49 Days Episode 3

Ji-hyun (in Yi-kyung’s body) catches her fiancé meeting clandestinely with her best friend, which sends her reeling. The room service waiter asks after her in concern but soon grows suspicious at the weird lady crouched in the hallway, and his raised voice is overheard by the cheating cheaters in the hotel room.

Min-ho steps out to ask the waiter what the problem is, and grows concerned at mention of a strange woman sitting outside his room. Ji-hyun barely steps inside the elevator in time to avoid being caught by Min-ho — not that he’d recognize her as herself, but that’s sure to be one awkward confrontation. Min-ho shrugs off the incident, but picks up an small ornamental ball on the ground outside his room. It had fallen off Yi-kyung’s shoe, surely to make a reappearance at an inconvenient future moment.She returns to the restaurant, where everyone’s written her off as a liar who falsified her resumé.

So Kang is surprised when she not only shows up, but presents her hotel employment papers. Gruffly, he reminds her that he’d given her an hour, and she’s way past that.

Starting to tear up, Ji-hyun stammers about seeing a friend with her fiancé together at the hotel. Proving that he’s really a softy at heart, he tells her to show up to work tomorrow and accepts her papers — only to have her collapse at his feet in exhaustion. When Ji-hyun wakes up in Kang’s studio, she’s a little surprised at this evidence of Kang’s thoughtfulness, and is relieved she wasn’t fired. A sudden idea strikes her, though, and she bolts out of the room, not even stopping to take her handbag with her. The employees are puzzled and look through her bag, wondering if she’s up to suspicious behavior. The sight of a whistle on a string makes Kang think back to Ji-hyun’s whistle, which she’d had the day they first met. Dad asks Min-ho about the contract for Ji-hyun’s land. Min-ho says that he took care of it — which explains why he’s so keen to get that seal, if he hadn’t actually quite wrapped up the matter when he was supposed to and is now trying to fix that mistake. Ji-hyun finds Min-ho as he arrives at his apartment, and follows him inside while talking aloud (to herself, really) about his infidelity, trying to make sense of it — it was so clear that he loved her, and he gave her all his passwords, and he’d wanted to see her in all his free time.

When he steps inside, though, Ji-hyun is stunned to find In-jung waiting for him inside. Not only were they meeting in secret hotel rooms, but In-jung was close enough to know his passcode?

Her outrage takes a backseat, though, once she catches the drift of their conversation about her seal, which he needs for some kind of deal. Ji-hyun had actually given her seal to Min-ho before the accident — or so she thought, except it turned out that in her absentmindedness, she had accidentally handed over lipstick instead of the seal. If Min-ho were merely trying to fix a mistake, there’d be nothing too weird about his need for the seal now. However, he adds the suspicious warning, “If Ji-hyun has land left to her, our plan fails. And I worked so hard to include that land.”

Ji-hyun may not understand the finer details, but this much is clear: These two are more than just cheating cheaters, they’re quite possibly underhanded cheaters with plans to backstab her father financially as well. Yi-kyung takes an envelope of cash with her to work that evening, to pay back the Good Samaritan for her hospital fees. He gives her the requested receipts, and she hands him the cash. He asks if she’s curious to know who he is, or why he was there at her accident site, but she’s not interested. He momentarily piques her interest by asking, “What if I told you I knew why you went there?” but she dismisses him. Rather than press the issue, he just says that he’ll see her tomorrow.

Yi-kyung has her first clue that something’s different when she brushes a hand through her hair and notices that it feels different today.Another night turns into day, leaving 44 days on the calendar. Ji-hyun shoves aside her Scheduler cell phone/alarm clock, but it shoots back to her like it’s on a tether. She throws it away, only to have it caught by Mr. Scheduler himself, here to check up on her. She orders him to leave, saying that she can’t continue living.Hyperbole, perhaps, but just the thing to get her ass in gear. Ah, he smiles, then should he call the Elevator To Heaven now? Does this mean she’s giving up her three-tear quest?

Ji-hyun scrambles to her feet, that threat lighting a fire under her spectral butt. When the Scheduler warns her that she wasn’t given 49 days just to piss ‘em away, she meekly promises not to do that anymore.

That means she has to go back to Kang’s restaurant with head bowed to try to explain her absence. Thankfully, his attitude toward her has relaxed into resigned-but-unsurprised territory, rather than his initial irritated-into-firing-her mood. He even asks if she’s eaten, and offers her a meal (albeit in his gruff way). Ji-hyun thanks him mentally for his generosity . Kang and his manager ajusshi are so startled to see that she has improved her serving skills that they stare, agape. I guess she set that bar pretty low that they’re astonished that she can pour a glass of water competently. Way to manage expectations.

Seo-woo arrives that evening, and Ji-hyun is happy to see her non-backstabbing friend, but her smile downturns the minute she spies In-jung with her. While taking out the trash, she comes face to face with Min-ho, also arriving to meet his friends. She ignores him, but he remembers Yi-kyung and thanks her for her help the night he was drunk.

Ji-hyun glares when he asks if she remembers him, pointedly asking, “Am I supposed to remember you?” She walks away in tears, leaving him confused.The two men are below, talking business in Kang’s office — Kang has been hired to design a building on Ji-hyun’s land, which is the project Min-ho is handling. Ji-hyun bursts in to ask Kang for an amendment to her work hours, pausing briefly to shoot daggers in Min-ho’s direction.She explains to Kang that she can only work until eleven — that someone at home is waiting for her, who “can’t move till I get there.” Grudgingly, Kang consents to the schedule change, and that’s unusual enough that Min-ho asks why he’s so lenient with her — he’s always so particular about business matters. Ji-hyun has another favor to ask her long-suffering boss, prefacing it with the reminder that she’s totally broke, and that he can’t fire her over this request, and that she’s paying him back for the taxi fee she’d borrowed that first day, and that she just needs to pop out for three hours today, but it’s totally those three hours when nobody’s in the restaurant anyway, is that okay?

Kang’s soft spot is no longer so secret, so Ji-hyun wheedles her way into his assent, and he’s almost even charmed by her pluck. I’ll give him two more episodes before he’s totally smitten.

So in her afternoon off, Ji-hyun arrives at her house, timing her arrival to match with the housekeeper’s departure, and uses the passcode to let herself in. She sneaks upstairs to her room, grimacing at the happy photos of herself and Min-ho. Complicating matters is the unexpected arrival of Min-ho, here bearing gifts as an excuse to search for the seal himself. He’s concocted a pretty good excuse, now that he’s been warned by In-jung, and says he wants to take some of Ji-hyun’s favorite things to the hospital. That plays on all of Mom’s hopes and fears, so she happily grants him permission to select a few things from Ji-hyun’s room.

Knowing that time is ticking, Ji-hyun hastens her search to find her seal before Min-ho gets there. She stiffens as the door opens, and he steps through…