Gyeol went home on a Thursday, with a paper bag of dried persimmons, a stack of leaflets about sleep hygiene, and a firm instruction from the neurologist to take three weeks of rest. He did not take them. He turned up at Dawnbridge on the Saturday afternoon in a clean white coat, with his hair damp and a look of tremendous innocence, and when Haeseul ordered him home he said, with great dignity, "Noona, I have been asleep for three days. I think I am entitled to be awake."

She let him stay until six. She was not proof against a boy who had cried on her wrist.

It had been a strange week. She had gone through it as one goes through a house after a flood, picking up the pieces and finding that most of them still worked. The shop was quiet. The lights were steady. The refrigerator hummed. Nothing wept in the walls. And on the inside of her left wrist, beneath the cuff of the cardigan that she was beginning to think of as a kind of uniform, two pale rings lay against the pulse with their small cold marks, twelve and eight, and she checked them every morning the way other people check their phones.

She kept her own tally. She had said she would. She had drawn a small neat grid on the last page of the green notebook, and under it, in her round pharmacist's hand, she wrote the figures as they came: the date, the hours slept, the mark count, a word or two. A way of making a feeling into something that could be added. It had taken her two nights to realize that she was waiting for someone to ask to see it.

She moved a bag into the back room of Slow Hours on the following Tuesday.

She did not call it moving. It was only a canvas holdall with a change of clothes, a toothbrush, her mother's tin of tea and the notebook, and she carried it up the hill on a gray bright afternoon in the manner of a woman going to a friend's for the weekend. She let herself in at the back door with the brass key. The bed was made. A new blanket, thick and soft and the color of oatmeal, had been folded at the foot of it, with a note pinned to the top in a hand she knew: For the dark nights. I hope it is warm enough.

She stood looking at the note for a long moment, in the quiet of the little sloping room, with the light from the skylight lying across her feet.

"It is not the dark of the moon," she said, to nobody.

But she put the holdall down beside the bed, and sat for a while on the edge of the mattress with her hands in her lap, and listened to the clocks ticking through the floor.

"Hush," said Eunhae, that night, "is not a thing you do with your ears."

They were standing on the end of the east quay under a low, sullen, starless sky. The tide was out. The harbor lay in front of them like a sheet of pewter, with the small boats tipped over on their sides in the mud and a smell of salt and rot and diesel rising off the flats. The old lamps along the sea wall made a ragged string of yellow beads, and between them, in the gaps, the dark had a thick, close, waiting look, like a held breath.

"What am I to do with them, then?" said Haeseul.

"Close your eyes."

"I would prefer not to. There is a drop of eight feet at my left foot."

"I will catch you." It was said quite matter-of-factly, in the voice of one remarking that it might rain. "Close them. And do not try to listen. People try, at first. They tilt their heads and strain, as if the sound were a long way off. That is not how it comes. It comes up through the soles of the feet." She paused. "May I show you where?"

"You may."

A hand settled lightly between her shoulder blades. It did not press. It only rested there, warm through her coat, the way a hand rests on a horse, and Haeseul felt every nerve in her back go bright. She shut her eyes. She breathed.

"Now. Let the weight go down. Through your legs. Into the stones."

She tried. It was absurd. She felt like a woman trying to remember a dance she had never been taught. But after a moment, in the dark behind her eyelids, something gave, a faint settling, as if a tight screw had been loosened a quarter turn, and she became aware of the stones beneath her. They were cold and slick and wet. They went down a long way. And somewhere down at the root of them, deep under the quay, there was a sound that was not a sound at all, a low slow tolling like a buoy in a fog.

"Oh," she said. "There is something."

"Where?"

"Left. Under the sea wall. It is..." She frowned, eyes closed. "It is wet. It is very cold. It is not angry. It is only... lost."

The hand on her back withdrew. She heard Eunhae draw a sharp breath.

"That is exactly right," she said. "It took me four years to feel that, the first time. My grandmother used to hit me on the head with a ruler. How did you..."

"I do not know. It was only a feeling."

"It is not only a feeling." There was an odd note in her voice, half wonder, half something else. "Open your eyes."

It stood at the bottom of the sea wall in the dark. It was a man. That was the best she could say of it: a tall, stooped, barrel-chested man in oilskins, standing to his knees in the shallow water of the tide pool with his arms stretched out in front of him as if holding a rope. Water streamed from his sleeves. He had no face, only a pale blur where a face should be, and his head turned from side to side with a slow, patient, searching movement, as though he were looking for a mooring in the dark.

"Captain Mun," said Eunhae, softly. "Sixty years ago. The old woman at the net store told me. His boat went down on the rocks off the point in a storm, with four men aboard, and he swam back for them. He did not come out." She drew a breath. "He has been looking for the line ever since."

"Has no one tried to settle him?"

"A great many have tried. He does not listen. I have counted him down eleven times, and he rises again in a month. It is as though he does not know that he can stop."

"May I try?"

Eunhae turned her head. In the thin light from the lamps her face was drawn and tired and very beautiful, and there was a small, stubborn, wary furrow between her brows. "You do not know what you are doing."

"No," said Haeseul. "But I have a great deal of practice at not knowing what I am doing in front of frightened people."

"It is not the same."

"Is it not?"

Eunhae looked at her for a long moment. Then she let out her breath, and gave a short, dry, unwilling little laugh, and said, "Go on. But I will stand behind you. And I will count, very quietly, as a... as a precaution."

"You will be good enough to leave your hands in your pockets."

"I would not dream of anything else."

Haeseul went down the steps.

They were slimy, and she took them with care, one hand on the iron rail. The smell of the mud rose around her, rank and cold. At the bottom she stopped a few yards from the figure, in the shallows, with the tide pool lapping at the toes of her shoes, and she put her hands loosely in front of her, palms open, in the stance she used for approaching a patient who had not slept for a week.

"Good evening," she said. "Captain?"

The head turned.

"I am Haeseul. I work at the pharmacy. I thought I would come and see how you were." She kept her voice low, and warm, and slightly dull, as one speaks to a person in distress. "I am afraid you have been out here a very long time. Would you mind telling me your name?"

There was silence. The water slid and sucked at her ankles. Beside her, very softly, so softly that she thought she had imagined it, Eunhae began to count.

"Mun," said the figure.

The voice was like a rusty hinge. It was barely a voice at all, a breath dragged over wet stones, and Haeseul felt the hair stand on her arms. She did not flinch.

"Captain Mun," she said. "Thank you. May I ask what you are looking for?"

"The line." It was quite slow, and quite clear. "I have lost the line. The boys are on the boat. I have to find the line."

"I see. That sounds very difficult."

"It is dark."

"It is," said Haeseul. "It is very dark. And you have been holding on for so long. You must be so tired." She waited. "Captain, I wonder if I might ask you something. Is it right that you are the one who has to find it?"

The head came round, a little, as a bull's head swings when it hears a new sound.

"Who else," said the figure.

"Well, I do not know. But I was thinking that there were four men on that boat. And you said they were on it. Is it possible that they might have found the line themselves? Is it possible that one of them, perhaps, took it up, while you were swimming?" She let it sit. "I am only a pharmacist. I do not know boats. But I know that when I am very frightened, I tend to think that everything depends on me, and I am usually wrong. Usually somebody else has picked it up. It is only that I was not looking."

The wet silence lengthened.

"Hyun-soo," said the figure, slowly. "The boy. Hyun-soo had hands like a bear." A pause. "He would have had the line."

"I should think so."

"He was only seventeen."

"Then I think it was in good hands."

Something went through the tall, bowed shape, a long slow shudder, the way a building shudders when the last prop is knocked out from under it. The arms came down. The head lifted. For the space of a single breath Haeseul saw, quite distinctly, the outline of a broad, weathered, whiskered face, and it was weeping, and it was smiling, like a man who has been told, after sixty years, that his shift is over.

"Thank you, miss," said Captain Mun.

And he went down into the water, like a stone slipping beneath a pond, and the tide pool smoothed over, and was only a tide pool.

Haeseul stood very still. The cold had gone from the air. In its place was a deep gentle hush, a blank clean quiet, as of a church after the last hymn. She felt it in her chest. She felt it in her fingertips. She felt the pull of the seal at her wrist, a little cold tug, there and gone, like a fish rising to a line.

Behind her, a long way off, somebody had stopped counting.

"I did not do anything," she said, turning. "I only asked."

Eunhae stood at the top of the steps with her hands jammed in her pockets and her mouth slightly open. In the dim light her face looked strangely stripped, like a drawing that has been rubbed out and drawn again.

"You asked him if he was the one who had to find it," she said.

"Was that wrong?"

"It was the one thing nobody had ever thought to say." She came down the steps, slowly, with a hand on the rail. "Eleven times, Haeseul. I counted him down eleven times. I sang to him. I brought him tea. My grandmother tried for twenty years. And you walked down in your good shoes and asked him his name."

"I did not mean to be clever."

"You were not clever. You were kind." She stopped on the bottom step, and the lamplight fell across her shoulder. "It is a different thing. I have been trying to learn it all my life."

"You do it constantly."

"I count."

"You count," said Haeseul, "very beautifully. I have seen you do it. I stood in a room full of the dead for six hours and felt perfectly safe because of it." She smiled, a little crookedly. "But I think there are some who need to be told what to do, and some who need to be asked. It does not seem to me that either of us is wrong."

Eunhae did not answer. For a long moment she stood there on the stair, tall and thin and shadowed, with the wet wind pulling at her short dark hair, and then she did a thing that Haeseul would remember afterward, on the long slow nights, as if it had been a small lit window in a very dark house. She laughed. It was the low, rusty, startled laugh that Haeseul had heard once before, in a cafe, over a rose-flavored cake. It shook her whole body. She put her hand over her eyes.

"My grandmother would have hated you," she said.

"Would she?"

"For about a week. And then she would have left you a pair of gloves."

"Garam told me that."

"She is not wrong." She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "I must have heard it a hundred times. She says it about everyone. It is the highest praise she has."

"I will take the gloves."

"I will find you the best pair in the city," said Eunhae, and then flushed, and turned away, and began to climb the steps with a good deal more haste than the slope required.

They quarrelled on the way back up the hill.

It began, as these things do, with something small. Eunhae observed, in the tone of a woman making a general remark about the weather, that it had been irresponsible of Haeseul to wade into the tide without warning; that Hushed of that age were unpredictable; that a single misjudged word could have turned him. Haeseul replied that she had been standing six feet away from a woman with a pocket watch and a plan, and that it was not irresponsible to trust one's colleague. Eunhae said that it was not a matter of trust. Haeseul said it was precisely a matter of trust. Eunhae said, with great stiffness, that she had not meant to imply that she did not trust her. Haeseul said that she was very glad to hear it, since she had a bag in the back room and a toothbrush in the sink.

There was a pause.

"You have a toothbrush in the sink," said Eunhae.

"I do."

"I saw it. I thought that you had forgotten it."

"I did not forget it. I put it there."

"Oh," said Eunhae. After a moment she said "Oh" again, in a quite different voice, softer and slightly higher. They had come to the corner by the temple and stopped under the lamp, and neither seemed to know where to put their hands. "I did not know if you would."

"I did not either," said Haeseul. "It seemed a sensible thing to bring. In case the weather turned."

"The weather," said Eunhae.

"It has been looking very unsettled."

"It has," said Eunhae gravely, and the corner of her mouth went down and up again like a person trying to keep a coin from rolling.

By the time they reached the shop, Haeseul was so tired that the pavement seemed to tilt. It was a different tiredness from the night of the flare, a dull thick tiredness that settled in her knees and the backs of her eyes, as though she had been walking for a long time in deep water. She did not say so. She got her key into the lock on the second try, and stumbled into the dark workshop, and stood swaying beside the bench while Eunhae lit the lamp.

"You are very pale," said Eunhae.

"I am quite all right."

"It was a draw. A small one. I did not tell you, because you had not said that you would, but I took a little, to hold him while you spoke. It was less than half an hour." She said it carefully. "I wanted to tell you before you felt it. I am sorry I did not ask first."

"You are telling me now."

"Yes."

"Then I think we may allow it." Haeseul drew a breath. She was too tired to be angry. "The next time, ask. But I would not have said no."

"I know." Eunhae's voice was very quiet. "That is why I should have asked."

It was such a plain thing, said without any flourish, that Haeseul felt her throat tighten. She stood in the lamplight with her hand on the bench, and the clocks ticked around her, and a great slow wave of tenderness and weariness went through her, so large and so sudden that she thought for a moment she would simply sit down on the floor.

"Eunhae," she said. "May I lie down?"

"Of course."

"I do not think I can walk home."

"You do not have to." Eunhae had already crossed to the back room and flung open the door. She was moving quickly, turning down the bed, shaking out the oatmeal blanket. "Here. Sit. Let me take your coat. May I?"

"Yes."

She did it with the delicacy of someone removing a glove from a sleeping child. She helped her out of the sleeves. She knelt, and untied her shoes. She did not touch anything that she had not asked about, and Haeseul, sitting on the edge of the narrow bed with her eyes half shut, thought that nobody had undone her laces since she was five years old.

"There is water," said Eunhae. "On the stool. And a biscuit, if you can eat it. I will be in the shop."

"Will you sleep?"

"Presently."

"You always say that."

"I always mean it." It was very low. "Go to sleep, Haeseul."

She went.

It was a thin, light, flickering sleep, full of cold water and the creak of rope. She dreamed of a man in oilskins, and of a boy with hands like a bear, and of a dark shore. She dreamed of her mother. She dreamed that she was standing in a doorway in a blue scarf and holding out a cup of tea. And then, with the abruptness of a hand on a shoulder, she was awake, in the gray dark, with her heart racing and the taste of barley on her tongue.

She lay still.

The clocks were ticking. Somewhere in the shop the grandfather clock gave a slow, deep, three-note chime and fell silent again. Three in the morning. She turned her head on the pillow and saw that the door of the little room stood a hand's breadth open, and that a line of yellow light lay across the floorboards, and that in the gap between the door and the frame there was the edge of a shoulder.

Eunhae was sitting on the floor outside.

She sat with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up, in the thin gray jacket, with the silver watch open in her hand. She was not reading, or working, or doing anything at all. She was only sitting there, quite upright, with her eyes open and fixed on the dark of the passage, watching, in the posture of a sentry on an unlit road. She did not turn her head. She had not heard Haeseul wake.

Haeseul watched her for a long time.

She saw how still she was. She saw the shadows under her eyes, and the taut lines of her shoulders, and the hand curved round the watch as if it were a bird. She saw that she had been sitting like this for hours, that she had not once lain down. It came to her slowly, with a slow soft shock, like walking into a warm room out of a storm. She had stayed. She had guarded the door. Not for the Hushed, or the moon, or the ritual, but for her. For a woman asleep in the next room who had said, I cannot walk home.

She did not move. She lay with her eyes half closed and the oatmeal blanket drawn to her chin and her heart going slowly, and the warmth that had begun in her chest spread out through her limbs until she could not tell where it ended.

I am in trouble, she thought. This is going to be a great deal worse than I imagined.

She went back to sleep. She did not mean to. It stole over her like warm water, and when she woke again the skylight was gray and Eunhae had gone from the door.

She wrote the figures in the book at six, sitting up in bed with the pencil in her fist. 3h 20m. Mark count: 12 and 8. The hours that the small draw had taken, by her own reckoning, were in there somewhere, and so were the hours that the old tiredness had taken, and so, perhaps, were the ones that nobody had counted. She stared at the numbers. They did not add. She wrote, in the margin: Not all of it is the seal. Some of it is only me. And then, in smaller letters, with a slight curl of her mouth: Do not tell her this.

She tore out the thought and tucked it away, as she tucked away all things she did not wish to look at, in a fold in the back of her mind where the air was still.

When she came out into the shop at seven, with her hair damp and her face washed, there was a cup of corn silk tea waiting on the bench, and a small plate with two rice cakes, and Eunhae standing behind it with her sleeves rolled and her hands unnaturally still.

"Did you sleep well?" said Eunhae.

She looked at her. She looked at the shadowed eyes, and the carefully neutral mouth, and the tea steaming gently in the morning light. And she thought of a woman sitting on a cold floor for five hours because somebody had said, I do not think I can walk home.

"Very well," said Haeseul. "Thank you. I do not think I have slept so well in years."

It was the first time she had lied to her. She said it gently, with a smile, and the lie went down as smoothly as honey. And she saw something cross Eunhae's face, quick and glad and entirely unsuspicious, and knew, with a small cold twist beneath the ribs, that it had been believed.