Chapter 13: The Order in Writing
“What did he want you to send?” I asked.
Park paused. His attorney answered first.
“We have the message he sent and the instruction he received. We’re separating what the records show from what Park remembers hearing.”
She asked Park to read the instruction on his screen. It was a reply from Daeho’s work account, sent three minutes after his 6:31 p.m. response to Park’s warning.
“‘Tell the security liaison to stop requesting corroboration of Sora’s report. No more questions to her and no more pulls of the study access records tonight. I’ll handle it.’”
I looked at Han. On the assault night, Daeho had demanded that I apologize for taking documents. Before he confronted me, he had told someone to stop checking whether Sora’s claim was true.
Park continued. At 6:36, he had forwarded the instruction to the liaison, identifying it as Daeho’s direction. The liaison replied that the inquiry would be paused.
“Did you speak to Daeho between those messages?” Han asked.
“He called after I sent the warning. He told me I was making trouble where there wasn’t any. Then the written replies came.”
“What did you hear him say about Yuna?”
“Nothing. I didn’t know what would happen at the house.”
His attorney let the silence sit before adding that she had requested preservation of the call record. Park could establish that a call occurred; he had not recorded its words.
Han asked for the complete thread, including headers, rather than a screenshot. Park’s attorney said she had the copy from his ordinary work mailbox and was seeking the corresponding record from the liaison’s mailbox. A match would help establish that the messages had traveled between those accounts. It would not identify whose hands were on Daeho’s keyboard.
Park spoke again, without being asked.
“I should have pushed back when he told me to stop.”
“You had warned him,” I said.
“And then I passed on the order.”
His voice was steady, but I remembered the letter threatening his job. There was no honest way to tell him his choice meant nothing.
“You can tell them that,” I said. “You don’t have to take responsibility for what Daeho did to me.”
Park thanked me. He sounded no less troubled.
After the call, Han wrote down the times in a column: warning, open event, first reply, instruction, forwarded message, acknowledgment. She left room beside each entry for the record supporting it. The open event still did not prove who had read my warning. Daeho’s two replies, if authenticated, showed far more than that he had received it.
“Will this prove he knew Sora was lying?” I asked.
“No. The logs didn’t prove she was lying, either. They gave him a reason to check before accusing you. His instruction tells us what he chose to do instead.”
That distinction angered me more than I expected. Eight broken ribs were not an uncertain thing. Yet every document about the hours before them had to be read with care while Daeho had acted without any.
Han seemed to know what I was thinking.
“We are being careful because he wasn’t,” she said.
Two days later, the liaison’s attorney provided a copy of the forwarded message and acknowledgment from the liaison’s mailbox. The message identifiers and times matched Park’s copy. A separate company mail record identified the instruction as having been sent from Daeho’s account. His lawyer was invited to inspect the records and respond; he maintained that Park had misunderstood a temporary pause in a confused inquiry.
There was no mention in Daeho’s written instruction of waiting for another investigator. There was only an order to stop requesting corroboration that night.
Han added the records to the hearing file. She did not ask Park to search for anything else.
The following afternoon, she received a response from Sora’s attorney. Han had asked Sora to explain two conflicts: the document-preparation firm’s record of a missing-file draft completed at 4:41 p.m., and Sora’s account that she first noticed missing documents around 8:30. Han had also sent the examiner’s report comparing the altered photograph with the repair company’s original, taken nine days earlier.
We had not sent Ms. Choi’s 5:47 message. Choi was still speaking with an independent adviser about what sharing it could mean for her work. Han had promised to wait.
Sora’s response called the contractor’s work “precautionary drafting.” It said an early concern about a file was different from confirming later that one was missing, though it did not identify either file. It suggested the photograph’s added date might have resulted from routine handling by an unnamed employee. It offered no account from that employee.
At the end, Sora wrote that I had created confusion by approaching the study and demanding access to company matters.
“She’s still saying I took something,” I said.
“She hasn’t identified what, in this response.”
I read the first page again. The repair company’s original placed me in the hallway nine days before the assault. Sora’s explanation did not change that date. Nor did it tell us who altered the copy uploaded through an account associated with her device. I wanted to write her a question she could not evade.
Han closed the file gently.
“She may be asked these questions in a setting where the answers are recorded.”
“And if she gives the same answers?”
“Then the decision-maker can compare them with the records.”
I hated how little comfort that offered. I also knew what it would mean to skip the comparison and declare I knew everything.
That evening, my grandfather found me at the apartment dining table with three folders open and an untouched bowl of soup. He moved the folders only after I nodded.
“Did the board call?” he asked.
“Not about the bid. I’m excluded.”
“I know.”
He sat across from me. Earlier, he had promised not to use his contacts to stop Daeho’s company. The promise had been harder for him to keep than he liked to admit, and harder for me to ask of him than I had expected.
“I keep thinking there must be something I can do,” he said.
“You made me soup.”
“I meant something bigger.”
“I know. Please let this be enough tonight.”
He pushed the bowl toward me. For a few minutes, I ate and he told me about a repair to the apartment elevator. No one asked me to be a chairwoman or a witness while the soup was warm.
The next morning, Han and I worked through the coming hearings. My divorce petition did not require me to sign Daeho’s accusation. My account of the assault would be supported by medical records, photographs taken with my consent, and what Ms. Choi had heard and seen within the limits she had described. Han would not turn Choi into an eyewitness to blows she had not witnessed.
“The company-file allegation and the assault won’t necessarily be decided together,” Han said. “Different questions may be heard by different people.”
“I don’t need every question answered in my favor,” I said. “I need them to hear what happened.”
Han marked a place in my statement where I had written that Sora watched the entire assault. I crossed out entire. There were moments I could remember with terrible clarity, and moments when pain had narrowed the room to the floor beneath me. I would not fill those gaps for Daeho. I would not fill them for myself.
Before Han left, Ms. Choi called. She had spoken with her adviser and wanted more time before deciding whether to provide her message. She was willing to describe what she had heard, but worried that losing her job would mean losing the room that came with it.
“Tell her I understand,” I said when Han covered the phone.
Han relayed my words and discussed what could be requested to protect Choi from retaliation. No one promised her employment would be safe. When the call ended, the blank place in our evidence file remained blank.
I thought of Park, trying to correct his own part in Daeho’s order while his employer examined him. Neither he nor Choi had been asked whether they could afford to tell the truth before the truth became dangerous.
By the end of the week, Haneul’s independent committee had completed its review of Daeho’s bid. I received a notice about the process, not the restricted proposal or the committee’s deliberations. The recorded minutes showed that I had been excluded from discussion and voting under the board’s conflict protocol.
The committee found that the submitted disclosure history did not adequately account for a replacement page and that the bidder’s explanations had not resolved discrepancies in the submission trail. It recommended that no award proceed on the current file. Under the same procurement rules used for other bidders, the company could seek the available corrective review.
The notice made no finding that Sora had invented a theft. It said nothing about what Daeho had done in our home. Those were not questions the committee had been appointed to decide.
My grandfather read the notice beside me.
“He’ll say you made this happen.”
“He already has.”
“But you didn’t.”
I had asked for the conflict to be disclosed and the file to be reviewed. I had not seen the confidential bid or chosen its result. The distinction mattered even if Daeho refused to make it.
Han called that evening about the hearing schedule. I was at the same table where I had crossed one word out of my statement. She began with dates, then stopped.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Daeho’s attorney has filed a notice of his proposed testimony.”
May you like
I waited while she opened the attachment. Beyond the window, someone crossed the courtyard carrying groceries, shifting the bags from one hand to the other.
Han read the final paragraph aloud. Daeho would dispute the medical account of how I had been injured. He would testify, the notice said, that I had fabricated the assault.
