This was the third funeral Soojin had gone to this year.

She actually preferred them to weddings, since people asked much less questions when they were grieving. At weddings, she was usually overwhelmed with queries from her client's families.

“Where did you two meet?”

“Any wedding plans in the future?”

“Is that a baby bump I see?”

She was a professional, so she always answered the questions the exact way the person wanted, as it was her job to please. In the early years it pulled at her heart a bit when she had to lie to kind grandmothers about non-existent wedding plans and baby names. Nowadays, the lies came easier than truths.

Her clients came in all types, and she was trained to read them right away. The most empathetic were the ones who desperately wanted to fit into society. The closeted sons who wanted to show off their female fiancées to their judgemental parents. The single fathers who didn’t want their children to look like outcasts on Mother’s Day. Others used her to fill the emptiness in their lives. Older married women who were desperate for a friend. Grandfathers who missed their late wives and wanted to have someone to talk to during dinner. These were the type of clients Soojin had during the majority of the time. Humans were the loneliest species, she believed, and it was her job to fill in the blanks in people’s lives. These types of clients could usually only afford one or two days of her time, but there were so many of them that she never had to wait long for a new assignment.

The worst clients were always the richest. The ones who didn’t even try to pretend to be charming or suave, who thought that paying for Soojin’s time somehow meant they owned her. If she had a choice, their requests wouldn’t even pass by the front desk, but her company cared more about money than for their workers. These types of men mostly hired her to impress their business partners or trick themselves into thinking any woman would want to spend time with them. Even with all their wealth and power, they were still pathetic, lonely men. She was lucky her company automatically blacklisted any client who requested anything ual—because not all companies did—but that didn’t keep the rich clients from trying. Luckily, she hadn’t had to deal with one of those clients for quite a while due to her senior standing at the company.

Soojin was awoken from her thoughts as the limo reached it final destination and the driver opened the door for her. She was dressed in all black, more conservative than usual but still stylish. There was a growing crowd outside of the funeral hall, as expected, and Soojin took a deep breath before she walked forward into the flashing lights. The paparazzi tried their best to get clear shots of her face, but the bodyguards that surrounded her did a fine job of blocking their cameras.

Her new client was an enigma. They had only met briefly a week ago during the intake meeting, but Soojin had sensed that there was much more to the man than he had revealed.

Park Sungho was young, only a few years older than herself. He was handsome in the way only someone with wealth and pedigree could be. He seemed like someone who had never had to work hard in his entire life. He said he had studied abroad in Europe for most of his life, and had only returned to Korea recently when his father first fell sick. He said he had hoped to stay in Europe and start his own winery, but his father wished for him to take over the family conglomerate after he passed. His mother was a famous actress who had a contentious divorce with his father when he was ten. He had a younger half-sister that he was close to.

And his father, one of the richest men in Korea, had died two days before their meeting.

As Sungho explained, his reason for hiring her as his fiancée was due to the extreme pressure his mother put on him to get married. He only needed her to pretend for a few months as he sorted out his family matters before he would return to Europe. Soojin wondered why such a rich and handsome man needed a faux fiancée instead of having a real one, but she guessed that he perhaps already had a lover or two back in Europe that his family would probably disapprove of.

Her current identity was as Soojin Kwon, a successful fashion photographer born to expat parents in Paris and currently residing in Florence, Italy. In her experience, sometimes the more elaborate and specific the background story was, the less people would question her. Especially rich people, who flocked to stories of foreign glamour like moths to a flame.

Soojin had lost track of how many different identities she had taken on over the years. No matter the background, she fit into the role naturally every time. A professional, through and through.

The funeral hall was covered in flowers that probably cost more than two years of rent in downtown Seoul. They made the whole hall smell sickly sweet, like they were trying to hide the smell of death. Soojin never understood rich people’s obsession with flowers. Why pay thousands for something that would only fade away in a few days?