Chapter 19: The Price of Foresight
The argument with Minho happened on a Tuesday in August, at the worst possible time and in the worst possible place.
They were at Soyeon’s library table—the one by the window, third floor, their unofficial headquarters for six months. Soyeon was there too, which made it worse, because arguments in front of witnesses have a way of becoming performances whether you want them to or not.
It started with a question.
“I want to sell,” Minho said.
Daniel looked up from his CSAT practice book. “What?”
“My stocks. The Samsung and Hyundai shares. They’re up sixty percent. I want to sell.”
“No.”
“No? That’s it? Just ‘no’?”
“We agreed to hold. The plan was—”
“The plan was your plan, Daniel. Not ours. Not mine. Yours. You decided when to buy, what to buy, how much to buy. I just followed along because you were the guy with the predictions.” Minho’s voice was controlled, but his eyes were sharp. “My portfolio is up 500,000 won. That’s real money. My money. And I want to take it off the table.”
Soyeon’s pen had stopped moving. She was watching them with the focused stillness of a person who recognizes a controlled detonation when she sees one.
“If you sell now,” Daniel said, keeping his voice even, “you’ll miss the next twelve months of growth. Samsung is going to hit 800,000 by next year. Hyundai is going to—”
“You don’t know that. You predict it. There’s a difference.”
“I’ve been right about everything so far.”
“So far. Those are the most dangerous words in investing, Daniel. ‘So far.'”
The library was quiet around them—too quiet, the way libraries get when two people are arguing in whispers and everyone pretends not to listen. The elderly man at the newspaper rack had lowered his paper. The sleeping college student was, for once, awake.
“Why now?” Daniel asked. “What changed?”
Minho’s jaw tightened. For a moment, he looked not like a seventeen-year-old boy but like something older and harder—the shadow of the man who, in another timeline, would embezzle fifty million dollars with the same calm precision.
“My dad got let go,” Minho said. “Last Friday. The firm downsized. He’s been going to the office every morning in his suit and sitting in a coffee shop until 5 PM because he doesn’t want my mom to know.”
The anger drained out of Daniel like water from a cracked glass.
“Minho—”
“I found out because I saw him at the coffee shop. Starbucks near Bupyeong Station. Sitting there with his laptop open, pretending to work.” Minho’s voice was steady, but his hands were not. They were pressed flat against the table, white-knuckled. “He doesn’t know I saw him.”
The library hummed. The air conditioning wheezed. Someone on the first floor was photocopying something, the machine thunking rhythmically like a heartbeat.
“I have 500,000 won in profit sitting in a brokerage account,” Minho continued. “My dad is unemployed and lying to my mom about it. If I can give my family even a small cushion—”
“I understand,” Daniel said. And he did. He understood it in a way that went beyond strategy or market timing or compound interest. He understood it because he’d watched his own father cry on a balcony five months ago, and the memory of that still burned like a wound that wouldn’t close.
“It’s your money,” Daniel said. “You should do what you need to do.”
Minho blinked. “That’s it? No lecture about long-term holds? No chart showing me what I’m leaving on the table?”
“It’s your money, Minho. It was always your money. I gave you advice. I didn’t give you orders.”
Something in Minho’s expression shifted. The hardness softened. The seventeen-year-old came back, replacing the shadow of the man he might become.
“I’m sorry,” Minho said. “For getting—I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t apologize. You’re trying to take care of your family. That’s not something anyone should apologize for.”
Soyeon cleared her throat. “For the record,” she said, “the optimal move is to sell half and hold half. You take 250,000 won off the table for immediate needs, and the remaining position continues to benefit from the recovery.”
Both boys looked at her.
“What? I’ve been running the numbers since this conversation started. Half-position liquidation minimizes regret while providing immediate liquidity. It’s basic portfolio management.”
“You were running numbers during our argument?” Minho asked.
“I’m always running numbers. It’s what I do.” She tapped her pen three times. “Sell half. Hold half. Both of you stop being dramatic.”
Minho looked at Daniel. Daniel looked at Minho. The argument was over, dissolved not by agreement but by a girl with a calculator and zero patience for emotional decision-making.
“Half,” Minho said.
“Half,” Daniel agreed.
“Good.” Soyeon returned to her practice book. “Now can we get back to studying? The CSAT doesn’t care about your feelings.”
That evening, Daniel walked home alone.
The August heat had broken into something tolerable—warm but not oppressive, the kind of evening where the sky turned orange and purple in equal measure and the cicadas sang their last songs of summer. School would resume in two weeks. The CSAT was in three months. The portfolio was healthy. The plan was on track.
And yet.
The argument with Minho had unsettled something in Daniel that he couldn’t quite name. Not the disagreement itself—that was normal, even healthy. What bothered him was the moment when Minho’s face had hardened. The flash of something cold and calculating behind the friendly eyes. The way he’d said “your plan, not ours” with a precision that felt rehearsed.
Is that who you are, Minho? Is that who you’ve always been? Or is it just what stress brings out?
Because stress brought out the worst in me too, in my first life. I became controlling. Paranoid. I stopped trusting people and started managing them. And by the time I realized what I’d become, there was nobody left who cared enough to tell me.
Maybe that’s what happened to you. Maybe the man who stole fifty million dollars was just a boy who got stressed and scared and never had anyone pull him back.
He stopped at the convenience store near his apartment and bought two cans of beer. Not for himself—he was seventeen, and the convenience store clerk was the kind of uncle who knew everyone in the building and would absolutely tell his mother. The beer was for his father.
When he got home, his father was on the balcony. Standing at the railing, looking at the city. The jade tree was thriving in the summer heat, its fat green leaves catching the last light.
“Dad.” Daniel held out the beer.
His father took it without comment. They stood side by side and watched the Bupyeong evening unfold—delivery trucks, pedestrians, the distant glow of Incheon Bridge.
“Minho’s dad lost his job,” Daniel said.
“I heard. Your mother heard from Mrs. Park at the market.”
“Small town.”
“All towns are small when people are hurting.”
They drank. The beer was cheap—Cass, the default Korean beer, the kind that tasted better cold and outdoors and when you were sharing it with someone who understood that sometimes drinking together was better than talking.
“Dad, can I ask you something?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
“Do you think people can change? Like, fundamentally. Do you think someone who does bad things was always going to do bad things, or can the same person turn out differently if the circumstances are different?”
His father considered this. He was not a man who answered questions quickly—he turned them over like parts on a factory line, examining them from every angle before committing to an assessment.
“Your grandfather,” he said, “was a good man who made a bad decision because he trusted the wrong person. That bad decision turned him into a bitter man. But the bitterness came after the loss. Before it, he was kind.”
“So the circumstances changed him.”
“The circumstances revealed what was already there. Everyone has the capacity for both.” His father took a sip of beer. “The question isn’t whether people can change. It’s whether they have someone in their life who makes them want to.”
Someone who makes them want to.
Daniel thought about Minho. About the boy who wanted to start a business. The boy who covered for his friends without being asked. The boy who sat in Starbucks watching his father pretend to be employed and decided to sell his stocks to help.
And he thought about the man Minho became in his first life. The thief. The betrayer. The man who disappeared to Southeast Asia with fifty million dollars and never looked back.
What if the difference between those two Minhos is just… me? What if, in my first life, I was too busy building an empire to notice my best friend drowning? What if I had been there—really there, not just in the same building but actually present—he might have been different?
I can’t know that. I’ll never know that. But I can try.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“For what?”
“For the wisdom.”
“It’s not wisdom. It’s experience. Wisdom would mean I’d learned from it.” His father finished his beer and crushed the can. “Your mother made naengmyeon. It’s too hot for jjigae.”
“Sounds perfect.”
They went inside. The cold noodles were sharp with vinegar and ice, exactly right for an August evening. Minji was at the table, proudly showing their mother her latest math practice score—ninety-one, the highest she’d ever gotten.
“Oppa helped me with the word problems,” Minji said, beaming. “He’s actually a good teacher when he’s not being weird.”
“I’m always a good teacher.”
“You’re sometimes a good teacher. The rest of the time you stare at your phone and mutter about stock prices.”
“That’s called multitasking.”
“That’s called being obsessive.”
“Eat your naengmyeon.”
“You eat YOUR naengmyeon.”
His mother smiled. His father ate in silence, the ghost of his own smile hidden behind a mouthful of noodles. The apartment was warm and loud and alive, and Daniel sat in the middle of it and let the noise wash over him like a tide.
Tomorrow, he would call Minho. Not about stocks. Not about the market. Just to see how he was doing. Just to be there.
Because his father was right. The question wasn’t whether people could change. The question was whether someone cared enough to help them try.
And Daniel was going to care. This time, he was going to care about all of it.