Chapter 2: The Kitchen Table
The bus ride from Hana High School to Bupyeong took thirty-seven minutes. Daniel knew this because he’d made the trip roughly two thousand times in his first life, but also because right now, each minute felt like an hour.
He sat by the window, watching Incheon scroll past, trying to reconcile the city he was seeing with the one he’d left behind. The empty lot near Bupyeong Station—where the luxury apartment complex would go up in 2016—was still a parking lot. The old Lotteria where he and Minho used to get burgers after school was still open, its faded sign glowing orange in the afternoon sun. In 2021, it would become a Starbucks. Then a phone repair shop. Then nothing.
Everything was the same and nothing was the same. Like putting on a pair of glasses that showed you the ghost of every building that would ever stand on this ground.
The bus lurched to his stop. Daniel grabbed his backpack—impossibly light, stuffed with textbooks he could now probably teach—and stepped off onto the sidewalk.
The apartment building was a concrete rectangle, five stories, built in the early ’90s when function was the only design principle anyone could afford. Unit 302. Third floor, second from the left. A small balcony where his mother hung laundry and his father kept a single potted plant—a jade tree that somehow survived decades of neglect.
Daniel climbed the stairs. His legs took them two at a time without thinking, the muscle memory of a teenager overriding the caution of a forty-two-year-old man. By the second floor, he wasn’t even winded.
God, being seventeen is like having a cheat code for existing.
He reached the front door. Brown paint, slightly peeling. A doorbell that hadn’t worked since 2005. The faint sound of a television inside—the evening news, 6 o’clock broadcast.
His hand hovered over the door handle.
On the other side of this door were two people he had failed in ways he couldn’t begin to catalog. His father, who’d worked thirty years at the same factory so his son could go to college, and who had died alone in a hospital bed while Daniel was in a meeting about Q3 projections. His mother, who had called every Sunday without fail for twenty years, and who Daniel had stopped answering when the calls started to feel like obligations rather than conversations.
He was going to walk through this door and see them alive. Young. Healthy. Happy in the small, sturdy way that people are happy when they don’t expect too much from the world.
Daniel pressed the handle and stepped inside.
“I’m home.”
The apartment was exactly as he remembered. A narrow hallway leading to a living room that was also a dining room that was also, on cold nights, a sleeping room when the heating bills got too high. The wallpaper was the floral pattern his mother had chosen in 1998 and never changed. The TV—a boxy Samsung CRT—sat on a stand that his father had built from leftover wood.
“Daniel-ah! You’re early!”
His mother emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She was forty-five—younger than Daniel’s real age by three years—with her hair pulled back in a practical bun and the kind of smile that made you feel like everything was going to be fine, even when it wasn’t.
She was alive. She was right there.
“Mom.”
The word came out wrong. Too heavy. Too full. His mother noticed immediately—mothers always do.
“What’s wrong? Did something happen at school?” She crossed the hallway in three quick steps, pressing the back of her hand against his forehead. “You’re not sick, are you? Your face looks strange.”
“I’m fine. I’m—” Daniel swallowed hard. “I just wanted to come home.”
His mother studied him with the kind of careful attention that no board of directors had ever given him. Then she smiled.
“Well, good. Dinner’s almost ready. Doenjang jjigae and fried mackerel. Go wash your hands.”
“Okay.”
He went to the bathroom. Closed the door. Looked in the mirror.
A seventeen-year-old boy stared back at him. Round face, not yet sharpened by stress and late nights. Clear skin. Bright eyes. A face that had never negotiated a hostile takeover or read a bankruptcy filing or sat alone in a corner office drinking whiskey from a bottle given to him by the man who destroyed everything.
“Who are you?” Daniel whispered to his reflection.
The reflection didn’t answer. But the face looking back at him was terrifyingly, impossibly young, and somewhere behind those bright eyes was a forty-two-year-old man who was trying very hard not to fall apart.
He washed his hands. He dried them on the same blue towel that had hung in this bathroom for as long as he could remember. He went back to the kitchen.
His father came home at 6:30.
Cho Byungsoo was a compact man with thick hands and a quiet demeanor. He’d worked at the Hyundai factory in Ulsan for twenty-six years, commuting two hours each way, and he had never once complained about it. Not because he was particularly stoic, but because complaining took energy, and all his energy went to the factory and his family, in that order.
“Daniel’s home early,” his mother said as his father hung up his jacket.
“Good.” His father settled into his chair at the kitchen table—the same chair, same table, same position, for as long as Daniel could remember. “How was school?”
“Fine.”
“What did you learn?”
“Joseon Dynasty. 1392.”
“I knew that.” His father picked up his chopsticks. “I don’t need a university degree to know when the Joseon Dynasty started. That’s just knowing things.”
His mother set the jjigae on the table, steam rising in a column that smelled like home in a way that no restaurant in Gangnam had ever managed to replicate. Mackerel, crispy and golden. Rice, perfectly cooked. A side of kimchi that his mother had made herself, the way her mother had taught her.
“Eat,” his mother said.
Daniel ate.
The food was extraordinary. Not because the ingredients were special—this was working-class home cooking, the kind of meal that cost less than the appetizer at the restaurants Daniel would frequent in his thirties. It was extraordinary because his mother had made it, and his mother was alive, and his father was sitting across from him cracking the mackerel’s spine with his chopsticks the way he always did, and the television was mumbling the news in the background, and everything was normal.
Normal had never tasted this good.
“You’re being quiet,” his father observed.
“Just tired.”
“Tired? You’re seventeen. What do you have to be tired about?”
I ran a company for twenty years, got betrayed by my best friend, went bankrupt, and then somehow woke up in a high school classroom. I’m very tired, Dad.
“School is hard,” Daniel said instead.
His father grunted. “School is not hard. The factory is hard. School is sitting in a chair and listening. Try standing for twelve hours pressing metal into shapes.”
“Byungsoo,” his mother said in her warning tone.
“I’m just saying. The boy should appreciate what he has.”
“I do,” Daniel said. “I really do.”
Something in the way he said it made both his parents look at him. His father’s chopsticks paused mid-reach. His mother tilted her head.
“Are you sure nothing happened at school?” his mother asked.
“Nothing happened. I just…” Daniel set down his spoon. “I just want to say thank you. For dinner. For—for everything.”
His parents exchanged a look. The kind of look married couples develop after two decades—a full conversation in a single glance.
“He’s being weird,” his father said.
“He’s being sweet,” his mother corrected. “Let him be sweet.”
“Sweet is weird for Daniel.”
“Just eat your mackerel.”
His father ate his mackerel. Daniel ate his jjigae. His mother refilled the rice. The television talked about the weather—rain tomorrow, clearing by the weekend.
It was the most important meal Daniel had ever eaten.
After dinner, Daniel retreated to his room.
It was small—barely bigger than the walk-in closet he’d had in his Gangnam penthouse—and cluttered in the specific way of a teenage boy who has never been asked to organize anything. Textbooks stacked on the floor. Dirty laundry draped over a chair. Posters of StarCraft players on the walls. A desktop computer that was already outdated by 2008 standards, humming quietly on a particleboard desk.
Daniel sat on the bed. The mattress was thin enough to feel the metal frame underneath, and for a moment he missed his king-sized bed so intensely it was almost physical.
Then he remembered that his king-sized bed was in a penthouse he’d bought with money that no longer existed, in a life that was either a dream or a previous iteration of reality, and the mattress suddenly didn’t seem so bad.
He needed to think. To plan. To figure out what the hell had happened to him and what he was going to do about it.
He opened a notebook—the kind with a plastic cover and lined paper, the kind he’d used in school and hadn’t touched in twenty years—and started writing.
Things I know:
1. The date is September 3, 2008.
2. Lehman Brothers collapses September 15. Global financial crisis begins.
3. Markets bottom out March 2009.
4. I have roughly 43,000 won to my name.
5. I am seventeen years old, in excellent health, and I know the next 25 years of history.
Things I don’t know:
1. Why this happened.
2. Whether this is permanent.
3. Whether changing things will create consequences I can’t predict.
4. Whether I’ll remember everything, or if the memories will fade.
He stared at the lists. In his previous life, he’d been a man of action—act first, plan later, apologize never. It had made him rich and it had made him reckless. This time, he needed to be smarter.
The financial crisis was the obvious starting point. If he could get even a small amount of money into the market at the absolute bottom—March 2009—he could multiply it tenfold within a year. Samsung, Hyundai, the American tech stocks that were about to be born. He knew which ones would survive and which would disappear.
But he was seventeen. He couldn’t open a brokerage account. He couldn’t invest without a parent or guardian. And he had forty-three thousand won—about forty dollars.
“First things first,” he muttered, staring at the ceiling. “I need money. Real money. And I need it before the crash.”
Six months. He had roughly six months to accumulate enough capital to make his market timing meaningful. Six months of being a high school student with the mind of a failed CEO and the bank account of a teenager.
He thought about tutoring. He could teach any subject in the high school curriculum—not because he’d been a good student, but because he’d spent twenty-five years accumulating knowledge that went far beyond textbooks. Economics, history, mathematics—he could explain them with the clarity that comes from actually using them, not just memorizing them for exams.
He thought about electronics. The iPhone had launched a year ago. Smartphones were about to reshape the world, but most Koreans were still using flip phones. If he could buy and resell early smartphones, refurbish used ones…
He thought about his father’s jade tree on the balcony. It had survived for years on nothing but occasional water and the will to exist.
That’s me now. Minimum resources. Maximum patience. Just survive until the moment comes.
Daniel closed the notebook and lay down on the thin mattress. The ceiling of his childhood bedroom was water-stained in one corner, a shape that he’d always thought looked like a dog but his sister had insisted was a cat. His sister—who was twelve right now, probably doing homework in the next room, completely unaware that in another timeline she’d gotten a full scholarship to MIT on the strength of sheer, stubborn brilliance and a brother who’d finally had enough success to fund it.
The apartment was quiet. His parents’ room was down the hall, the sounds of the television leaking through the thin walls. His mother was probably washing dishes. His father was probably asleep in his chair—he always fell asleep in his chair after dinner, mouth slightly open, the newspaper draped over his chest like a blanket.
Daniel pressed his hand against the wall. Through it, faintly, he could hear his sister’s pencil scratching against paper.
I’ll do better this time. Not just for me. For all of you.
He closed his eyes. Sleep came faster than he expected—the body of a seventeen-year-old, apparently, didn’t believe in insomnia.
Tomorrow, the plan would begin.