"Don't go?"
"There's no point in going there. You'll only end up feeling terrible, so why bother?"
Elise muttered quietly that she had never heard a kind word from that mouth in her entire life.
Dull, not smart enough, lacking effort. These were the words Elise had heard most often from her father, Dominic Chae.
"I wonder who she takes after to be so stupid."
Once, when she overheard her father muttering to himself, she couldn't stop crying for a long time.
There were many days when she wanted to scream like a madwoman, saying it wasn't entirely her fault for being born stupid, for not meeting unreasonably high expectations, for not always achieving good results despite trying her best in unseen ways.
Her father's criticism today was much worse than usual. It started with Elise not handling her assigned case properly. The case she was handling independently for the first time was on the verge of losing.
'No one does well from the beginning.'
