'Private Lives' Episode 2: Joo-eun confuses a marriage scam for love, falls for Go Kyung-pyo's Lee Jeong-hwan
After getting caught by Jeong Bok-ki (Kim Hyo-jin), Cha Joo-eun (Seohyun) who was the mastermind behind conning the con artist ends up in cuffs. Turns out Bok-ki is not someone who can be fooled very easily and Joo-eun's mother's greed only sabotaged their team at the end. Now, neither did Joo-eun get money nor did she manage to get revenge. Instead, all that happened was Joo-eun getting imprisoned on false charges very similar to how her father had been used as a bait for the law. Bok-ki, on the other hand, ended up flying to China right after all of this went down with her partner Kim Jae-Wook (Kim Young-min).
What is more interesting than the dynamics between Joo-eun and Bok-ki is the one between Bok-ki and her partner Jae-wook. There seems to be love and fear as well, and the fear overrides love momentarily when the two discuss Joo-eun and their accountant Park Jung-woo who betrayed them. The truth is, Jae-wook was the one who pushed Jung-woo to commit suicide, for which Joo-eun ended up serving time. Now that Joo-eun has served time and is out, Han Son, her mentor, is back and approaches her to get some work done.
Having been imprisoned for years, and not mere months, Joo-eun notices that a lot has changed in the city and it is while she gets used to everything new that she has to make the choice of picking up her old habits, hobbies, and profession or walk on a new path. As much as Joo-eun tries to make it all seem light and breezy, the moment that she is alone, she ends up having a breakdown and is in tears. She is overwhelmed beyond what she had expected and when she is in this state of mind, she agrees to work another job for Hanson.
In the meantime, she also reunites with her prison mate and friend Min-jeong at a bar when a man approaches her with a cheesy pickup line. She in fact rejects him with the truth, tells him she and her friend used to go to the same school, and here the school that she is referring to is a correctional facility. He leaves them alone and decides to come up with a different pickup line. If she hadn't met him again while pulling a job for Han Son, she might have been saved from heartbreak. However, she instead ended up meeting him again when he had handed her a pen drive.
She goes to the extent of continuing to act as if she is an employee of a company that doesn't exist while Lee Jeong-hwan and she date. Six months later, he introduces her to his family and the same night he even ends up proposing to her. For Joo-eun, who is desperate to leave the sham that she had lived so far behind, she holds this opportunity tight. She cuts ties with her mother, her father and even Hanson however she doesn't realize that Jeong-hwan could very well be a scam artist.
It is while she waits in the bride's room, ready to walk down the aisle that she realizes something is wrong. Her mother, and her former detective friend learn that everyone on Jeong-hwan's side has been hired to act as the groom's party and it comes to light that Joo-eun, who was accused of scamming Jeong-hwan by her mother and Hanson, got scammed instead. How will she get back up after this?
'Private Lives' airs on JTBC on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 9:30 pm KST and can be streamed on Netflix outside of South Korea.