What We Hold On To

Seha stayed frozen in place for a while, half-expecting Jeongyun to come storming back out again.

Only after enough time had passed did he finally relax and collapse onto the sofa.

Aside from going to see Insuk, he hadn’t really done anything, yet an overwhelming fatigue washed over him.

He’d always been confident in his stamina, but lately—no, more precisely, ever since he’d entered this house—his body had felt unusually heavy.

Cha Jeongyun was far from easy to deal with, but compared to working through the night nonstop, this was practically a cushy job.

That was what made it strange.

Was he under more stress than he realized.

Seha let the unimportant question drift away and lay flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

I’m trying to save my grandson.

Insuk’s voice, solemn to the point of desperation, suddenly echoed in his ears.

Faced with that earnest resolve, Seha thought of Sejin.

Just imagining himself in Insuk’s position made his heart feel like it was being torn apart.

Even when Sejin caught nothing more than a cold, Seha couldn’t sleep.

If Sejin were collapsing again and again, wasting away while the hospital couldn’t even pinpoint a cause—

Seha blinked rapidly and bit down on his lip.

A memory surfaced of carrying Sejin on his back, running to the emergency room in the middle of a winter night when his fever had suddenly spiked.

It had been a long time ago, yet it still made him feel like he might cry.

“Ten billion is nothing.

If you’ve got money, even a hundred billion wouldn’t feel like a waste.”

That was why Seha understood Insuk’s heart.

Perhaps Insuk herself didn’t truly believe Seha was some kind of talisman either.

She simply couldn’t let it pass.

If there was even a 0.1% chance.

If there was even the smallest possibility.

Then she couldn’t not try.

Blinking hard to swallow the tears threatening to fall, Seha pulled out his phone to check the time.

It was when Sejin would be in the middle of afternoon classes.

He missed him.

Some people thought Seha’s devotion to his younger brother was excessive.

Plenty warned him it was abnormal, telling him to live his own life instead of clinging to his sibling.

But Seha never took those words to heart.

Sejin was the only family he had left, and he was still a minor.

Seha was his guardian.

Through the violent storms of life, Sejin had never left him or abandoned him, always staying by his side as his support and source of happiness.

Not once had Seha ever thought of his brother as a burden, or someone he needed to shake off quickly.

If anything, his only regret was not having enough money or ability to do more for him.

By the time his thoughts reached that point, the gloom that had settled earlier began to lift again.

He might not have money enough to spend ten billion on his brother, but there was no reason he couldn’t play the role of a so-called talisman.

So what if he got cursed at and called a fraud or a fake.

Looking at the photo of himself and Sejin he’d set as his lock screen, Seha steeled his resolve once more.

Jeongyun was in a foul mood.

The reason was simple.

Jin Seha.

He’d left the house because he didn’t want to be under the same roof as that bastard, but he didn’t actually have anywhere to go.

The main house was suffocating, and he didn’t really have any close friends he could casually call up to meet.

He didn’t have hobbies to kill time with either, and he’d lost interest in nightlife long ago.

Sitting in the park inside the apartment complex to gather his thoughts only made him feel pathetically small.

What a joke.

A third-generation chaebol who didn’t need to earn a cent feeling miserable like this.

Again, it was all Jin Seha’s fault.

If not for that bastard, he wouldn’t be loitering here like this instead of staying in his spacious, comfortable home.

Just then, his phone vibrated in his hand.

A glance at the screen showed the name Hyung Donghyun.

He didn’t need to hear the reason for the call to know it.

Seha, who’d been unable to follow because Jeongyun had vehemently refused, must have contacted him.

Jeongyun was about to hit decline, then stopped.

If he went out alone and didn’t even answer calls, it was obvious the report would go straight to his grandmother.

When it came to matters related to her grandson’s safety, she knew no limits.

If she heard he was unreachable, she’d probably mobilize people or make a huge fuss somehow.

Letting out a heavy sigh mixed with frustration, gratitude, and guilt, Jeongyun answered the call.

“I’m at the park.

I’ll be back soon.”

He could hear a sigh from the other end as well.

— …If you were going to the park, you could’ve at least told Seha.

“I didn’t know the park would be my only option.

Is that enough?”

— …….

Donghyun’s silence, unable to immediately find a retort, only made Jeongyun feel more pathetic.

Jeongyun spoke again in a twisted tone.

“I said I’ll go back later, so hang up.”

— J-Jeongyun.

Donghyun sounded like he wanted to say more, but Jeongyun didn’t wait and ended the call.

Listening further would only make him feel smaller.

He tossed his phone aside and stared quietly at the scenery in front of him.

A weekday afternoon.

The quiet park had few people around, especially no men his age.

A sigh escaped him.

It wasn’t as if Jeongyun had done nothing but laze around.

Anything that sparked even a little interest, he learned.

Naturally, he was taught by the best instructors, and with his aptitude, he picked things up quickly in many fields.

Management was no exception.

But learning without real experience naturally had its limits.

Running a company was especially so.

No matter how outstanding his grades were, it was still just management learned from books.

What Jeongyun could actually do was lie in hospital beds for no reason, suffer nightly nightmares that made him feel like he was dying, and wait for the day he’d die from an illness with no known cause.

And yet, because he was born into a chaebol family, he was considered better off than most by the world’s standards.

People died every day from treatable illnesses simply because they had no money, so it wasn’t an incorrect assessment.

Jeongyun thought so too.

Still, at times, that disparity made it hard for him to breathe.

I’ve always suffered.

After my parents died, I fought death every day in hellish time.

I’m still enduring pain that I don’t even know how to fix.

If this couldn’t be called misfortune, then what could.

Useless thoughts swallowed Jeongyun whole.

No one had ever said it outright, but Jeongyun knew his death was drawing close.

It was an instinctive sense, yet even without it, he could have known.

There were things in this world that were conveyed without words.

In the looks people gave him, in their breaths, in the unconscious sighs and shadowed expressions, Jeongyun felt death every day.

His grandmother’s reckless decision was surely born of the same desperation—knowing that time was running out.

Those who loved Jeongyun, precisely because they loved him, sometimes became messengers of death.

An indescribable emptiness surged through him.

He’d struggled desperately to live.

Countless times he’d thought it might be better to just die, yet he’d endured and endured, unable to render his mother’s sacrifice meaningless—

Only for it to end like this.

If this was how it would end anyway, why had he endured so many years of suffering.

If he’d given up earlier, at least the unhappiness would have ended sooner.

I might really be your good-luck charm, Cha Jeongyun.

Jin Seha’s voice suddenly surfaced in his mind.

The completely unexpected echo made Jeongyun’s shoulders twitch.

I can’t undo past tragedies, but I might really be able to save you from the misfortune that’s coming.

He’d thought every word of it was complete bullshit, not worth holding onto even a syllable of—

Yet somehow, not a single word had left his head, as if he’d memorized it on purpose.

It was obviously reckless bravado.

Seha himself had admitted as much.

Words with no use other than to provoke and irritate Jeongyun.

I might really be your good-luck charm, Cha Jeongyun.

And yet—

Why, just why, did that sentence linger at the edge of his heart like a ray of light piercing pitch-black darkness.

“…Are these bastards putting some kind of spell on me or what.”

Unable to bear the feeling rising inside him, Jeongyun deliberately muttered in irritation.

It was a strange thing to say for someone who didn’t believe in misfortune or shamans, but he didn’t have the luxury to think deeply.

“Arrogant bastard….”

Even after the fiasco in front of his grandmother today, that shameless face still floated up.

Jeongyun hurriedly tried to scatter the voice still echoing in his ears.

Just thinking about him made his heart pound unpleasantly.

“Yeah, hang up.

Don’t stay up all night—do things in moderation and sleep, okay.”

— You too, hyung.

Don’t push yourself, and if it gets too hard, quit and come back anytime.

Late at night, nearing dawn, the repeated reminders might have sounded like nagging.

Yet the voice on the other end showed no irritation at all, only concern for Seha.

Got it.

Sleep well.

Let’s talk again tomorrow.

After exchanging similar words several times and ending the call, Seha let out a small laugh.

Even lovers deep in a passionate relationship couldn’t be more affectionate than this.

Sejin wasn’t usually very talkative.

Today, perhaps sensing his brother’s unusually low mood, he’d been especially chatty.

His worries escalated from Is work hard and Is the owner bullying you to wild speculation about whether Seha had been kidnapped by criminals and couldn’t say anything.

It seemed he still couldn’t shake his suspicion toward the owner who’d suddenly hired Seha as a live-in helper, despite Seha having no particular background for it.