled black sheep, to the one shining beacon of an ethical, well-managed conglomerate, who had been brave enough to own up to their past mistakes when everyone else had tried to cover them up – and who had been the first to restart on a clean sheet, with a new, modern business model, one that had grown out of the subgroup led by Can and was quickly overtaking everyone else's market shares.

Nobody in Can's group of friends – who surprisingly hadn't tired of meeting at their fabulously rich friend's place – would have pegged Can for a businessman before he had gotten married to Tin, and Can himself least of all.

But the secret to his success wasn't that he was any good at doing business – it was that Can was good at reading people and giving his trust to those who deserved it. He didn't actually need to know how to run a business, he just needed to know how to pick the people to do it for him, and reward them well for their loyalty.

Unlike any other Medthanan, Can's employees were so devoted to him that they would follow him through hell and back, if he needed them to and it made all the difference in the world.

At the fifth anniversary of their wedding, Tin finally admitted that the monk might have been onto something, 27 years ago, when he had made that prophecy. Though Tin – who could now proudly call himself Dr Medthanan, after successfully handing in his PhD thesis – was also rational enough to maintain that it wasn't due to some magical foresight, but the hard work they had all poured into it.

Married life hadn't been all rainbows and roses so far, this much was also true. Getting two complete strangers to align themselves into something that worked for both of them was tedious work full of risks and misunderstandings – but Tin and Can were learning how to talk to each other better and better, and they had, what many other couples never achieved: commitment.

Instead of two separate wings for each of them, the mansion now had several locked rooms that not even their domestic staff had access to, and rumours on what happened behind these closed doors between the loving husbands would entertain the polite society of Bangkok for many years.

But no matter what devious tricks they applied to find out, nobody ever did.

Some things were meant to remain private.