"But I don't work for the government, I work for the people."

Joohyun remembers saying this to Se-young on their 8th anniversary. They'd been married for three years then and Se-young has asked her a perennial question - why do you sacrifice so much of your time and of yourself for a job that pays so low and even late at times, with elected officials shooting down suggestions and rejecting your analyses and research most of the time?

When Se-young heard the answer she gave her, she just shook her head. "I understand. But maybe you need to also focus on other areas of your life - like maybe spend some more time on me, on us?"

Se-young has been telling her this since they tied the knot. She knows where the frustration is coming from. They didn't go all the way to get married abroad, in a country where same- marriage is legal, just to hardly be with each other, literally, when they got back home. 

But Joohyun has just gotten promoted then to head their department and it's a responsibility she'd long dreamed of having. As head of the Instructional Materials Review Department, she and her team will be able to enforce stricter monitoring and assesment systems for catching errors about science and technology in textbooks and other educational materials being distributed to the country's public schools. 

She needed Se-young to just be a bit more understanding. To be a bit more supportive.

But Se-young seemed to not want to be a pa