Chapter 78 of 111

Chapter 78

Chapter 78. The Bitter Truth

"You really were at home watching the drama? How long of a story are you planning to tell us if you even redid your makeup..."

"Even if I'm only going outside for one minute, I have to put on makeup. I look very different without it."

At those words, Serin shook her head.

Then she leaned toward me and whispered.

"She's lying...! She doesn't even have shading on, and she doesn't have double eyelids either. That's basically just foundation over her skin."

I'd been a manager for quite a long time myself, but if Serin said so, then it had to be true.

Though whether Lee Eun-bit looked much better with makeup wasn't exactly the important part.

"Ah, I watched the drama. The comments were..."

"Wait."

I hurriedly stopped Lee Eun-bit before she could bring up reactions to the drama.

"I'm not planning to check the response to the drama yet. I'm sure the direction we chose is controversial enough already. There's no need to go looking for insults on purpose."

"I see."

It was an unspoken pressure for her to hurry up and confess if she wanted to stop Serin and me from getting cursed at.

Though I genuinely wasn't checking online reactions either.

"Then if I only tell you my personal reaction, Actor Serin's acting was so good that I really enjoyed it. Especially that final monologue. Writer Go Won-hee wrote the script, right? Compared to the movie version, the dialogue is definitely more fun to listen to, and the monologues too."

"Ah, really?"

Serin smiled and turned toward me.

"That monologue was Serin's ad-lib."

I said.

"It was an ad-lib?"

"Yes. An ad-lib. Well, not a completely spontaneous one. The monologue didn't exist originally, but I suggested adding something there."

I'd suggested that a monologue from Serin would work well in that scene, and Go Won-hee had asked Serin what she thought the character should say.

After filming ended, Serin recorded the monologue right there.

Since she'd come up with it while lying on set with fake blood covering her head, you could almost call it her personal thoughts on getting hit with a hammer.

"Then how did you come up with that monologue?"

That question probably wasn't aimed at me.

Lee Eun-bit and I both turned toward Serin.

Serin quietly thought back to how she'd felt at the time before answering.

"Up until then, the protagonist had made a mistake, but I was thinking that nobody in the world is completely bad. I wanted viewers not to hate the protagonist just because she'd gotten a murderer acquitted. Anyone can make a mistake like that, right?"

Lee Eun-bit looked at me in surprise.

She seemed to think I'd told Serin something.

But I shook my head.

I genuinely hadn't told Serin anything.

And during my previous meeting with Lee Eun-bit, we hadn't exchanged any meaningful information either.

The conversation had simply ended with her insisting that Jo Jin-young had indeed been falsely accused.

So if she was now looking at me as though she wanted to ask something, that meant she had prepared something I'd be glad to hear.

There was a reason people said guilty feet had no rest.

"Nobody in the world is completely bad...?"

"Yes."

"Then what about murderers? Can you really say that someone who brutally killed several people isn't simply a bad person?"

Serin looked flustered and couldn't answer.

But Lee Eun-bit wasn't trying to defeat Serin in an argument.

Hadn't she already said she'd liked that monologue?

Lee Eun-bit pressed hard against her temple, just as she'd done after sending Jo Jin-young away before.

Then she spoke.

"Since you're interested in the case, I assume you've looked into why Prosecutor Lee Ho-seong lost the first trial."

"Why he lost?"

"Anyone who was in the courtroom that day knows. Prosecutor Lee Ho-seong basically lost because he couldn't establish Jo Jin-young's motive."

A motive?

Come to think of it, I vaguely remembered hearing something like that.

Even though they had different biological parents, Jo Jin-young had always cared deeply for his younger sister, so there was no reason for him to kill her.

It was also difficult to argue that he'd killed her impulsively because there had been far too many stab wounds.

And Jo Jin-young really had been a model student at school.

"You're saying there actually was a motive?"

"You understood quickly. Yes. There was. And I immediately dismissed that motive. Having a motive doesn't mean everyone commits murder, and in this case I thought the motive might unfairly turn Jo Jin-young into a murderer."

"What was the motive?"

Lee Eun-bit explained.

To Jo Jin-young, Jo Jin-a was his stepmother's daughter.

Apparently Jo Jin-a's original surname had been Lee or something like that.

His stepmother had lived in Cheongdam.

After her husband died, she remarried Jo Jin-young's father, who had been in the same Korean literature department as her.

He'd injured his arm while working at the Ulsan shipyard and lived in poverty, but he was apparently a decent and respectable man.

Up to that point, it was a perfectly ordinary love story.

The tragedy had begun with the stepmother's obsession with the arts.

She had become fixated on private education for her daughter, Jo Jin-a.

"The family was poor, but every bit of money his father had saved went into his daughter's academies and tuition. Jo Jin-young must have hated that. He even admitted that he did. But he endured it."

Her academy fees alone had apparently cost millions of won every month.

"That's all. It's still not enough to qualify as a complete motive. To call it a real motive, you'd need to explain why he committed the crime at that specific time after enduring it for so long."

I almost asked whether it was really possible to figure out why he had chosen that exact moment.

But I stopped myself.

Lee Eun-bit probably hadn't wanted to know.

She probably hadn't even tried to.

That was something Lee Ho-seong needed to investigate.

"Can I tell Prosecutor Lee Ho-seong what you just told me?"

"..."

Lee Eun-bit muttered incomprehensibly to herself.

"Take the hammer blow... take the hammer blow..."

Then she answered.

"Up to this point, it's all from statements the police collected while interviewing Jo Jin-young's school friends. Prosecutor Lee already knows about it, but I dismissed it so quickly that he probably started doubting it himself. He's likely looking for different evidence by now, but... yes. That's the situation."

Lee Eun-bit advised him to take another close look at those statements.

Lee Ho-seong was as capable as he was passionate.

After I briefly explained the motive and told him, just as Lee Eun-bit had suggested, to investigate Jo Jin-a again, Lee Ho-seong nearly jumped for joy.

He asked me to pass along his encouragement to Lee Eun-bit.

And the moment Lee Ho-seong finished his investigation, the entire case entered a completely new phase.

The prosecution had already discovered that after Jo Jin-a's death, large sums of money had repeatedly been transferred from Park Gwang-ho into the bank account of Jo Jin-young's father.

That alone was enough to create a plausible story.

It just hadn't been conclusive evidence.

After entering high school, Jo Jin-young failed to receive a scholarship.

He had enrolled in a city high school in Changwon, where he could no longer remain among the absolute top students.

Because of that, someone suggested that he drop out.

And that was when he finally snapped.

To make matters worse, Jo Jin-a, who knew nothing about any of this, had openly announced that she planned to apply to an arts middle school.

Apparently, the murder hadn't been premeditated.

At first, Jo Jin-young had only intended to speak honestly with Jo Jin-a about his situation for the first time in his life.

But then he saw Jo Jin-a entering an obviously expensive pizza restaurant with friends from her academy.

And he changed his plan.

He went to a nearby hardware store, bought a knife, and entered the restaurant looking for her.

When he couldn't find her inside, he began checking the women's restroom.

The moment he saw Jo Jin-a, he stabbed her to death.

The tragic part was that everything Jo Jin-young thought Jo Jin-a had enjoyed was actually the result of their stepmother's vanity.

And on that particular day, Jo Jin-a had only followed a friend who offered to buy her pizza.

What could an elementary school child possibly know?

Her parents gave her money, so she pursued the art she wanted.

That was all.

Whether the man about to become her stepfather was working like a slave in Masan...

Or whether the older brother who played with her whenever she visited Masan for the holidays was about to be forced out of high school...

Those weren't things Jo Jin-a could have known.

Regardless, Jo Jin-a died.

With new evidence added, Lee Ho-seong re-indicted Jo Jin-young.

As he entered the Changwon Prosecutors' Office, Jo Jin-young's father collapsed in front of the building with a hollow expression.

He couldn't even cry.

Maybe poor people were destined to suffer no matter how much they clung to the rich.

Park Gwang-ho, who had played a major role in manipulating the case, also became the target of an investigation.

There hadn't been a retrial yet, but the wave of online criticism that had briefly engulfed Lee Ho-seong disappeared just like that.

-So the movie version of 〈Good Pro〉 was wrong and the drama version was right?

-Where'd all the people who cursed out Go Won-hee last time go?ㅋㅋㅋㅋ

┗ So if it turned out well in the end, that means she didn't deserve criticism? If she thought he was innocent but still broadcast it like that, wasn't that still wrong?

┗┗ If there was no victim in the end, then yeah, she doesn't deserve criticism. Are you going to throw people in prison for murdering someone in a dream too?

┗┗ Agreed. It's not like Go Won-hee never explained that she didn't have enough time to rewrite the adaptation.

And just like that, the ratings doubled.

Exactly twice the ratings of Episode 1, which had already started high thanks to expectations from the successful movie version of 〈Good Pro〉.

Even the screenwriter of the original American 〈Good Pro〉 from the 1980s mentioned the Korean terrestrial version.

[New history is being born in Korea! As expected of K-content!]

But really, this was the achievement of a K-lawyer, a K-Masan prosecutor, and K-Kim Serin.

Of course, K-Go Won-hee deserved most of the credit.

Our Kim Serin, who had shown both a highly capable lawyer in the early episodes and an excellent romance character later on, began receiving countless offers.

So many drama and film casting requests arrived that when we rejected too many, some casting directors started secretly visiting the company at dawn and shoving scripts through the door like newspapers before running away.

If you had too much rice and not enough storage space, you couldn't exactly pour the rest into a ditch.

We needed to make proper use of this opportunity if we wanted Serin to continue working consistently.

Public attention built up like this never lasted very long.

So for now, I personally handled the first round of script reviews.

And as a Kim Serin fanatic, there were far too many characters I wanted to see her play.

I even started wondering whether I should pull only Serin out of 〈Rebooting〉.

"Hello?"

A call came in while I was reviewing scripts, and I answered without checking the caller.

It was Lee Eun-bit.

"Ah, yes, Attorney Lee Eun-bit! I've been worried, so I've been checking all the comments mentioning you this time..."

"Wait. Don't tell me. I don't particularly want to go looking for insults either."

I had been about to tell her that public opinion was surprisingly sympathetic toward her, thanks to Lee Ho-seong protecting her well.

And with Kim Serin, the character directly modeled after her in the public's mind, becoming enormously popular, that reaction was only natural.

But if she didn't want to hear it, then fine.

"And I'm not a lawyer anymore."

"Why?"

"I shut down the firm, sold the office, and donated half of the money to Talent Holdings Korea. It was their money in the first place. I gave the other half to Jo Jin-young's father..."

Lee Eun-bit said she had quit being a lawyer and decided to try becoming a police officer.

"A police officer? Why all of a sudden?"

"I learned something about myself. Someone like me shouldn't be the one making judgments. Bad clients always seem to have money, while good clients don't. I realized I was more vulnerable to temptation than I thought. Back then, I told myself I was only approaching the trial strategically... and somehow it turned into all of this."

"To become a police officer, you need to study well, but your physical fitness has to be good too, doesn't it?"

At that, Lee Eun-bit said she'd already been looking into special recruitment for people with legal backgrounds.

"Anyway, I called because I wanted to thank you. If it hadn't been for you and Actor Kim Serin..."

"You can stop there. By the way, if you ever change your mind, let me know anytime."

"Seriously. I've never even met that person privately. Why do you keep trying to set me up on blind dates?"

Lee Eun-bit thought for a moment before speaking.

"Fine. Once I'm done job hunting, I'll contact him once. Send me his number."

You should've said that from the beginning.

After hanging up, I searched through my contacts to send her Lee Ho-seong's number.

While I'd been speaking with Lee Eun-bit, another text message had arrived.

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