Hearing this, Hong-ran immediately defended Dae-young, saying he was the one who should have been famous. Seeing her boyfriend getting attacked, Ha-neul wasn't going to let it slide either. She argued that it wasn't like Dong-gu had purposely pushed his friend down the stairs, and who knew whether Dae-young, if he had gone, would have ended up as successful and as handsome as Dong-gu.
So the two women got red in the face arguing. Hong-ran insisted that Dae-young's looks weren't any less impressive, while Ha-neul thought her friend was too drunk and told her to go wash her face with cold water to wake up.
Hong-ran wasn't going to back down, and clapped back right away. "You're the one who needs to wake up. Stop being so blindly biased just because he's your boyfriend."
While the two of them were arguing over who was more handsome, Dae-young had to step in and stop them. "All right, all right, you two stop arguing, or else you'll end up like me and Dong-gu back then, charging at each other to pull hair."
The whole crew suddenly went completely silent.
The two women couldn't believe that these two big men had fought and actually used hair-pulling moves. Dong-gu tried to deny it, but it was too late.
It turned out that back then, after getting famous, Dong-gu was insanely busy, and sometimes complaining a little made Dae-young think his friend was just showing off. When Dae-young asked for favors or for professional advice, Dong-gu either refused him or made sarcastic comments. The tension that had built up for so long finally exploded.
During an argument, Dae-young got dizzy, and just as he crawled up and tried to grab onto something to stop himself from falling, he accidentally grabbed right onto Dong-gu's hair. So the two god-like men charged in and ripped each other's hair out mercilessly.
After hearing the story, Ha-neul quietly pulled her chair a bit further away from Dong-gu, because she thought it was way too childish. Hong-ran also added, "My son doesn't even fight as messily as you two," and gave them both a judging look.
Actually, after that, they cleared up their misunderstandings. Dae-young apologized and admitted that he had been very jealous and very childish at that time, but it was all because he was going through a crisis. He had just divorced his wife, and his rich father-in-law looked down on him like a servant. Seeing Dong-gu succeed hurt his pride, so he acted like that.
The two men took turns apologizing to each other, but by the time they looked up, the two women had already disappeared into thin air.
Meanwhile, Hong-ran was asking Ha-neul about her future plans, and whether she wanted to go back to the hospital. She even introduced her to a reporter she knew who could help investigate Kyung-min and get her justice back.
But Ha-neul refused. She felt the peaceful life she had right now was already very happy.
Elsewhere, when Dae-young and Dong-gu were talking privately, Dae-young accidentally brought up the time he bumped into Kyung-min in front of the bathroom and saw him holding a strange bag of powder.
Dong-gu was shocked to realize that his memory of getting drugged back then was real. But why would Kyung-min do that? He tried to calm himself down, thinking maybe it was just his own personal medicine.
However, when Ha-neul went for her psychology checkup, she accidentally saw a photo of Kyung-min volunteering in Thailand on the doctor's computer. It turned out that the pharmaceutical company he was the director of had been the sponsor. What was even more suspicious was that the company representative's wife was from Macau. And coincidentally, the victim in Dong-gu's medical accident had also been from Macau.
To clear things up, Ha-neul decided to go meet the reporter Hong-ran had introduced. From here, she found out that Kyung-min's pharmaceutical company was extremely dirty, having bribed the media and faked research to manipulate the stock market.
When she was looking through the documents the reporter provided, Ha-neul froze. The vice representative of that company was the exact same man who had bumped into her at the courthouse door back then. Why would someone completely unrelated to the case show up at Dong-gu's trial?
All the clues started pointing toward a terrifying conspiracy, with Kyung-min as the mastermind.
Right at this moment, Ha-neul got a call from her younger brother. The police had made a breakthrough in the break-in case from the other day. According to the investigation, the person who broke in the first time wasn't the anesthesiologist, because he had been abroad at that time, with clear immigration records. When they checked the surrounding surveillance cameras looking for familiar faces, Ha-neul was dead shocked to recognize Kyung-min's face popping up on the screen.
On another side, Kyung-min seemed to be getting blackmailed by the anesthesiologist. That doctor had planted seven hidden cameras in the hospital, but earlier only six of them had been found. The seventh camera, the most important one, seemed to have recorded all the evidence of his crime.
Without hesitating, Ha-neul went to meet Kyung-min all by herself. She exposed his conspiracy, and why he would use any means necessary to climb up to the professor's seat. It turned out that the new drug his company was developing required the participation of a university hospital professor in order to be legalized. He planned to use the fake thesis to manipulate stock prices.
She also questioned why his company's vice representative had shown up at Dong-gu's trial, strongly claiming from that point that he had a hand in the medical accident back then.
Kyung-min heard these words and his face lost all its color. In a moment of distraction, he almost crashed into a huge truck coming from the opposite direction. Luckily, the car horn rang just in time and he swerved hard to narrowly escape death.
But right when the two of them were still catching their breath from escaping death's door, a construction vehicle suddenly rushed out from the side, crashing straight into the side of their car.
Both of them lay motionless in the wreckage, barely breathing.
On the other side of the city, Dong-gu was anxious because he couldn't contact Ha-neul. He was restlessly waiting at the end of the alley, completely unaware that tonight the person he was waiting for would never show up.
After the accident, Ha-neul recovered, but she chose to hide the real cause from Dong-gu. She didn't want him to live in guilt and blame himself.
However, the truth eventually found its way out. The police found the anesthesiologist's old video recording, showing Kyung-min secretly handing a note to the suspect nurse right before the medical accident happened. There was also a voice recording from the car's dash cam during the accident.
Only then did Dong-gu shockingly realize that Ha-neul had gotten into the accident entirely because of him.