There was a place on the roof of Slow Hours where the tiles lay flat, and Eunhae had been going to it at sunset since she was seven years old.

It was reached by a ladder in the back passage and a trapdoor that stuck in damp weather. You climbed out between two chimney stacks onto a shelf of old gray slate about the size of a double bed, with a low parapet on three sides and a view down the whole tilted length of the harbor quarter, the crooked lanes and the washing lines, the temple roof with its upturned eaves, the bright pewter curve of the bay. Her grandmother had brought her here on the first evening. She had set her down on the slates with a flask of barley tea and a flat gray biscuit, and said, in her gravel voice: "This is where you learn the city. Not from the street. The street lies. From above, you can hear what it is doing."

She had been seven. She had understood perhaps one word in three. But she had sat on the warm slate with the biscuit in her fist and the evening coming down, and felt for the first time the great slow breath of Haeryeong rising round her, a thousand small lives turning over, a thousand doors closing, and she had thought, with a child's vast certainty: I will never leave.

She had not brought anyone else up here in twenty-five years.

"Is it safe?" said Haeseul.

"The slates are sound."

"I was not asking about the slates."

"Then, yes." Eunhae held the trapdoor with her shoulder and offered a hand, and then withdrew it, and said, "May I?" a fraction late, so that the question and the gesture overlapped. Haeseul looked at her with quiet amusement. She put her hand into Eunhae's, and let herself be drawn up through the gap, and stood blinking on the slate in the last of the light with a covered basket in her other arm and a long gray scarf whipping about her throat.

"Oh," she said.

It was all she said. She stood quite still, with her lips parted, and looked.

The sun was going down behind the headland in a long slow wash of apricot and rose. The whole harbor had turned to hammered copper. A line of fishing boats crept in across it with their lamps newly lit, small and yellow and crooked, and above them, hanging very low and faint in the pale green sky over the eastern hills, there was the thinnest possible paring of an old moon. It was only a scratch of silver, a clipped fingernail, so slight that it seemed less a thing than the memory of one. It would be gone in three nights.

"I did not know you could see so far," said Haeseul.

"On a clear day, to the island."

"I have lived here six years."

"People do not look up." Eunhae lowered herself onto the slates and drew her knees under her. "Sit. I have brought a blanket. It will be cold when the sun goes."

They sat side by side with their backs to the chimney stack, and Haeseul opened the basket. She had brought a thermos of tea, and a tin of small sesame biscuits, and a second tin that turned out to hold sliced pears, each wedge pale and wet and glistening. She laid them out on the lid with a slow, meticulous domesticity that Eunhae found almost unbearable to watch. It was so ordinary. It was so entirely the way a person might lay out a picnic for someone she liked.

"I thought," said Haeseul, and stopped, and began again. "It has been a strange month. I thought it would be nice to eat something that was not a tablet or a rice cake, in the open air, and not talk about anything that was dying."

"That seems reasonable."

"We are allowed to be ordinary for an evening."

"I do not know that I remember how."

"I shall instruct you," said Haeseul, and passed her a pear.

It was cold and sweet, and the juice ran down her wrist. She ate it. She ate another. The wind ruffled their hair and flapped the corner of the blanket, and the light turned from apricot to rose to a deep clear violet, and Eunhae, who in thirty-two years had never done a single thing for the sake of doing it, found that she was telling a story. It was about her grandmother. It was about the time that Ongjo had tried to teach her to whistle through her teeth, and had succeeded only in producing a noise like a kettle falling down a stair, and had said, with great severity, that it was a gift that skipped a generation.

Haeseul laughed. She laughed with her head thrown back against the chimney, and the pear in her hand, and her whole throat moving, and the light behind her lit the loosened edge of her hair like a flame. She looked, thought Eunhae, like a person who had put down a very heavy bag.

And she is lying to me, said a small cold voice at the back of her mind.

She had not meant to listen to it. It had come up out of nowhere, unbidden, with the neat cold clarity of a draught from beneath a door. She had noticed, in the shop, over the last week, small things. A habit of keeping her left hand in her lap. A way of looking at the tea cup as though it required a decision. She had heard Haeseul say, very well, thank you, I have not slept so well in years, and she had felt a lightness in her chest, a quick hot flush of gladness, and beneath it, like a tooth beneath a plaster, a small insistent ache.

She was a clockmaker. She knew what a movement sounded like when it was running a little off.

But she did not say it. She did not want to. It was a lovely evening, and she was sitting on her own roof beside a woman who was laughing, and she thought, with a desperate sort of tenderness: let her have it. Let me not be the one who takes this away.

"You are very quiet," said Haeseul.

"I was thinking."

"About what?"

"About the pear." She felt her face warm. "It is a very good pear."

"You are a dreadful liar."

"I am aware."

"It is rather endearing." She said it lightly, with her eyes on the harbor, and let it lie there between them on the slate, small and shining and not quite said. "Tell me about the coat."

Eunhae went still.

"The one you owe." Haeseul's voice was easy. "I have been wondering. I do not say you must. I only thought, since we are not talking about dying, that it might make a pleasant story."

"It is not very pleasant."

"Is it very bad?"

"It is..." She searched for a word. "It is old. It is a thing that happened a long time ago, to a person who was not myself, and I am afraid I am not yet able to tell it well."

"Another night, then."

"Yes."

"I shall hold you to it."

"I would be glad if you did," said Eunhae, and meant it with her whole heart, and felt sick.

The sun went. It slipped into the sea with a last red flare, and the sky turned blue, and then gray, and the first stars came out, small and keen. The wind sharpened. Haeseul drew the blanket over their knees without asking, a single brisk tug, and Eunhae felt the warmth of her thigh against her own through two layers of cloth and said nothing at all. Lamps had come on all over the quarter. The temple bell gave one soft stroke, and far below in the lanes a woman's voice called a child in to supper.

It was then that Eunhae heard it.

It was a very small sound, and it came from her left, along the ridge. A pattering, light and quick, like a mouse on a tin. She turned her head. On the slates twelve feet away, picked out in the faint light from a window below, something small was running. It was a child, or the outline of one, no taller than her waist, in a short coat and a woolen cap, and it was running along the roof's edge with its arms stretched out for balance, laughing silently, with its mouth open and its eyes shut, as children run when they have been told not to.

"There," she said, softly.

"I see it."

"It is a small one. It will not harm us. It will run till it tires and then it will lie down." She started to rise. "I will see to it..."

She stood too quickly.

She knew it as she did it. It was the oldest mistake in the book. A body that has been stoking itself on three hours of sleep and a bowl of rice for a week, that has gone four nights without lying down, that has been sitting still in the cold on an empty stomach and a few pears, does not take well to being asked to rise. The roof tilted. Her knees went to water. The whole violet dusk wheeled like a plate on a stick, and she put out a hand into nothing, and felt the blanket tangle round her ankle.

A grip closed on her elbow.

It was firm and warm and quite certain. It held. She felt herself brought up short, not roughly but with a kind of strong, practical, absolute gentleness, and a voice at her ear said, in a tone of such perfect calm that she almost did not recognize it as fear, "I have you."

She stood. The roof steadied. She was breathing hard.

"I am sorry," she said. "I stood too fast."

"You did." The grip did not slacken. "May I keep hold of you until you are certain?"

"You have kept hold of me. You did not ask."

"I know. I am sorry. It seemed urgent." A breath. "I will let go if you wish."

"I do not wish."

She had not meant to say it. It was out before she could stop it, quite soft, and she felt Haeseul go still beside her.

Neither of them moved. The wind plucked at the blanket. Out on the slates the small thing in the woolen cap had stopped running, and stood with its head tilted, listening.

She turned her head.

Haeseul was very close. She had risen with her, to hold her, and now they stood a hand's breadth apart on the flat gray roof with the whole sky behind them, and the last light from the west lay along the line of her cheek and her jaw. Her eyes were enormous. They were dark and clear and quite unguarded, and there was a look in them that Eunhae had seen only once, on the night of the new moon, when a woman with her hands in hers had said, I am here. It was open. It was almost shy. And it was fixed, quite simply, on her mouth.

Her heart did something terrible.

It lurched, once, hard, and then settled into a slow heavy beat that she could feel in her teeth. She could not look away. She could not do anything. She stood there with her hands hanging at her sides and the touch of the fingers on her elbow burning like a brand, and she thought, quite calmly, with the clear cold light of disaster: I want to. I want to, more than I have wanted anything in my life.

"Eunhae," said Haeseul.

It was barely a whisper. It was not an order, or a plea. It was a question, held out on an open palm, the plainest she had ever heard.

She felt the distance close. It did not seem to be anyone's doing. It was only that the air between them grew warm and thin and trembled, and Haeseul's face tilted a fraction upward, and her lashes lowered, and Eunhae felt the cool brush of her breath against her lips. She could smell pear and wool and the very faint clean salt of her skin. She could hear her own pulse. She thought: she is asking. She is asking, and she is waiting, and all I have to do is answer.

She thought of a repair ticket in the pocket of her shirt.

She thought of a cold ring of marks on a wrist.

She thought of the sentence in her grandmother's journal, in cramped black ink, that she had read so many times that she knew it by the shape on the page. Choose someone whose nights are already empty. And she thought of a woman in a white coat and a fraying cardigan in a pharmacy at three in the morning, with a paper cup in her hand, saying, I have never been afraid of someone who was hurting.

She stepped back.

It was the hardest thing she had ever done. It was like tearing something out by the roots. She pulled her arm out of Haeseul's grasp, gently, and put a pace of cold air between them, and she saw the whole of the other woman's face change, a swift soft shuttering, like a window closing against the wind.

"I cannot," she said.

Her voice shook. She drew a breath and tried again.

"I am so sorry. I cannot. Not like this." She had her hands pressed together in front of her, hard, to stop them trembling. "I want to. You must believe that. I want it more than I know how to say. But I am still keeping something from you. I told you in the letter that I was, and I meant it, and I cannot..." She swallowed. "I will not kiss you with a lie between us. I will not do it. It would be one more thing I had taken without asking."

For a long moment Haeseul said nothing.

She stood very straight on the slate with her arms at her sides, and the color had gone out of her cheeks, and her face was quite still. Then, slowly, she let out her breath. She did not look angry. She did not look hurt, or ashamed. She looked, if anything, a little dazed, like a person who has run at a door that was not locked and found it opened from the inside onto a very different room.

"I see," she said.

"I did not mean..."

"No. I understand." She drew the scarf more closely about her throat. Her voice was quiet and perfectly steady. "It is a very decent thing to say. I do not think that anyone has ever told me no for a reason that was to my credit."

"It is not a no."

"Is it not?"

"It is a..." She could not find it. "It is a not yet."

"Then it is a very good not yet." Haeseul looked at her, and something moved at the corner of her mouth, brief and rueful and astonishingly tender. "I am not displeased. I want that clear. I am not, as far as I can tell, offended. It is only that I am not accustomed to being given a reason. It is rather disorienting." She paused. "Is there a thing that I can do to make it a yes?"

"Hear me, when I am ready."

"That is all?"

"It is not a small thing."

"No," said Haeseul. "I do not suppose it is." She lifted her chin. "Then when you are not hiding it any more. I shall wait."

"You may not want to."

"That is for me to decide," said Haeseul, gently, "and I should like it noted that I am a person who always reads the whole prescription before refusing the dose."

Eunhae made a small helpless sound that was neither a laugh nor a sob. She put the heel of her hand against her eyes. It was dark now, nearly, and the wind had grown sharp, and somewhere below in the lane a gramophone had started up, thin and tinny, with a woman's voice singing something slow. The old moon was a hair of silver above the eastern hills. And on the slates, forgotten, the small thing in the woolen cap had sat down with its legs dangling over the parapet, and was swinging its heels, and listening, as children listen to adults who are being foolish.

"I will see to him," said Eunhae, huskily.

"May I come?"

"Please."

They went along the ridge together, not touching. The small figure watched them come. It had a round face, indistinct, and a woolen cap pulled down to its brows, and when Haeseul knelt in front of it on the cold slates and said, in her low, even voice, "Hello. Are you tired?", it nodded, solemnly, and lifted its arms.

She did not pick it up. She only held out her hands, and it laid something into them, a small gray weightless thing that might have been a pebble, or a marble, or a tooth. She closed her fingers over it. And the little shape lay down on the roof, as quietly as a leaf, and curled in upon itself, and was gone.

Haeseul stayed on her knees for a moment, looking at her closed hand.

"What is it?" said Eunhae.

"I do not know." She opened her fingers. The palm was empty. "It felt like a very small hour."

They went down the ladder in silence. At the foot, in the dim passage, they paused. It was dark and warm and smelled of oil and old wood and the faint sweet dust of the clocks. The lamp in the shop threw a long soft bar of gold across the boards. Haeseul lifted her hand, and hesitated, and laid it for one moment flat against the front of Eunhae's shirt, over the pocket where the folded paper lay.

"Thank you for the evening," she said. "And for the pear."

"It was your pear."

"It was your roof." She smiled. "I will be back on Thursday. I have promised Gyeol I will help him with a case of antacids."

"Good night, Haeseul."

"Good night, Eunhae."

She went. The back door opened and closed, and the footsteps went away down the lane, light and quick and uneven, as they always did. And Eunhae stood in the dark of the passage with her hand pressed against the place that had been touched, and the warmth of it going slowly out of the cloth, and listened to the clocks.

She did not go to bed.

She climbed the ladder once more, in the dark, and sat on the slates in the cold with the blanket round her shoulders. She took out the folded repair ticket, and spread it on her knee, and could not read it in the starlight. She did not need to. She knew what it said. The word agreed, written in a hand that shook. The signature. The date. The terms that had been made in good faith, on a bright morning, by a woman who had known as she wrote them that she was lying.

She thought: she waited for me.

She had been asked, and had said not yet, and Haeseul had said, I shall wait. It was the kindest sentence that had ever been spoken to her, and she felt it settle on her like a coat. And she thought: and I do not deserve it. And she thought, in the same breath, with a fierce small flare of defiance that startled her: but I will.

I will deserve it. I will find out the truth, all of it, and I will tell her. And then, if she will still have me, I will kiss her until the sun comes up.

The old moon had gone down behind the headland. The harbor lay dark and still. And from where she sat, far below on the cobbled lane where the lamps made their yellow pools, she could just make out a small figure in a long gray scarf walking home alone. It paused under the last lamp. One hand went up to its face and stayed there. From that height Eunhae could not tell what the gesture meant, and she sat watching it until the lane took it, and hoped, with her whole heart, that it was a smile.