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Chapter 4
“My nephew? You expect us to believe that?”
In the conference room of Clef Entertainment.
Every employee stared at Yoon Tae-jin with an utterly dumbfounded expression.
“Why?”
Yoon Tae-jin asked with an aggrieved look on his face.
The head of the PR team, Han Su-jin, turned her gaze toward Jin Do-hyun.
“Last time, you said you didn’t know who he was, didn’t you?”
“Ah… Well, I hadn’t seen the kid in so long…”
“You should at least make your lies believable.”
Han Su-jin snorted.
“Now, look closely!”
At that moment, Choi Eun-bi from the management team crouched down beside Jin Do-hyun and raised her index finger.
“First, the eyes!”
She pointed alternately at Jin Do-hyun’s eyes and Yoon Tae-jin’s.
“Similarity: zero! There’s absolutely nothing alike, right?”
“……”
“Next, the nose!”
She pointed back and forth again.
“This is really, really zero! And… oh, the jawline!”
Choi Eun-bi’s gaze moved quickly.
“Still zero! And… huh?”
Her hand suddenly stopped.
The employees leaned forward.
“His chubby cheeks are a little similar, aren’t they?”
“Oh…”
“Come to think of it, yeah.”
The employees nodded in agreement.
“Even if they’re distant relatives…”
Choi Eun-bi straightened her knees and reached her conclusion.
“They don’t look alike at all. At this point, it’s like they don’t even share the same blood!”
“Ah… So that’s what you meant?”
Yoon Tae-jin looked relieved, though somehow he also felt a little offended.
“I’d sooner believe he looks like Jin Do-hyun.”
“……!?”
The moment she casually said those words, Jin Do-hyun and Yoon Tae-jin both froze.
Everyone’s eyes turned toward Manager Choi Eun-bi.
“No, I just meant that hypothetically! When I saw him last time, he really was incredibly handsome…”
Choi Eun-bi twisted her body awkwardly.
Everyone’s gaze immediately shifted to Jin Do-hyun.
“Huh? Now that I look at him, he does kind of look similar.”
“I feel like he might’ve looked like this when he was little.”
“Seriously! Look at his eyelashes. I told you, you have to be born with eyelashes like that.”
Gulp.
Jin Do-hyun swallowed dryly.
This is bad.
A dagger was flying straight into his chest.
But there was no need to worry.
His hands were faster than his eyes!
Jin Do-hyun carefully reached for the small bag hanging around his neck.
He needed to send Yoon Tae-jin a message.
He needed to overcome this crisis right now.
But at that very moment, one of the employees suddenly grabbed Jin Do-hyun’s hand.
“Oh my~ Look at those tiny fingers wiggling! He’s so cute!”
“Are you bored? Want me to put on YouTube? What do kids these days like?”
“Piano Fairy Doremi! My nephew loves that.”
Damn it.
The ‘Cute!’ chorus has started again.
Jin Do-hyun’s tightly shut eyelids trembled.
‘Endure it. Just endure it… Yeah, I suppose this is possible.’
But Doremi is kind of tempting… Maybe Season 3, then…
Before he knew it, the employees had surrounded Jin Do-hyun.
Amid the noisy chaos, only Yoon Tae-jin and PR Team Leader Han Su-jin stubbornly remained in their places.
But there was something strange about Han Su-jin’s expression.
“Wait!”
She suddenly raised her hand.
The office fell silent, and everyone’s attention focused on her.
“Su… Surely…”
Her pupils shook violently as if she’d realized something.
“D-Don’t move!”
She hurriedly pulled out her phone. Her fingers flew across the screen.
Tap tap tap tap.
“T-This!”
She frantically held out her phone.
On the screen was Jin Do-hyun when he was around twenty years old.
His face was still immature, somewhere between that of a boy and a young man.
“Uh… huh?”
“Holy crap!”
“He’s seriously handsome…”
The employees marveled.
“No, that’s not the point!”
Han Su-jin pressed the phone screen beside Jin Do-hyun’s face.
“What do you think? Doesn’t he look a little similar?”
The employees’ eyes grew wider and wider as they alternated between looking at Jin Do-hyun and the photograph.
“N-No, this isn’t just ‘a little similar.’”
“Look at the eyes! The eyes! They’re practically identical!”
“Holy crap! Could he be… Producer Jin Do-hyun’s son!?”
At someone’s shout, the conference room instantly fell silent.
Everyone’s eyes turned toward Yoon Tae-jin.
“N-No! He’s not! No!”
Yoon Tae-jin frantically waved his hands.
But as they say, a strong denial only makes people believe it more.
“Seriously… Is he Jin Do-hyun’s son?”
“Jin Do-hyun’s son!?”
The employees chorused throughout the office.
It didn’t take long for one person’s outrageous remark to turn into an imagination, and then for that imagination to become established as fact.
‘Why is the story going in that direction?! I’m single!’
Jin Do-hyun screamed internally.
You might not believe it, but Jin Do-hyun was a lifelong single.
“No, I said that’s not it! Do-hyun hasn’t even gotten married yet!”
Yoon Tae-jin desperately shouted, but that only stimulated their imaginations even further.
“He hasn’t even gotten married…?”
“Then when’s the wedding?”
“Come on. If he hasn’t gotten married by the time the kid is this old… they basically got divorced.”
“Ah, right…”
“Producer Jin seems like a real jerk, but I guess he has a sense of responsibility at least?”
“But what did the kid’s mother do?”
A secret son belonging to the handsome-but-insufferable Jin Do-hyun.
The employees became excited at the appearance of such a unicorn-like existence in their imaginations.
It no longer mattered who the child actually was.
At this very moment, Jin Do-hyun simply had to be Jin Do-hyun’s son.
“Director, don’t worry! Producer Jin is practically family now, isn’t he? We’ll make sure this secret never gets out!”
“Everyone! Forget everything you saw and heard here today!”
“Yes!”
The employees chorused together as one.
‘N-No! No, no, no!’
Jin Do-hyun’s gaze turned toward Yoon Tae-jin.
‘Fucking hell, Tae-jin!’
“Pweee-see!”
The furious shout of a little child rang through the conference room.
Several days later.
Jin Do-hyun and Yoon Tae-jin stopped in front of a house.
“You can do this, right?”
Yoon Tae-jin looked down at Jin Do-hyun with concern.
“You should worry about doing your own job properly.”
Jin Do-hyun gritted his teeth and spoke while suppressing his anger.
The Lumis Flop Idol Escape Project.
And.
“Hyung, don’t you have nothing to do these days? Why aren’t you replying?”
“Hyung?”
“Hey, Jin Do-hyun!”
The Great Mosquito (Han Jin-seo) Extermination Operation.
Since he’d decided to do it anyway, Jin Do-hyun, a perfectionist who couldn’t rest until he did everything perfectly, eventually decided to appear on Our Family’s Youngest.
And the place they’d arrived at was the new accommodation where Jin Do-hyun and Lumis would be staying.
“Do-hyun, we really have to turn a profit this time.”
“Ah, come on! You don’t trust meee? I’m going this far! At my ageee! With guys in their twenties! And there are five of them, no less!”
“Whoa, whoa. Calm down.”
Yoon Tae-jin now knew for sure.
Jin Do-hyun’s anger was no longer expressed through his cold eyes or his tone of voice.
It was in his pronunciation.
“Haa… But how long am I supposed to keep holding this?”
Jin Do-hyun gave him a cold look and nodded toward their hands.
“Huh?”
Yoon Tae-jin followed his gaze.
There, Yoon Tae-jin’s chubby hand was tightly holding Jin Do-hyun’s tiny hand.
“Ah~ You know, in movies and dramas, dads usually hold their kids’ hands like this when they’re walking around. So they don’t get lost.”
“Am I your son? Huh? Do you really think I’m going to get lost at my age? Huh!?”
“You look exactly like a kindergarten kid right now…”
“Seriously! You’re giving me the creeps!”
Jin Do-hyun hurriedly pulled his hand away and shouted.
“Huh? You’ll get lost!”
Yoon Tae-jin grabbed Jin Do-hyun’s hand again.
“Oh? Director!”
At that moment, Seo Yoo-jin, the writer of Our Family’s Youngest, appeared.
“Oh, Writer Seo!”
‘Oh, really?’
Yoon Tae-jin practically tossed Jin Do-hyun’s hand aside before immediately grabbing Seo Yoo-jin’s hand instead.
“H-Haha… The cameras are almost all set up. Would you like to take a look?”
Seo Yoo-jin said with an awkward smile.
“Yes!”
The three of them immediately entered the house.
“Hmm…”
The accommodation wasn’t bad.
It was a detached house with a small yard, one living room, four bedrooms, and two bathrooms.
The exterior was ordinary, but the interior was surprisingly elaborate.
Whether it was the homeowner’s work or the previous tenant’s taste, Jin Do-hyun couldn’t tell, but it made for a pretty good backdrop to film Lumis in.
“Wow~ Thanks to Our Family’s Youngest, our company’s flop group gets to live in a place this nice. Hahaha!”
Yoon Tae-jin laughed heartily.
He was definitely smiling brightly, but there seemed to be something glistening at the corners of his eyes.
“But he’s really cute every time I see him. What’s his name?”
Seo Yoo-jin asked.
“Ah, his name is…”
Yoon Tae-jin trailed off awkwardly.
‘We’re screwed!’
Over on JinTube, they’d claimed that the child was Tae-jin’s distant relative.
Thanks to that, there hadn’t been any particular problems with his appearance on the show, and procedures such as verifying his identity had been skipped as well.
But they’d skipped so much of the process that they had practically no information about Jin Do-hyun in his child’s body.
His name, his age, and so on…
“H-His name is…”
Yoon Tae-jin broke into a cold sweat as he looked at Jin Do-hyun.
HELP! SOS! WE NEED ASSISTANCE!
His eyes were saying exactly that.
“My name is…”
Jin Do-hyun politely opened his mouth, but his gaze toward Yoon Tae-jin was sharper than ever.
He wanted to scream right then and there, but he gritted his teeth and endured his boiling anger.
“Absolutely not! Whatever happens, I can’t let my personality show!”
“If they find out, we’re finished! You like movies, so you know this, right? They’ll take us straight to the National Intelligence Service. No, they’ll drag us all the way to the White House!”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life as a lab rat before dying in some experiment?”
‘Damn it.’
It was complete nonsense, but this genius producer, blessed with an excessively creative imagination, had surprisingly believed him quite easily.
“Jin…”
Gulp.
‘Wow, why am I so nervous about something this trivial?’
At that moment, Jin Do-hyun’s eyes landed on the mess scattered across the desk.
Lumis’s previous album and an opened bag of jelly candies.
‘Lumis? …Luha?’
His eyes suddenly lit up.
“Lu-Luha! Jin Luha!”
“Luha? How cute! That’s such an adorable name!”
Seo Yoo-jin gently patted Jin Do-hyun’s head.
Phew…
Jin Do-hyun breathed a sigh of relief.
“But what’s that?”
Seo Yoo-jin asked once again.
Her fingertip was pointing at the back scratcher behind Jin Do-hyun.
“Ah… this.”
Oh, come on. Why does everyone have to be so nosy?
What am I supposed to say this is now…
“He has atopic dermatitis! He has atopic dermatitis!”
‘Oh?’
Thanks to Yoon Tae-jin’s quick response, they managed to get past it this time.
“Oh dear. That must be so difficult for him. If he scratches himself with something like that, he’ll damage his skin. Luha is seeing a doctor, right?”
Seo Yoo-jin asked with concern.
“The writer really is such a kind-hearted person…”
Yoon Tae-jin’s eyes curved into crescent moons.
“Well, that’s true too. But sometimes I use it for other purposes.”
Jin Do-hyun glared sharply at Yoon Tae-jin, pulled out the back scratcher, and swung it through the air.
It was meant to be a threatening gesture, but Seo Yoo-jin repeatedly cried out,
“So cute!”
She said he looked exactly like a five-year-old boy, like a little kid pretending to be a ninja.
‘Damn it.’
Another member has joined the ‘He’s So Cute!’ chorus.
