Our Sticky Love Episode 4 Recap

Who's in the cast:
Jung Hae-in as Jang Tae-ha
Ha Young as Go Eun-sae
Jeon Bae-soo as Hong Do-yeop
Kim Young-ok as Go Yeon-hong
Jang Hye-jin as Pang Hui-ja

Go Eun-sae cannot stop turning over one word: gangster. In voiceover, she wonders whether something she took for a dream was really a memory. If Jang Tae-ha, the boxing coach who says he is her boyfriend, really was in a gang, she suspects it may be tied to whatever happened to her.

Tae-ha explains the two names

At Hong's Boxing Gym, Pang Hui-ja is furious that her son, Pil-seung, has been training there in secret. She accuses Tae-ha of dragging the boy into the violent life that wrecked his own. Someone cuts in that some things should never be said, given why Tae-ha went down that path. Coach Hong Do-yeop asks her to blame him instead. Hui-ja backs down and apologizes. Not every boxer turns gangster, she knows, but she is scared the wrong people will notice her kid, and she hauls a protesting Pil-seung home.

Afterward, Tae-ha shrugs off his own hurt and says he only worries about Pil-seung. He turns down a drink with Do-yeop to go home. Do-yeop says it is good to have someone waiting there on a day like this. On TV, a news report covers Mirae Eden Company's joint Irang-dong development with Gangju City.

Eun-sae, though, is at the clinic of her doctor, An Gi-jun. She admits she had started to believe Tae-ha a little, because amid all the absurdity he sometimes seemed sincere. Now she knows he was a gangster, and a friend's social media post says her name is Go Ji-won. She does not know what to question first, and she is scared. Nurse Min Su-ji quietly phones Tae-ha to tell him where she is, and asks whether Eun-sae is really his girlfriend.

Gi-jun explains that he cannot put Eun-sae up or lend her money. She teases that he must have few friends, and he takes it so seriously she has to explain the joke. Then Tae-ha walks in and asks her to come home. Eun-sae balks at leaving with a thug. Gi-jun tells her to trust her own experience: if Tae-ha has never threatened her, hurt her or taken her money, then to her he is an ordinary man.

Outside, Tae-ha explains. Go Ji-won is her legal name, given when the orphanage registered her birth. Only afterward did the director find "Go Eun-sae" written in her mother's maternity notebook. Eun-sae preferred that name, he says, reasoning that no mother picks something so lovely for a child she does not love. As for the designer clothes in her friend's photos, she got rid of them when they moved, and he never asked why. Then he apologizes for having been a gangster and admits he was too ashamed to tell her. Eun-sae says she would never fall for a gangster in any lifetime. Tae-ha promises never to use his fists outside the ring again. When she demands to know what he wants from her, his answer is small: "Just don't disappear without a word."

Inside, Su-ji doubts Tae-ha is really Eun-sae's boyfriend, but Gi-jun insists he is. He remembers Tae-ha asking whether she had been crying or was hurt. Su-ji brings up their own trip to Yeosu, when she walked out after a fight and got lost for hours. When she made it back, terrified, Gi-jun asked if she was happy to win by making him worry. Maybe, Su-ji says, Gi-jun is the one who never acted like a real boyfriend. Eun-sae, meanwhile, sends a direct message to Park Hyo-jin, the friend in the photos, and begs her to write back.

A birthday party goes wrong

Hui-ja visits Go Yeon-hong, Tae-ha's grandmother. She hands Kim Song-wol, the villager who cannot speak, dried persimmons to share with her own grandma. Hui-ja apologizes for driving a nail into Tae-ha's heart, knowing what Yeon-hong went through to raise him. To make amends, she promises a grand party for Yeon-hong's 80th birthday. Hyo-jin answers the message and agrees to meet.

On party day, a call from Do-yeop pulls Tae-ha away. He hands Eun-sae his grandmother's favorite playlists for Hui-ja and tells her to go and stay put. Eun-sae cannot imagine what matters more than his grandmother's birthday.

Elsewhere, Kim Gang-rok, Tae-ha's former underling, has tracked him down. The gang cut one of his Achilles tendons when he quit. He left Mirae Eden because Tae-ha, who was like a father to him, was gone. He remembered Tae-ha once talking about coaching back home, and Gujin, Tae-ha's hometown, has only one boxing gym. Then he asks whether Tae-ha saved Prosecutor Go, because he just saw her, very much alive.

At the party, under a banner for Yeon-hong's 80th, Eun-sae drops off the music and tries to leave. The village women call her the granddaughter-in-law and press food on her. Suddenly she flashes back to someone shouting "Go Ji-won" and forcing food into her mouth. She reacts so sharply that Hui-ja scolds her manners, and Eun-sae shoots back that forced feeding is torture, not affection. Asked whether her parents taught her nothing, she says apparently she has none and grew up in an orphanage. Then she boasts that she has more class and grace than anyone there, calls it a low-class village, and storms off in a taxi bound for Seoul.

Back with Tae-ha, Gang-rok praises him as a man who was always above taking a life. He guesses Prosecutor Go quit to stay off Chairman Baek Sang-gil's radar, and he begs to stay. Tae-ha corrects him: to protect his people, nothing is beneath him, including killing. If Gang-rok came with a hidden agenda, Tae-ha will kill him. Gang-rok swears he has none.

Eun-sae meets her best friend in Seoul

That night, Eun-sae is alone in the city with six missed calls from Tae-ha. She replays his plea and tells herself it will all be over tomorrow. In the village, Tae-ha calls until her phone goes dead, praying she has not gone to Seoul. Then a menacing voice calls someone Prosecutor and warns that Seoul has many eyes. A shout of her name and a desperate cry follow. By morning, Gang-rok has a question: if Prosecutor Go has no ID, whose name is her phone under?

In Seoul, Eun-sae meets Hyo-jin and spots an old gift tag from Eun-sae to Hyo-jin. When she asks about the name, Hyo-jin explains it in almost the same words Tae-ha used. Asked what she used to do, Hyo-jin says everything Tae-ha told her is true: the orphanage, the boxing-coach boyfriend, no real job. She asks who Eun-sae thinks paid for the designer clothes. Then she tells her to be good to her boyfriend, who took care of her despite everything. The two of them, she adds, used to be friends.

Flashbacks fill in why. They met working part-time in their early twenties, but Eun-sae changed. She makes Hyo-jin swap shoes so her own legs look longer for a cute customer, leaving her friend barefoot in the cold. She ditches a meal Hyo-jin closed her nail salon for, to join her boss for drinks, and sends her 700,000 won to cover the lost day. She waves off a gift that cost Hyo-jin over five million won and months of deliberation, guessing Hyo-jin will want a refund. Back in the present, Hyo-jin admits that losing the person who hurt her was not so bad, and asks Eun-sae not to contact her again. As for the missing designer items, Eun-sae must have returned or sold them, and should have lived within her means.

Alone on the street, Eun-sae replays her speech about class and decides she was the lowest of them all. Someone points out that a phone registered in Tae-ha's name can be tracked with consent, and he finds her. She says she cannot face his grandmother and the women after what she said. She is angry that this is all she amounted to. Tae-ha suggests they get something to eat.

Taffy Village takes her back

Back in Taffy Village, the women let her have it. They mock her thick skin and tell Tae-ha to pick a side. Then Yeon-hong speaks up: she asked Eun-sae to come back, because she is family. One woman quietly asks Song-wol whether the old lady is lucid. Yeon-hong asks whether they plan to throw the girl out, and tells them to leave her alone.

Eun-sae asks Tae-ha whether he put his grandmother up to it. He says he can never predict her clear moments; she did it because she is his grandma. Later, over a batch of taffy, an older woman, apparently Yeon-hong, explains that stretching and folding the candy traps air bubbles that make it sweeter and crumblier. People are the same, she says, and a few holes can make a hard life sweeter. It is fine to be embarrassed now and then. Eun-sae apologizes through tears, and the woman teases that she thought she was a lady, but she is just a baby.

What Tae-ha gave up

At the gym, Do-yeop tells Eun-sae who Tae-ha was. After six months of training, the boy swept the city, provincial and national competitions and trained at Taereung, the national athletes' village. Yeon-hong is not his blood grandmother. His mother arrived in the village with a newborn and died at Yeon-hong's house, so Yeon-hong raised him with endless love. Then she collapsed, and her cancer treatment cost nearly a hundred million won when Tae-ha was 20. Then a gang called Geukrakpa reached out to him. Yeon-hong survived, but once she learned how he had saved her, she began to slip away. Tae-ha spent 14 years breaking things on command, too kind to stop feeling sick about it, until he came back. Do-yeop asks Eun-sae not to make that wound worse.

A phone call sends them to Tae-ha. A driver accuses him of a hit-and-run over a broken side mirror, though Tae-ha left his number before rushing off on an emergency. The man has also messed up Tae-ha's face. Eun-sae tells him to bow toward his family's burial ground, since if Tae-ha had held back any less, he would be joining his ancestors. Then she announces that she is Tae-ha's guardian and offers to replace the mirror with the fanciest one available.

Outside, she asks why a former gangster did not just knock the man out. One punch would have done it, Tae-ha says, but he promised her he would never use his fists outside the ring. Eun-sae calls him stupid and tells him he should have hit back. Then she softens: "This must be why I liked you." Gangster or not, she says, that must be the reason. She apologizes for not remembering him and for upsetting him.

Up next: Our Sticky Love Episode 5 Recap. See every episode in the Our Sticky Love episode guide.