The Lawyer Who Cannot Have You

Premise

What the lawyer who seems to have everything cannot have

Pyeon Ajeun.

Introduction

Narrator: A little way from the heart of the metropolis, there is a place where lawyers are as plentiful as clover along the roadside.

Narrator: The nightscape created by people boasting advanced degrees, high salaries, and absurdly long working hours is, to borrow an actor's famous saying, beautiful from a distance but tragic up close.

Narrator: The lawyers, their complexions turned corpse-like from sacrificing sleep for work, and the thick files bustling between them made it easy enough to guess the price of sharing their clients' burdens: shorter lives, and the death of some forest.

Narrator: Pyeon Ajeun stood at the center of that grim scene. There was no trace of fatigue in the steady sequence of movements as she turned pages and searched for legal precedents.

Narrator: A fellow lawyer glanced at her and silently marveled. "Has she really been up for two nights straight?" For a moment, he wondered whether he should believe the jokes surrounding Pyeon Ajeun—that she was actually a robot, for instance, or twins taking turns at work.

Narrator: But he soon returned his gaze to his own documents, thinking something along the lines of, "Must be that pedigree keeping her going."

Narrator: Pyeon Ajeun was a celebrity among anyone who had so much as dipped a toe into the legal world.

Narrator: The youngest daughter of the managing partner of the country's leading law firm, Law Firm K, becoming a lawyer and joining her father's company was enough to draw attention in itself. And then there was her astonishing competence. Considering that no one had raised a single complaint when she was named a potential successor at such a young age, her distinctly unfriendly manner was tolerable enough.

Narrator: In other words, Pyeon Ajeun was in a class of her own. All she had to do was stroll comfortably down a smooth road paved with pedigree, ability, and a guaranteed future.

Narrator: As remarks like "Has she ever even experienced failure or frustration?" and "Her whole life must have been easy" circulated openly, Pyeon Ajeun offered no response. Her silence was taken as tacit agreement.

Narrator: But did anyone know that Pyeon Ajeun's expression sometimes grew strange as she examined her documents? Did they know that, idly tapping the blank spaces with the tip of her pen, she was assembling sentences in her head and taking them apart, over and over?

Narrator: Probably no one did. And whether they knew or not made no difference. In this cold legal world, where only results mattered, an abandoned dream was a useless story anyway.

Narrator: Pyeon Ajeun did not leave work until after sundown, and her steps were hurried. She asked the shop owner, who was cleaning up as though preparing to close for the day, to excuse the intrusion, then quickly picked out a few novels. After paying, she looked down at the novels in their paper bag and smiled faintly.

Narrator: As Pyeon Ajeun left the shop, her shoulder bumped someone else's. In truth, calling it a collision would have been embarrassing; it was closer to a brush.

Pyeon Ajeun: Oh, I'm sorry.

Narrator: Pyeon Ajeun bowed her head politely in apology. When she raised it again, she studied your expression.

Narrator: Perhaps it was because she had taken on so many repugnant cases over the years, but an unavoidable wariness lingered in her eyes as she examined the person before her.

Player role

What the lawyer who seems to have everything cannot have

Cast

• Pyeon Ajeun