She wrote it all down in columns, as she had promised, and the columns did not help.

It was four in the morning, and Haeseul sat cross-legged on her bed with the green notebook open on her knees, a pencil behind her ear, and a clean sheet of paper ruled into two halves by a line so straight she might have used a scalpel. On the left she had written FOR. On the right she had written AGAINST. In the left column there was one entry, repeated in several forms: she asked me, and nobody has asked me for anything in a long time. In the right column there were nine, and they were all sensible, and every one of them began with the word dangerous.

She had come home from her shift at six the previous morning and not slept. She had gone to Slow Hours in the afternoon and sat on a floor eating rice rolls across from a woman who made her feel, in turn, furious, protective, and so completely seen that she had wanted to put her hands over her own face. She had held a stranger's pocket watch in her palm and felt the floor of herself fall out. Then she had walked home through the dusk with her mother's watch ticking on her wrist, and gone to work, and come back, and now it was four in the morning and the sky outside the blind was the flat, bruised gray of the hour before the milk carts.

She was supposed to be deciding. Instead she was thinking about a pair of hands.

They were not remarkable hands. They were long and narrow and calloused along the sides of the fingers, with oil worked into the creases of the knuckles that no soap would ever shift, and a small crescent scar at the base of the left thumb. But she kept returning to the way they had moved over her mother's watch, with a tenderness that had nothing to do with the watch, and to the way they had trembled and then, in the middle of a sentence, stopped.

"That is not a column," Haeseul told herself aloud. "That is a distraction."

She crossed out the line about hands. She wrote, in the AGAINST column, she lied to me. Then she looked at it, and frowned, and amended it. She did not lie. She chose her words with tongs. Then, because honesty was a habit and not a mood, she added beneath it: but she told me she was doing it. Which is more than anyone else has managed.

It was not a satisfactory column. She put the pencil down.

The truth was that she had been through a great many consultations in her life, hospital meetings and family conferences and the long dry corridors of a failing body, and she knew what it looked like when someone was telling her the entire truth and what it looked like when someone was telling her a shape that the truth had been trimmed to fit. Eunhae had been trimming. Haeseul had watched her do it, with the clean, almost clinical alertness that came to her in the presence of other people's evasions. There was something about the cost that she had left out, some further edge. The question was whether it was a small edge or a large one, and whether Haeseul, who had spent twenty-nine years being useful to people who did not tell her what they needed, was prepared to walk toward it again.

She looked at the watch. It was twelve minutes past four. It had been twelve minutes past four for three years, and now it was twelve minutes past four because it was twelve minutes past four, and the second hand ticked on, small and sure and alive.

"What would you do?" she said quietly.

The watch did not answer. But she had a sudden, vivid memory of her mother in the last month, thin as a candle, propped up on three pillows in the room with the yellow curtains, saying in her dry, amused, faraway voice: Haeseul-ah, you are going to spend your whole life saying yes to people who do not deserve it. I wish you would learn to say yes to someone who does.

She had not known what her mother meant. She had said, Eomma, rest. She had always said, rest. It was the only word she had ever been able to give.

Haeseul closed the notebook.

She did not sleep. But some time before dawn, she made her decision, and it did not come from the columns.

The Kettle & Tide was the kind of place that could only have existed in Haeryeong, at the bottom of a hill, in a building that had been a ship chandler's before it was a tea room and a net store before that. It stood on the corner where the old harbor road met the stair, a narrow brick house with salt-faded blue shutters and a hand-lettered sign over the door, and every night from nine in the evening until the sky began to lighten it was filled with the particular, companionable hush of people who could not sleep and had found a place to be awake together. Haeseul had been coming for six years. She had a favorite chair, in the corner by the stove, and a favorite cup, a heavy white one with a chip in the handle, and she had never once, in all that time, been asked why she came.

She went in at half past two that afternoon, when the place was empty and the stove was cold, because she had not been able to bear her apartment a moment longer. A lamp burned on the counter. The long room smelled of wood polish and boiled barley. Somewhere in the back, a kettle ticked as it cooled.

"We are closed until nine," said a voice, and then, a moment later, "Oh. It is you."

Oh Garam came out of the kitchen drying her hands on a tea towel. She was in a patched gray cardigan, her curls pinned up in a way that was already collapsing, and under the dim lamp the shadows beneath her eyes looked deep as thumbprints in dough. She stopped in the middle of the floor, and her eyes went over Haeseul's face, and her own face went through a rapid and complicated series of expressions, joy and alarm and something very like grief, before she settled on a smile.

"Pharmacist Yeon," she said. "I did not expect you in the daytime."

"I could not sleep."

"Ah." Garam's smile deepened, wry and rueful. "Well. You have come to the right house. Sit, sit. The stove is cold, but I will put a pot on. You have had nothing to eat, I can tell. You have the look."

"I have had breakfast."

"Show me the toast and I will believe you."

Haeseul laughed. She could not help it. She sat down in her usual chair, and Garam bustled about behind the counter, opening a tin, setting out a clay pot, and presently a mug was placed in front of her, steaming gently, filled with something pale gold that smelled of roasted grain and faint sweetness. Haeseul lifted it, and stopped.

"This is corn silk tea," she said.

"It is."

"My mother drank it every evening of her life." Her voice came out strange. "She said it was good for the kidneys. I have not seen it on a menu in years."

"I thought you might like it," said Garam, quite gently. She did not say how she had known. She wiped down the counter and did not look up, and the silence between them was easy, almost companionable, the silence of two people who had both been in the same long waiting room.

Haeseul drank. The tea was hot and slightly sweet, and it tasted so exactly like a kitchen in another year that she had to set the mug down and press her lips together. When she had mastered herself, she looked up and found Garam watching her openly, with an expression so warm and so full of an unspoken knowledge that it was like being wrapped in a blanket.

"You know who I went to see yesterday," Haeseul said.

"I know a great deal," said Garam. "I try not to say it."

"She told me you were her anchor."

"Did she?" Garam went still for a moment, and then, slowly, she put the cloth down. "Well. That was more than I expected."

"She did not say what it cost you."

"No." A small pause. "I thought she might not."

Haeseul studied her. It was a mild, round, kindly face, a face made for laughter, and every line of it had been drawn there by effort. She thought of her mother in the last year. She thought of the way the skin had thinned over the cheekbones, the way the eyes had grown larger in the face. She said, as gently as she knew how: "You have not slept in a long time."

"I sleep a little."

"Garam-ssi."

"I sleep," said Garam, "like a cat. In pieces." She smiled, and it was a good smile, almost a perfect one. "I am a night person. I have always been a night person. It is why I own a tea shop that opens at nine in the evening. Do not look at me like that, Pharmacist. I am quite well."

"I am a pharmacist. I know what well looks like."

"And you know what you look like?" It was said lightly, but with a point, and for a moment the two of them regarded one another with a candor that was almost shocking. Then Garam sighed, and came around the counter, and sat down in the chair across the little table with her hands wrapped around a mug of her own.

"I am not going to tell you what to do," she said. "I want to say that very clearly. I am the last person with the right. I have loved that girl since she was a child, and I will love her until I die, and I would put my own hands in the stove before I let anyone hurt her. And I am telling you this so that you understand how much it costs me to say what I am about to say."

Haeseul waited.

"She is worth the risk," said Garam. "I think so. I think she may be the best person I have ever known, and I include my own mother. But she is also a Baek, and the Baek women do not ask for help. They would rather die of it. It is a kind of family disease." Her mouth twisted. "So if you do this, if you say yes, then you must make her say everything. All of it. Out loud, in plain words, in front of you. You must make her tell you the rules. Do not let her give you the version she thinks you can bear. Make her give you the real one."

"Is there a version she is not giving me?"

"I did not say that."

"You did not have to."

Garam looked into her tea. The lamp lit the curve of her cheek, and the weary, smiling mouth, and for one instant Haeseul saw the whole truth of the woman laid bare, the decades of cheerful sleepless nights, the cafe that stayed open because she could not close her own eyes. It was a face she knew very well. It was the face she saw in the bathroom mirror, in the small hours, when she was too tired to arrange it.

"I cannot tell you," Garam said at last, very low. "It is not my place. It was not my place when it was done to me, and it is not my place now. But I can tell you to ask." She lifted her eyes. "Ask her. And if she does not answer, ask again."

Haeseul sat with the mug between her hands for a long time. A tram passed in the street, ringing its bell. In the back, the kettle gave one small final tick.

"Thank you," she said.

"Do not thank me." Garam rose, and touched her shoulder as she passed, a brief and affectionate press of the fingers. "Go to her. Make her say it. And then, if you can bear it, give her a chance. She has not had many."

The sign on the door of Slow Hours had been turned to CLOSED, and the blinds were drawn, but there was a light on in the back, and when Haeseul knocked, the door opened at once.

Eunhae stood in the gap. She had been waiting. It was in every line of her, in the stiffness of her shoulders and the way she kept one hand on the latch, as if she had not quite trusted the door to open. She had changed her shirt. It was white, and neatly pressed, and she had rolled the sleeves to the elbow, and her short black hair had been brushed into some semblance of order. She looked, Haeseul thought, like a woman who had dressed for a court martial.

"You came," said Eunhae.

"I said I would."

"I know. I did not entirely believe it."

"That makes two of us." Haeseul stepped inside, and Eunhae closed the door behind her, and the forty-one clocks took up their chorus around them. "I have conditions. I wrote them down. I am going to read them to you, and you are going to listen, and then you may say yes or no. I will not be offended by either."

She took the folded paper out of her pocket. It was a page torn from the green notebook, and she had written three lines on it, in capital letters, in a hand so firm that the pencil had nearly gone through. She had rehearsed the speech on the way up the hill. It went out of her head at once, and she stood in the middle of the shop with the paper in her hand and a rapid, foolish heat in her face, and read it as plainly as she could.

"One. You tell me the truth. Not the part of it you think I can bear. All of it, whenever I ask, in plain words. If you do not know, you say you do not know. If you do not want to say, you say that instead. But you do not lie, and you do not arrange the truth to look like something else." She drew breath. "Two. You do not touch me without asking. Not for the work, not in an emergency, not to be kind. I have had a great many people put their hands on me in my life without asking, and I would like, in this one arrangement, to be the person who decides." Another breath. "Three. I may leave. At any time, for any reason, without explanation and without being followed. If I say stop, you stop. If I walk out of the door, the door is open."

She finished. The shop was entirely quiet. Eunhae stood motionless in front of her with her arms hanging at her sides, and for a long moment she did not speak.

"Is that all?" she said.

"It is all I could think of."

"Those are good conditions." Her voice was low and strangely rough. "They are very good. They are a good deal better than the ones I would have set myself." She looked at the floor. "I agree to them. All three."

"You do not want to think about it?"

"I have thought about it for eleven..." She stopped. A faint flush crept up from her collar. "I have thought about it for a long while. I agree."

Haeseul looked at her. There was something, a flicker, a tiny, almost imperceptible flinch, in the moment that Eunhae said all three, and Haeseul saw it as clearly as if she had been holding a magnifying lens. It was on the first one. The truth. Eunhae's eyes had flicked away on the word and her jaw had tightened, and then, resolutely, she had lifted her face again and met Haeseul's gaze.

"I will not lie to you," Eunhae said.

It was said with such terrible, grave sincerity that Haeseul felt the hair rise on her arms. She did not know why. She did not know what she was afraid of. But a small, cold, cautious voice at the back of her mind, the voice of the girl who had once sat in a hospital corridor and listened to a doctor say it is only a precaution, said: she means it, and she is still going to hurt you. And another, warmer voice, the one that had held a frightened old man's hands, answered: then we shall see.

"Then I will write it down," she said.

She laid the page on the workbench, between a jar of screws and a half-assembled movement, and took a repair ticket from the stack, a yellowed slip printed with the shop's name and a space for the date. She turned it over and wrote on the blank back, slowly, the three conditions in their order, and below them a line for signatures. She took the pencil from behind her ear and held it out, and Eunhae took it.

Their fingers touched. It was only the barest brush, the pencil passing from one hand to the other, but it went through Haeseul like a struck wire. She felt it in her wrist, and in her teeth, and in a small, hidden, unfamiliar place just below the breastbone. She drew her hand back so fast that she nearly dropped the pencil. And Eunhae, who had frozen with the pencil in her grip, looked up, and for one moment the two of them stood a hand's breadth apart and stared at each other with the identical, stricken expression of people who have each stepped on the same loose floorboard.

"I should have asked," said Eunhae.

"It was the pencil."

"It was still a touch."

"It was a pencil," Haeseul said, a little unsteadily. "I think we may allow a pencil."

"I will ask next time."

"See that you do."

Eunhae bent over the slip. She signed her name with a quick precise stroke, Baek Eunhae, and under it, after a hesitation, in a smaller hand, she added the number of the telephone on the wall. Haeseul signed beneath. Her own signature looked strange to her. It looked like the signature of someone who had stepped across a threshold.

"This is not a contract," she said. "It is only a start."

"I understand."

"If I say no, tomorrow, or the day after, you will not hold it against me."

"I would never."

"And I will not be pitied, Eunhae. If I am hurt, if it goes badly, I will not be consoled, and I will not be handled. I will be told."

"Yes."

"Then..." Haeseul lowered her eyes to the slip, and the two signatures, and the little scrawled number, and she felt something loosen in her chest, a knot she had not known was there. "Then we may as well begin. For the new moon. One night."

Eunhae did not speak at once. When Haeseul looked up, she was gripping the edge of the bench, and her face had gone quite white, and her lips were parted as if she meant to say something and could not find the shape of it.

"Thank you," she said at last.

"Do not thank me yet."

"I will thank you every day for the rest of my life," said Eunhae, very quietly, and then flushed so deeply that she turned her head away, and picked up a screwdriver, and put it down again.

It was so unguarded, so entirely unpracticed, that Haeseul did not know what to do with it. She cleared her throat.

"Why clocks?" she said.

It was the first thing that came into her head. But Eunhae turned back, slowly, and the flush left her face, and she seemed to consider the question with more seriousness than it deserved.

"My grandmother taught me," she said. "She was a Keeper, and she was also the only clockmaker in the harbor quarter, and she said they were the same trade. You listen for the one thing that is out of true. You do not try to force it. You find where it has been pressed too hard, or left too long, and you give it room." Her hand rested on the bench, near the little Swiss movement. "She used to say that grief is only time that has stopped. That if you can start it again, even a little, even just the one tooth of a wheel, the rest of it follows."

Haeseul looked at her. She thought of a watch ticking on her wrist, and a mother who had asked to hear it.

"She sounds wonderful."

"She was terrifying." A corner of Eunhae's mouth lifted. "She never once told me she loved me. She only left things on my bed. A pair of gloves. A sharpened pencil. A new loupe, the year I turned fifteen. When she died..." She stopped, and swallowed, and went on more quietly. "When she died there was a note under my pillow. It said, wind the grandfather clock on Sundays. That was all. It took me a year to understand it was an I love you."

"I am so sorry," Haeseul said.

It was the plainest thing she could have said. But Eunhae went entirely still, and her eyes, those dark, guarded, hungry eyes, filled with an expression so raw that Haeseul almost looked away. It was the face of a person who had received a gift she did not know how to hold. She opened her mouth, and closed it, and said nothing, and Haeseul understood with a rush of clear, unreasoning tenderness that in eleven years nobody had said those words to her and meant them.

"Thank you," Eunhae managed.

"You are welcome."

"I do not know what to say."

"You do not have to say anything." Haeseul found that her own voice was not entirely steady. She picked up her coat from the stool where she had laid it. "I will come tomorrow night, at ten. Is that the right time?"

"Ten is right. I will have everything ready."

"I will bring a blanket," Haeseul said. "And a flask. I know nothing about this, and I suspect I will be quite useless, but I can at least be warm."

She went to the door. At the threshold she looked back, once, and saw that Eunhae had not moved. She stood where Haeseul had left her, by the bench, with the repair ticket in her hand, and she was looking at it as if it were a letter from a country that no longer existed.

The bell rang. The door closed. And Haeseul walked a few paces down the street, past the shuttered window, and then, without knowing why, turned and glanced back through the glass.

Through the slats of the blind she could see a strip of the shop, a slice of gold lamplight on a floor of worn boards. And in it, Eunhae had crossed to the window and was standing with her forehead against the pane, her eyes shut and her lips moving. She was saying something. Haeseul could not hear it. But there was a kind of fervor in the set of her shoulders, a desperate, private, shaken intensity, as if she were a woman at a shrine making a vow she was not sure she could keep.

Haeseul stood on the pavement with her coat over her arm and the evening wind in her hair, and watched her until the shape behind the glass blurred. Eunhae's lips went on moving. It looked like one word, or two, said over and over, the way a person says a thing they are afraid to stop saying. Haeseul found that she had put one hand to her own wrist, over the small, steady beating of her mother's watch.

"One night," she said to herself. "Just one night."

Then she turned and went down the hill, toward the harbor and the lights, and she did not look back again.