Chapter 16

Michael Han loved his daughters. They were the reason he worked such hideous hours, the reason he tolerated the fully verbalised, half-thought-out ideas of endless ambitious subordinates, and the reason his corporate ambition had quietly stopped mattering.

From the moment his eldest daughter first opened her eyes, he had acquired a new and powerful motivation. It replaced greed. It replaced ambition. It made the endless world of bows, handshakes, and empty rituals tolerable. The light in his daughters’ faces gave him all the purpose he needed.

He glanced across at his youngest now. Curled beneath a business-class blanket, she looked impossibly small, a picture of angelic calm. Porcelain skin, silky hair, lips still soft with childhood, all the quiet evidence of a sheltered life, carefully and expensively built.

He would lose her soon. Just as he had lost her sister.

One day she would choose a boy from the long line of eager suitors and bring him home to meet her loving father. She would marry, fly the nest, and take her light with her. Her sister had done exactly that two years earlier, though she hadn’t waited for a man first. Preferring to chase her ‘integrity”. As if she would ever find it working for a newspaper. 

Michael wanted to savour this moment while it still belonged to him.

As he brushed his thumb gently across her forehead, his mind betrayed him. It lurched, unbidden, toward what awaited him at home.

A hole.

A single square metre of nothing. It had been carved into his building by someone who had dared to touch what he’d built.

He shouldn’t have opened his laptop.

He had told himself he would watch one of the operas his sleeping daughter had downloaded for him. She was always trying to share her love of the arts. Earlier, while waiting in the lounge at Incheon, she had spoken excitedly about a major European production of Carmen coming to Seoul. Of course, she had asked him for tickets. On his desktop sat an MP4 of the Metropolitan Opera’s most recent New York adaptation. Her attempt to persuade him. She needn’t have gone to the trouble. He would get her the best seats money could buy.

He shouldn’t have merely hovered over the file. He should have double-clicked it.

He certainly shouldn’t have opened his email.

But once he had, there was no resisting the message from Detective Yang.

He would call Seungki when they landed. He would agree to the detective’s proposal. 10 AM. Seungki would have to move his other appointments. 

“Daddy, stop working.” His daughter stirred, peering at the screen. “It’s still vacation for at least another two hours. If mummy saw what I see, she’d freak.”

“When did you pick up your mother’s habit of always being right?” Michael said, closing the laptop. “Perhaps I’ll read the papers instead. See if your sister has had anything published.”

“You haven’t seen?” she said, suddenly wide awake. “She’s on page three. She wrote about that weird break-in at Bora’s gallery.”

“What break-in?”

“Oh, it’s totally weird, Daddy.”

“Show me.”