An Old Charm For Another Rainy Day

All Yoon Jin Ah ever wanted to do that day was to close her office laptop shut. She would not have opened it in the first place, but a message from one of her assistant managers desperately asking for her kind help to put out some fires at work was all it took for her to steal a couple of minutes from her precious holiday in Seoul and fire up her machine.

Minutes that turned to hours — three, to be exact.

“I’ve already spoken to the client, Sheryl. Their social media team will manage the uproar from their stakeholders and assure them that there has not been a breach of data privacy and security. In return, you must keep them posted on what’s happening in the war room,” she instructed her direct report with whom she was in a video call with.

Alright. I’ll call them in another half-an-hour.

Lips pursed in a tight line, Jin Ah shook her head and voiced out her stern refusal, “No. That wouldn’t do. With or without progress, it is imperative that you call them every fifteen minutes to show that we’re on it… that we’re still in control.”

Got it, Jin Ah. Will do, her manager acknowledged. Anyhow, I truly apologize for disturbing you on your vacation. The client was insisting to get you on the line.

“No worries. I am glad to buy the team some time. Let me know if anything else comes up, okay?”

The second she put down her headset, the two boys — a pair of five year-olds who were indisputably spitting images of the love of her life — emerged from where they were lurking by the doorway of their study and came running towards her, and she quickly rose to her feet to catch them in a bear hug.

“How long have you been standing there, Seo Bin?” she asked the elder twin whom she was holding with her left arm.

“I’m not Seo Bin, Mama. I’m Seo Joon!” the boy begged to differ, and for a brief moment, his eyes crinkled into twinkling crescent-moons as he tried to contain his laughter.

To humor her little rascals, Jin Ah pretended to be taken aback by her son’s declaration because she was a hundred and one percent positive that from the day they were born, there had not been any incident of her mixing up the two. She dramatically pulled away a bit to behold his face, her eyes narrowing into slits as she scrutinized the distinct features that set him apart from his brother — those subtle attributes which seemed to be exclusively perceivable to mothers.

Clucking her tongue loudly against her palate, she uttered his name in mock warning, “Goo Seo Bin.”

“I’m Seo Bin,” she heard the other boy claim.

Immediately, she turned to the younger charmer who was flashing an uncannily familiar boyish smirk her way.

“Nope. You’re not fooling me, honey,” she told her second-born. “You are Goo Seo Joon.”

It was apparent in the way the boys groaned at the exact same time (Always in seamless synchronization with each other, those two.) that they did not anticipate their mother to catch on their prank without breaking a sweat.

“Mama, how did you know?” Seo Joon pouted at her before pointing at his mustard-colored shirt. “We swapped clothes. See?”

Amused at her children’s poor attempt at mischief, she only smiled at them and poked on the sole dimple that graced a cheek of each of the twins — a shared inheritance from their father.

Her Goo Seo Jin.

It was during moments like these when Jin Ah was most grateful to her lucky stars, for she could not believe how the birth of her sons easily dispelled most of her earlier fears. She could clearly recall how she was reduced to a crying mess when she saw the two red lines of the pregnancy kit glaring at her on the bathroom sink back at their apartment in Perth five years ago. She was beyond terrified; they had just celebrated their anniversary and with the set-up they had agreed to (Seo Jin persuaded her to stay in Australia and volunteered to travel to and fro every three months instead because he did not want to disrupt her thriving career.), they were trying to extend the honeymoon stage for as long as they could. Having a child was the least of their priorities, yet somehow, fate must have thought it was a good idea to surprise them by messing up their plans. Alas, the unforeseen turn of events frightened her to a point wherein her panic attacks staged another resurgence.