Chapter 18: The Summer of Two Million
Summer break arrived with cicadas and humidity and the peculiar freedom of being a Korean high school student with exactly zero obligations for six weeks—if you didn’t count CSAT preparation, tutoring eight students, running an electronics resale business, managing a seven-figure investment portfolio, and trying not to accidentally reveal that you’d time-traveled from the future.
Daniel was busy.
“You need a vacation,” his mother said on the first morning of break, watching him eat breakfast at 6:30 AM with his notebook open beside his rice bowl.
“This is my vacation.”
“A vacation where you wake up at six and study until midnight is not a vacation. It’s a prison with home-cooked meals.”
“The meals are excellent.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
But Daniel had too much to do. The portfolio was growing, the tutoring business was at capacity, and the CSAT was four months away. Every hour counted. Every hour had always counted, in both of his lives, and that was precisely the problem.
Rule #1: The money means nothing if you lose the people.
He’d written that months ago. And he was already breaking it.
The crisis at home came in July, and it wasn’t about money.
Daniel came home late on a Wednesday—9:30 PM, two and a half hours past the dinner deadline—after a marathon tutoring session that had run long because Jieun was struggling with Shakespeare (Mr. Yoon had assigned Romeo and Juliet as summer reading, which Daniel privately considered cruel and unusual punishment).
The apartment was dark except for the kitchen light. His mother was sitting at the table, alone. No food was set out. No television murmured from the living room. The apartment had the heavy, pressurized quiet of a space where an argument had recently ended.
“Mom?” Daniel set down his bag. “Where’s Dad?”
“Sleeping.” Her voice was flat. Not angry—tired. The kind of tired that goes deeper than sleep.
“And Minji?”
“In her room. She’s been in her room all day.” His mother looked up at him. Her eyes were red-rimmed. “She failed her math exam, Daniel.”
“She—what?”
“Sixty-one out of a hundred. Her worst score ever. She came home, threw her backpack against the wall, and locked herself in her room.” His mother’s hands were wrapped around a cup of tea that had gone cold. “She’s been crying for three hours.”
Daniel sat down. The weight of it hit him slowly—not the failed exam, which was recoverable, but the three hours of crying. Cho Minji didn’t cry. She was twelve going on thirty, all sharp edges and fierce independence. For her to cry for three hours meant something deeper was broken.
“Did you talk to her?”
“She won’t open the door. Your father tried. I tried. She said she wants to be left alone.”
“What happened? She was doing fine in math.”
His mother was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was careful, measured—the voice of a woman who had spent three hours processing something and was now presenting her conclusions.
“I think she’s been struggling for a while. She didn’t tell us because—” She paused. “Because you’ve been so busy. With your tutoring and your studying and your investments. You promised to teach her, Daniel. You promised months ago.”
The words hit like ice water.
December. Minji in my doorway. “Teach me. I don’t want to be the person who needs saving.” I said “deal.” That was seven months ago. How many times have I actually sat down with her since then?
He counted. Twice in January. Once in February. Nothing since March. He’d been so consumed by the investment, the CSAT prep, the tutoring business—all the things that were supposed to secure the family’s future—that he’d neglected the family member who had explicitly asked for his help.
“I messed up,” Daniel said.
“Yes.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“She doesn’t want to talk.”
“I’ll try anyway.”
He walked to Minji’s door. The hallway was dark. Through the thin wood, he could hear something that wasn’t crying anymore but the exhausted aftermath of crying—shaky breathing, occasional sniffles, the rustle of blankets.
He knocked. “Minji.”
Silence.
“Minji, it’s me.”
“Go away.” Muffled. Face-in-pillow voice.
“I heard about the math exam.”
“I said go away.”
“No.”
A longer silence. Then: “You can’t just say ‘no’ to me telling you to go away.”
“I literally just did.”
“That’s—that’s not how it works, oppa.”
“Open the door and explain how it works, then.”
More silence. Then the sound of feet on the floor, the click of the lock, and the door opened three inches. One puffy, red-rimmed eye glared at him through the gap.
“What.”
“Can I come in?”
“Why?”
“Because I owe you an apology. And because I brought something.” He held up a convenience store bag. Inside were two mint hot chocolates—the ones with the green label, Soyeon’s preferred brand, which Daniel had discovered were objectively the best hot chocolate available in Bupyeong at 10 PM on a Wednesday.
The door opened wider. Minji’s face was a mess—swollen eyes, blotchy cheeks, hair in a tangled ponytail. She looked exactly like what she was: a twelve-year-old who had failed something for the first time and didn’t know how to process it.
“You bought hot chocolate.”
“Mint. Your favorite.”
“It’s not my favorite. It’s fine.”
“Your enthusiastic endorsement has been noted.”
She stepped aside. Daniel entered the room. It was small—even smaller than his—and cluttered with textbooks, manga, and the detritus of an adolescent girl’s life: hair ties, pencils, a stuffed rabbit that she would deny owning if asked. The failed math exam was on the floor, face-down, crumpled in one corner where it had been thrown.
He picked it up. Uncrumpled it. Sixty-one out of a hundred. Quadratic equations, factoring, word problems. He scanned the errors quickly—most were careless mistakes, the kind that come from rushing or from not understanding the underlying concept well enough to apply it under pressure.
“This is fixable,” he said.
“Easy for you to say. You’re good at everything now.” The bitterness in her voice was sharp. “You used to be normal. Now you’re this—this genius who makes millions of won and studies all the time and everyone talks about how amazing you are. And I can’t even pass a math exam.”
Oh.
It wasn’t about the exam. It was about him.
“Minji—”
“You promised to teach me.” Her voice cracked. “Months ago. You said ‘deal.’ And then you disappeared into your notebooks and your phone and your stocks and I never saw you. Mom and Dad are always talking about Daniel this, Daniel that. Daniel’s investment. Daniel’s predictions. And I’m here failing math by myself.”
Daniel sat down on the floor. Cross-legged. At eye level with his sister, who was sitting on the bed with her arms wrapped around the stuffed rabbit she would deny owning.
“You’re right,” he said. “I broke my promise.”
“You did.”
“And I’m sorry. Not the kind of sorry that means ‘I feel bad.’ The kind of sorry that means ‘I’m going to fix it.'”
“How?”
“Starting tomorrow, every evening from seven to eight. You and me. Math, English, whatever you need. No phones, no notebooks, no portfolio checks. Just us.”
“You said that before.”
“I know. And this time I mean it. You can hold me to it. If I miss a session, I’ll—” He thought for a moment. “I’ll let you read my diary.”
Minji’s eyes widened. “You have a diary?”
“It’s a notebook. With plans and stuff.”
“That’s a diary.”
“It’s a strategic planning document.”
“That’s a diary with pretentious vocabulary.” The ghost of a smile crossed her face. Just a flicker, barely there, but real. “One hour every night?”
“Every night. And Minji?”
“What?”
“Sixty-one isn’t a failure. It’s a starting point.”
“It felt like a failure.”
“I know. The first time something doesn’t work, it always feels like failure. But failure only matters if you stop there. If you use it—if you figure out what went wrong and fix it—then it’s just data.”
“Data?” She wrinkled her nose. “You sound like Soyeon unni.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It wasn’t one.”
“I’m taking it anyway.” He held out one of the hot chocolates. She took it with the reluctant acceptance of a twelve-year-old who was still angry but willing to negotiate a ceasefire.
They drank hot chocolate sitting on the floor of her room. Daniel picked up the math exam and walked through each problem, not solving them for her but asking questions that led her to the answers herself. The careless mistakes were exactly that—careless. The conceptual errors were addressable. By the end of the hot chocolate, Minji had corrected twelve of the fifteen problems she’d gotten wrong.
“See?” Daniel said. “Not a failure. A rough draft.”
“A rough draft with a grade attached.”
“Grades are temporary. Knowledge is permanent.”
“Now you sound like a motivational poster.”
“Good night, Minji.”
“Good night, oppa.” She paused at the door as he left. “Daniel?”
“Yeah?”
“If you break the promise again, I’m reading the diary. All of it.”
“Understood.”
“And I’ll tell Soyeon unni whatever’s in there.”
“Now you’re playing dirty.”
“I learned from the best.”
The next evening, Daniel kept his promise.
Seven to eight. Math. No phones. Minji was skeptical for the first ten minutes, waiting for him to check his portfolio or answer a text. When he didn’t, something in her posture relaxed—the visible unclenching of a kid who had been waiting to be disappointed and wasn’t.
By the end of the week, she’d improved enough to solve the practice problems without help. By the end of the month, she’d retaken a practice version of the failed exam and scored an 87.
“I’m going to beat Soyeon unni’s score,” Minji declared one evening, brandishing her practice test like a trophy.
“Soyeon scored a hundred.”
“I said I’m going to beat it. I didn’t say when.”
Daniel laughed. The sound surprised him—genuine, unselfconscious laughter, the kind that he realized he hadn’t made in weeks. Months, maybe. He’d been so busy being a strategic genius, a financial prodigy, a time-traveling twenty-five-year savant, that he’d forgotten how to just be a brother.
This is what I came back for. Not the money. Not the empire. This. A twelve-year-old girl who thinks she can beat Kim Soyeon in math, and a seventeen-year-old idiot who almost missed it because he was too busy watching numbers on a screen.
He wrote in his notebook that night:
July 2009. Portfolio value: 11,340,000 won. CSAT mock exam: 89th percentile (up from 78th). Tutoring students: 10. Minji’s math score: 87 (up from 61).
The last number is the most important one.
He underlined it twice and went to bed.