Su Ji tried not to kick the back of the seat in front of her – after all, the people up there hadn't done a thing to her. No, the culprits were all the way back home - home in Seoul. They were sitting in their cozy offices, not realizing what a single signature could do to other people. A single signature could decide a person's destiny, and the lives of everyone around.

"You should go live with your grandmother now," her father had said in desperation. And that really was the last resort – he didn't get on well with his mother, and if he was telling Su Ji to go live there it was really the end. All those fancy lawyers with their suits and brief cases had amounted to nothing in the end. They lost, and her father – her poor father, who got mixed up and confused by numbers – was found guilty of embezzling funds from his company. In a way, it was his faut – he should have found someone better to trust with the finances. The real culprit was long gone, and so was the money, of course. He had prepared things well before he disappeared, planting the evidence so it pointed straight at Mr. Lee.

"Dad," Su Ji had asked, with wide scared eyes when the police had first shown up. "Will you be ok?"
He had smiled at her and nodded. "Don't worry about me. I haven't done anything wrong, and the trial will be fair. My innocence will be proved." He then lectured her about how everyone was equal before the eyes of the law, and no matter what happened, the truth will come out at some point.

Su Ji could have kicked herself when she thought about how much she had believed in that. When the police came and took her father away in handcuffs, he was only worried about what would happen to her. "Go to Yumi's house, ok? You can live there for a while, until I get back." The last things he said before being dragged away were an endless stream of reminders to eat all her meals and dress warmly and to not get sick or else.

Su Ji had tried not to cry in front of him; she knew it would make things harder for him but when the house was empty, there was nothing to prevent the tears.

Kang Yumi lived next door, and her mother was only too glad to give Su Ji a place to live while her father's trial went on. She and Yumi had plenty of room to spare; it was just the two of them.

Just like it had been the two of them with her father. Su Ji couldn't remember a time when her mother had been alive, and she knew that her father tried hard to make up for not having a mother. He tried to fill in the roles of both a mother and a father, and with his work it wasn't always easy. But he had tried – he made sure she ate all her meals, he always made sure she had all the clothes she wanted, and as long as she was happy he didn't care about her grades if she passed.

"Spoiled," some people had said, shaking their heads sadly. "Just see what will become of the child..."
Those disapproving people were actually a few prying relatives from her mother's side. They had disagreed strongly over Mr. Lee's decision to bring Su Ji up on his own. For Su Ji's own sake, he cut all ties with them so they would no longer be able to harass him or lure Su Ji with fake promises.

Su Ji was all he had left to live for.

She had often wondered why he didn't date other women or marry someone else, but she knew why now. He had been too focused on bringing her up; balancing a life of a demanding job and bringing up a child left no time to invest in anything else.

"Also, I didn't need anyone else," he had said, when Su Ji finally asked him about it. "We're fine just the way we are, right?"
She had nodded, and yet felt guilty; she knew he also didn't want to make her go through the same things as other children usually did when a parent remarried: jealousy, confusion, anger, betrayal.

It had been all for her. His demanding job at N.E Corporation had been for her too – where else could he have had such high salary and working hours that enabled him to be back home when school was over for the day?

A lot of people actually didn't approve of this lifestyle, they didn't belive one could be a career man as well as a single father. But it had worked – granted, Su Ji was a bit on the pampered side but other than that she had grown up all right – she had never taken drugs or smoked, never gotten pregnant... never was stupid enough to hire someone who just stabbed you in the back.

The embezzlment case hadn't been a short one, or a quiet one either. The media went wild with daily reports – after all, it wasn't every day that on of the biggest companies in South Korea had a nice scandal to blow hot air into and make into an issue.

The first time the case affected her in school was when someone insulted her father. The school was full of rich snobs, ready to swoop down and tear anyone apart with their vicious claws.

One girl had been bragging that her father had bought a holiday home in Spain, and how there was a certain someone who definitely wouldn't be going anywhere for a holiday. Su Ji had seen the jibe and retorted, "At least I won't be using money that was earned from collecting bribes."
"That's right," the girl responded, a nasty grin on her face. "Your father was too low to be in a position like that, wasn't he? He's just a thief – stealing from his company and being stupid enough to get caught."

Su Ji had reacted violently, and to make a long story short, the chairman of the school wasn't too happy to have his daughter beaten up. Su Ji had been forced to apologize and endure further humiliation when the girl gave a big fat phony smile and said, "Oh no, don't worry. If my father was behind bars for common theft, I would be disturbed too."
Su Ji had bit her lip to keep down the stinging retort. She just bowed and Mrs Kang had kept on apologizing and thanking them for their generousity.

Su Ji hated how Mrs. Kang had to come deal with it...

The entire trial period had been marred with nasty comments, and for the first time, Su Ji became a target for bullies as she had no longer had a rich father to protect her.

When her father had asked her about school during one of those rare visits, she tried to sound normal – she still had her best friend Yumi by her side, after all. But he knew her too well to be taken in.

"Don't let anything get to you," he kept saying. "This will all be over before you know it, and things will be back to normal. And if you want, we can go live somewhere else."

And she had believed it. She had believed all his talk about justice and truth and every time she had visited her father in prison, she believed it would be one of the last times, the trial had to get wrapped up sometime soon.

And it did, but not the way it should have. That last day, she had attended the trial, against her father's wishes, and had been present when the judge banged on his gavel and declared, "Guilty."

Her father was sentenced to years in prison.