The Heirs

Chapter 7

Outside the neighborhood convenience store, Eun-sang pretends to sleep while Young-do sits at her table and tries to wake her up. “Why do you always sleep in these kind of places?” he wonders. “It makes me want to protect you.”

Tan calls from across the street, and they have a bit of a stare-off until Young-do tells Eun-sang to give up her sleeping act. He assumes that Tan is here for Eun-sang, but Tan scoffs at that, saying that he doesn’t care what they do. Telling Young-do to save his bad behavior for his own neighborhood, Tan leaves.

Young-do tells Eun-sang to run along after Tan, still convinced they’re here to see each other. She retorts that he’s wrong and leaves him to his ramyun.

Tan’s show of indifference is just for Young-do’s benefit, and the moment she enters the courtyard he pops up to grill her—shouldn’t she be more careful of where she sleeps? Why was she with Young-do? He’d warned her against him, and asks if Young-do did any threatening. Eun-sang replies that he said he wanted to protect her, and Tan bursts out, “That’s a threat!”

She asks what happened between them, and he sighs, “I don’t remember. All I know is we hate each other now.”

She makes it a point to enter the house separately, but Tan rather enjoys popping into the kitchen to interrupt the conversation between her and his mother. She plays it off like this is their first encounter, and Madam Han makes the introductions.

After Tan exits, Madam Han enlists Eun-sang as her spy to report back on Tan’s doings at school, though she’s quick to warn Eun-sang to remember her place—they may be living in the same house and going to the same school, but in no way are they on the same level. Tan overhears from the hallway with dismay as his mother basically tells Eun-sang she’s the servant and he’s the young lord.

Eun-sang finds a brand-new Jeguk High uniform hanging in the room, and freaks out to hear that her mother bought it. Mom assures her that she can handle the cost, and Eun-sang lights up in gratitude.

Rachel flips her lid, as usual, at another attempt by her mother to solidify the new family relationships—this time it’s a family photo with Young-do’s side. She snaps at her mother to have fun taking photos without her, then storms off to confront Young-do about it, finding him post-judo practice. (Is it a written into the contract that one scene per episode must feature somebody taking conspicuous swigs of that energy drink? For all the exposure it’s getting, they could’ve at least tried to write it in, a la Vitamin Water.)

Rachel is dead-set on finding some way to break up their parents’ engagement, impatiently brushing aside his quip to date him (“I said their engagement, not mine”). He offers that while he doesn’t have a plan for wrecking the engagement, he can stop the photo shoot from happening, and that grabs her interest. He demands a quid pro quo, though—nothing comes free.

At the crack of dawn, Eun-sang emerges from the house to find Tan haunting the gate waiting for her—he’d wondered how early she was leaving to avoid him, and waited extra-early to find out. It’s his driver’s day off so he’s called a taxi, and insists she ride with him.

During the ride, Tan instructs her on what to report back to his mother: “The kids all like him, because he’s good-looking. He studies well too, because he’s good-looking.” Psh. He notes how quick she was to agree to play spy, and she points out that she isn’t at liberty to refuse anything in his house.

Eun-sang explains her early departure as only be partially related to avoiding him, so he asks about the other reasons. Her thoughts flash to the parade of chauffeured cars dropping off kids at school, but she merely answers that she’s avoiding traffic. He overrides her choice to get dropped off at a distance from school, saying that nobody will be there at school this early to see them arriving together, which seems to me the opposite of what’s bound to happen.