Eunjo, lips pressed tightly shut as she stared straight through Jooheon, answered coldly.

“CEO, are you interrogating me?”

Her voice cracked as she swallowed the heat rising up her throat.

“Why? Are you saying I killed Lee Eunjo or something?”

Her eyes grew hot and the tip of her nose stung.

“I know you look down on me, but doing it like this is troublesome.”

Unlike Eunjo, the Jooheon in Na Eunjo’s memories is not a good man.

Prickly, cold, and cruel.

Selfish, scathing, and vicious.

Arbitrary, and he treats people’s hearts carelessly.

The day she met Jooheon for the third time, Na Eunjo had to come home and cry for a long time. Because of the harsh words Jooheon threw at her.

Of course, Na Eunjo started it first.

It was true that she approached Jooheon because she needed money. Because of another scandal that broke right before the scandal with Jooheon.

It was scheduled to become an article soon, and if she couldn’t stop it, she was about to lose her place in the industry.

The reporter demanded an enormous settlement, and Na Eunjo didn’t have any money in her hands.

What she knew how to do was steal, so in the end the only method that came to mind was this.

Spending a night with Jooheon and demanding money from him.

Even though she knew it was wrong, she had no other way, so she lifted her chin even more brazenly.

“……Money?”

“I need a settlement fee to shut some reporter up, you know. And right now, the only place I can get money from is you, CEO.”

“If I don’t want to?”

“Mm, then I’ll spread what happened last night. Would that be okay?”

When he spent the night with her, he called her name sweetly, but the moment she demanded money, Jooheon became colder than ice.

“If you’re stupid, at least you should be quick on the uptake. What’s one night with you to me? It’s not like women like you are one or two, you know?”

At the bottom of Jooheon’s words, a nasty blade that scraped at Na Eunjo’s pride was embedded.

“Even so, you held me without any feelings—do you really have to talk like this? I’ll definitely pay it back. I can pay it back, can’t I?”

Na Eunjo, who shouted like that, picked up the check Jooheon had thrown at her.

Trembling at that memory, Eunjo answered coldly.

“CEO, you’re not a prosecutor, and I’m not a suspect.”

If she had to hear those words from Jooheon in Na Eunjo’s place, the misery would be beyond words. Because she wasn’t Na Eunjo.

“I don’t know what Ms. Lee Eunjo’s death means to you, CEO, but you shouldn’t be doing this.”

In her life, Park Jooheon was someone who, just thinking of him, felt like a soft spring breeze rustling.

She can’t lose her spring breeze.

* * *

Taking advantage of the stop at the red light, Eunjo got out of the car.

“……Drive safely.”

After greeting briefly, Eunjo crossed the road without looking back even once.

Leaving the main road and entering an alley, Eunjo quickly stepped into the one-room building where she lived.

Her heart was pounding like it might burst.

To Jooheon, who questioned her like he was interrogating a criminal, Eunjo had snapped back just as prickly. But the answer that came back was…….

“I don’t know what Ms. Lee Eunjo’s death means to you, CEO, but you shouldn’t be doing this. You don’t have the right to ask things like that, and I have no obligation to answer. So questions like this…….”

“If Lee Eunjo’s death is, to me…… like the sky collapsing? Then can I ask a bit?”

The words he spat out coldly with an arrogant face gave her chills. And yet, at the words that her death was equal to the sky collapsing, her heart raced without fail.

“You idiot. It’s a lie. I’m just saying it.”

Yeah, it’s a lie.

She knows best that it’s a lie.

For three years they were together, sharing an aching tenderness of heart. It wasn’t only their hearts they shared. She gave him everything she had. And yet…….

The man who had all of her disappeared like the wind and never appeared again.

She even had to hear, through her father, the fact that he had gone abroad to study. And then a full eight years passed.

Time only romanticized those memories into a soft spring breeze, but the heart that couldn’t fill the emptiness he left behind collapsed in devastation.

Until she married with a resigned heart—no, even after that, all the while. Her heart couldn’t be rebuilt.

If that was how it would be, he should have never shown up again.

He returned to this world as the CEO of the major investment company MK Investment, and yet he didn’t even send her a single word.

In the end, it meant that to Jooheon, she was only that much of a person.

And yet the sky collapses?

A lie.

“Why are you telling that kind of lie? Why!”

And yet, in one corner of her heart, Na Eunjo’s memories bothered her.

The man who had gone eight years without a single word, as if he’d cleanly erased her, showed a wistful gaze at the name “Eunjo.”

What on earth is it, Park Jooheon.

Which part is your real heart, exactly.

“Ridiculous. Do I want to believe Park Jooheon still keeps me in his heart?”

You know it’s not.

It can’t be.

With a self-mocking laugh, Eunjo hurried into the one-room and locked the door. Then she leaned her back against the entryway and calmed her heaving chest.

After barely suppressing the pounding, only then did she take off her shoes and go inside.

It’s such a small house. It seems smaller than the bathroom she had on the 46th floor of Troyple.

When she thought of Na Eunjo, who had prepared for death in this narrow space all alone, her mouth somehow tasted bitter.

Stepping inside, she opened the old laptop sitting on the cramped desk.

After fingerprint authentication, it logged in automatically.

An unexpected meeting with Jooheon had stirred a whirlpool of emotions, but in truth she didn’t have the leisure for that. Because first, she had to face reality.

“Am I dead, or am I alive?”

Even now, when she couldn’t tell which was the real reality, she was hungry.

If so, maybe this side—where she was breathing and living—was reality?

If this was reality, and if this reality was going to continue to some extent, it could be even more horrific than she expected. It meant Na Eunjo’s life was that much of a mess.

Eunjo began tapping on the laptop keyboard, organizing the traces of the dead Na Eunjo one by one.

[Name: Na Eunjo, stage name: Nabi.

She wanted to become a supermodel who confidently walked the runway, but her height didn’t support it, so she barely settled for being a fitting model or magazine editorial model.

Even that—now the work has dried up.

Her relationships with her coworkers are extremely bad.

At the agency Hera Entertainment, she’s called a “pretty outcast” or “pretty trash,” to the point that neither her position nor her reputation is good.

Two bank accounts. Total cash assets: 1.72 million won…….]

“This is the most despairing. Only 1.72 million won.”

This cramped one-room has a deposit of 20 million won and monthly rent of 500,000 won.

“The 18th of every month is the rent transfer date, and even if I don’t spend a penny, it’s money that’ll make me automatically penniless in three months.”

How can the money saved up at this age be only 1.72 million won?

“With no decent work, she spends everything she earns, too.”

After looking through one year’s worth of Na Eunjo’s memories, Eunjo could only sigh.

If you were a lone orphan with no one to rely on, you should have pulled yourself together and lived better.

So you could at least properly take care of your own body.

Even as she criticized her like that, one corner of her heart didn’t feel good. Because, having Na Eunjo’s one year of memories, she ended up understanding her feelings despite herself.

Unlike her, who had been called beyond a golden spoon—a diamond spoon—Na Eunjo’s life was truly miserable.

Every day was just like hell. With circumstances that didn’t improve no matter how hard she tried, she’d let go of everything early on.

That can happen, can’t it. With a resigned heart, like a mayfly, only enjoying the moment without thinking about the future…….

Suddenly, Eunjo’s gaze slid to the small standing mirror on the desk.

The face that was still unfamiliar was staring back at her.

A small, slender face, and features so vivid they were glamorous—she was extremely beautiful. Especially the light-brown eyes set faintly between doll-like lashes that cast a deep shadow.

The slightly upturned upper lip, and the cute yet flawless bridge of the nose, too.

“So pretty, and yet…….”

Because she was pretty, it hurt more.

Because it seemed she had lived a harder life because she was pretty.

Turning her gaze away from the mirror, Eunjo tapped the keyboard again.

How to live is important, but what to live doing is also important.

If you live only eating because you’re hungry, how is that different from an animal?

In the end, it meant that if you forget your sense of purpose, the value of living disappears.

No matter that she was in Na Eunjo’s body, she was, no matter what anyone said, Lee Eunjo, the heir of CX Soft, and if she was Lee Eunjo, it meant there were things she had to do.

Eunjo quickly typed out the things she had to do as Lee Eunjo.

[First. Return to Troyple and open Kang Jinwoo’s secret safe.]

[Second. Find Secretary Jo.]

[Third. Meet Father’s colleagues and ask for help.]

“First, I have to find a way to go back to Troyple.”

Her father’s real will and the SD card containing various evidence videos—the ones her hand had barely reached right before she died.

She had to get them back into her hands.