Chapter 9: Oh Daehyun Makes an Observation

Oh Daehyun had a system for reading people's files.

He had developed it over fifteen years at CROWN, during which he had reviewed approximately nine hundred trainee portfolios, forty-seven talent acquisition proposals, and enough internal incident reports to paper the walls of a medium-sized apartment. The system was simple: he read the numbers first, then the evaluator notes, then whatever had been redacted or omitted. The redactions and omissions were always the most accurate portrait of a person, because they were the only parts nobody had thought to perform.

He pulled Bae Jiyeon's file on a Thursday morning, between the nine o'clock variance report and a call with the broadcast licensing team he had been postponing for eleven days. The file was three years thick and smelled, faintly, of the archive room's particular mustiness—old paper and the specific staleness of sealed ambition.