CHAPTER 192: CHAPTER 191. THE SCENT FROM THE PAST

After a long time, Sarah unlocked the door to her mother’s bedroom.

It took a while to get rid of the stale air and cleaned the room again to make it comfortable, which Sarah determined to do it herself. She only asked Hajin to give her pointer, while he watched her from the door. It was still a sacred place that Sarah didn’t want to share, even to her own lover.

While moving back and forth to get rid of the dust and airing the room, the blurry image of her mother moving around the room--which she had been supressed because of the pain--started to get clearer and clearer. It was still hard; she still felt like her heart was crushed as if the jade pendant weight a ton and was pressing on her chest, but...

It was bearable.

Yeah. Her tears fell once or twice, but she could wipe them with her sleeve and move on instead of crumpling up on the ground.

Which was good. It was good enough. She knew she could sleep there without sobbing herself to sleep.

"You scared me there for a second, Princess..." Hajin sighed when Sarah came out for dinner after she finished cleaning up the room. "I thought you were breaking up with me or something."

Sarah laughed when she remembered how pale Hajin was in the park. He couldn’t even speak, only closing and opening his mouth like a fish while looking at Sarah in panic. He looked so silly that for a second, Sarah was tempted to record it with her phone.

He was so distraught that he didn’t even ask her why she wanted to sleep separately for a while, and it was such a rare reaction that Sarah kept it to herself until they were back home and Sarah finally told him that she wanted to sleep in her mother’s bed for a few days.

The way Hajin slumped to the ground in relief was also a sight to see. Sarah giggled a little bit while the bodyguard let out a heavy, dramatic groan on the floor.

"Good job for being patient," Sarah patted his head, but Hajin still asked for a cuddling time on the couch before bed.

So clingy.

But, well...Sarah appreciated that he didn’t disturb her when she was cleaning her mother’s room. He didn’t insist on doing it for her, or constantly asking if she was alright when she started to cry while changing the sheet because she couldn’t smell her mother’s scent anymore. Cuddling time before bed was not a big deal.

"Just please don’t close the door," Hajin asked as a concession. He was a lover, but also a bodyguard.

Sarah could accept that.

"What about Joseph?"

Just as Sarah had predicted, Joseph contacted the chief of security in the building at the time when they almost reached the park. Thankfully, Hajin had already finished erasing their traces, so Joseph couldn’t find anything.

The fact that Sarah could tamper with the building’s CCTV seemed to convince Joseph that she had what it took to really blow him and his family with just the touch of a button, because his phone activity after that was filled with plane ticket searches. He told his wife and daughter to come home and packed their bags--quite agitatedly--and told his secretaries that he had an emergency and had to do a quick check-up in Singapore.

Sarah suspected the old man already had an emergency exit strategy in place if something happened and he had to go out of the country quickly for a while, and it didn’t seem to be baseless. Joseph made several calls to foreign numbers afterward, so Sarah and Hajin predicted it was someone who would manage their stay while Joseph figured out how to get out of his predicament.

Not that he would have the chance.

"Have you contacted your...acquaintances?" Sarah asked while they watched a random TV show, waiting for Joseph’s flight to start.

"When I cooked dinner earlier," Hajin said. "We’ll probably heard from them tomorrow morning."

"Okay..."

Sarah nodded, watching subtitles running on the screen without reading them. Hajin put his arm around her shoulder and spoke lightheartedly. "Just sleep nicely tonight, Princess. Everything will be over tomorrow."

"Not everything," Sarah corrected. They still had Daesung and HS Group to take care of. "But, well...I guess I can sleep better tonight."

"Without me?" Hajin whined.

"You were the one telling me to sleep nicely!" Sarah smacked the cheeky puppy and got attacked with a flurry of tickles and kisses until she shed tears from too much laughing.

Enough to distract her from any unpleasant thing until Hajin escorted her to her mother’s bedroom and gave her a goodnight kiss. It had been a while since they slept separately, so she felt a bit weird and...giddy, as if saying goodbye at the end of a date.

Perhaps this was how people normally experienced a typical relationship.

As she crawled to the bed, she realized that her mother also didn’t experience a typical relationship. She was a shy girl with no prior experience, accepting an arranged marriage request to honor her dead father’s friendship with a man who did not love her. Still, she loved him because for her, that was what a good wife does: loving their husband.

Sarah sighed, lamenting her mother’s stupidity. If she could choose, she would choose not to be born at all rather than have her mother married to Lee Hyuk. She hated her grandfather, who thought marrying an innocent orphan girl to his player son was a good idea, robbing her of the chance to be loved by someone who would actually treat her good.

Aside from her grandfather, the only person who was remotely good to Sarah’s mother was...well, Joseph. But knowing the truth, Joseph probably only did that because the previous chairman loved Sarah and her mother. They had became Joseph’s target from the start, and the only reason Joseph did not target Sarah further was because she was no longer favored by anyone, and showed no interest toward HS Group.

In the end, though...Joseph would probably try to get Sarah’s shares or get her on his side. He just didn’t have the chance yet before Sarah ambushed him.

"I’m glad...that you don’t have to witness his betrayal. You’ve been betrayed enough in your life," Sarah whispered into the pillow, imagining that her mother’s scent was still there.

The soft scent mixed with a refreshing herb from her medicine. If she closed her eyes, Sarah felt like she could recall it in her subconsciousness. Perhaps if she spent several nights sleeping there, she could recall it completely without trying too hard.

And perhaps, if she pulled the blanket over her body, she could pretend that her mother was still hugging her, just like she did when Sarah slept there when she was a teenager.

"Just a bit more," Sarah curled up beneath the blanket. "Just a bit more, Mom. Please forgive your daughter for doing whatever she wants for a little bit more."

* * *

Sarah woke up with a gasp; not because of nightmares, but the scent of coffee.

For a whole minute, she was blinking slowly im a daze, wondering where she was. At one point, she thought she was waking up in the past, when she was still a teenager and had a sleepover at her mother’s place. It was shattered immediately by the smell of coffee, however, because her mother didn’t drink any.

If it were her mother, it would smell like tea and ginger.

For another minute, Sarah spent her time sighing and keeping her emotions in check. Did she get a nightmare? Sarah had no idea. Even if she dreamed about the nice past, it would constitute as a nightmare still.

Heaving another sigh, Sarah wobbled out of the bedroom, following the strong smell of fresh coffee. The master bedroom was closer to the kitchen than the one she usually used with Hajin, and he could see the tall figure of the bodyguard in front of the coffee machine. Shirtless as usual, even in winter.

Sarah hobbled forward, following the scent of coffee and the magnificent back muscle as a beacon. The dragging of her fluffy slipper was loud enough for Hajin to know she was coming without seeing her.

"I was just about to wake you up, Princess--"

Hajin paused, widened eyes looking down at the arms around his waist. He glanced over his shoulder, watching Sarah pressing her face on his back.

"Princess?" he called. "Good morning?"

Sarah simply hummed in return without letting go. She rubbed her face on Hajin’s back and took a deep, deep breath, as if mingling the nostalgic scent of her mother in her memory and the scent of her recent favorite person. She had been too used to having Hajin around her when she woke up that the need to search him first thing in the morning felt weird.

Hajin chuckled and let Sarah cling to his back while pouring the coffee into a mug. "Coffee?"

"No sugar," Sarah mumbled against the back muscle. She felt rather miserable and wanted to get slapped into waking up.

"Are you sure?" Hajin turned carefully so he faced Sarah, the corner of his lips lifted cheekily. "I just got news from my contact."

Sarah opened her eyes in alert. "...and?"

With a spark in his eyes that did not match the news he conveyed, Hajin told Sarah in a gleeful whisper. "The man called Seo Joseph would never disturb you again."