She slept for eleven hours and woke up emptier than she had gone to bed.

It was a distinctly unfair arrangement. Haeseul lay on her back with the quilt twisted around her ankles and the late-afternoon light coming in through the blind in long bars, and took stock of herself in the way she would have taken stock of a patient. Heart rate, steady. Breathing, even. Muscles heavy, joints aching faintly, the way they did after a bout of flu. Head clear. Mouth dry. She had slept more than she had in three years, deeply, without a single dream, and there was nothing in her to show for it. She felt as though she had been wrung out and hung on a line, and the wind had gone through.

She reached for the green notebook on the nightstand and wrote: 11h 05m. Then, under it, in the margin, after a pause: Not rested. Then, because it was true and because there was nobody to see: Is this what it is like for the others?

She did not know who she meant by the others. She put down the pencil.

The mark was still there.

She had checked it twice before she went to sleep and twice since waking, turning her left wrist to the light, and it had not faded as promised. If anything it had settled, from a silvery frost to something that looked more like the faint pale line a ring leaves after years of wear. Twelve tiny ticks around the bone. She pressed one with her thumb. It was cold, in the way a stone is cold when it has been left in a stream, and it did not hurt, and it did not go away.

"By evening, perhaps," she said, aloud. "I think it fades."

She found that she was a little angry. It was a small, bright, specific anger, with no particular object. It was not that she minded the mark, or even the hollowness. She had walked into the thing with her eyes open and a list of conditions. But she had asked for the truth, and been given a careful, kind, uncertain shape of it, and she did not like the feeling of having been handed a half-sentence and told to be grateful.

The telephone number was on the back of the repair ticket, which she had slipped into the notebook. She looked at it for a long time.

Then she took out her phone and typed, with her thumb, in the stiff formal manner of a woman who had never texted a person she was not related to by employment: Is it always like this afterward?

She sent it. She put the phone face down on the quilt. She got up, and showered, and dressed, and ate two pieces of dry toast standing at the counter, and when she came back it was lying exactly where she had left it, and the screen was lit.

One word.

Rest.

She stared at it. She read it three times, with the toast turning to ash in her mouth, and a hot, ridiculous, entirely disproportionate resentment rose in her throat. Rest. As if it were a prescription. As if it were something one could simply take, like a tablet, with water, twice daily. She had slept eleven hours. She had practically drowned in rest. And she had the distinct, unpleasant suspicion that the woman on the other end of that one word knew perfectly well that it was not the answer.

She typed: I rested. It did not help.

She deleted it. She typed: What do you mean, rest?

She deleted that too. She stood looking at the blinking cursor for a long minute. In the end she wrote nothing at all, and put the phone in her pocket, and went to work.

Dawnbridge was warm that night, and very quiet, and entirely, suspiciously ordinary.

Haeseul noticed it the moment she came in. The lights were steady. The refrigerator hummed. The clock on the wall ticked at its usual pace. She stood on the mat with the bell still trembling over her head and let her senses range across the room, as a doctor lets her hands move over an abdomen, feeling for the wrongness. There was nothing. It was just a pharmacy.

"Noona!"

Han Gyeol was behind the counter in his white coat, with his hair neatly combed and his face, for the first time in two weeks, quite pink. He had a stack of prescription slips in one hand and a half-eaten pastry in the other, and he lit up at the sight of her like a lamp.

"You look well," said Haeseul.

"I slept," he said, with simple wonder. "I slept eight hours, Noona. Straight through. I did not hear a thing." He shook his head. "I thought I had gone mad. I thought it was all in my head, the breathing and the crying, and I was going to be sent home from the placement. And now it has stopped. It is as though somebody turned off a tap." He swallowed the pastry. "Do you think it was the weather?"

"Perhaps."

"The old women say that sometimes it is the moon." He said it carelessly, with the casual incuriosity of the young, and Haeseul felt her whole body go still. "Mrs. Seo came in this morning for her cough drops, and she said last night was a good night, and nothing went wrong in the district, and she had not seen the like in thirty years. She said somebody must have kept watch." He blinked. "What does that mean? Who keeps watch?"

"I do not know," said Haeseul. "Hand me those slips."

He handed them over. She sorted them, and her fingers did not shake, and she thought: it worked. She felt a quiet, stunned, ridiculous pride. For all her anger and her emptiness and her little silver ring of frost, the shutters on the old quarter had stayed shut last night, and nobody had wept in the dark. A boy had slept. An old woman had breathed easy. It had been worth it. Of course it had.

It was a quarter to nine when Mrs. Seo herself came in, as if the thought had summoned her.

She was a round, brown, formidable woman of seventy, who had sold fish in the harbor market for fifty-one years and owned a voice that could cut a mackerel at thirty paces. She wore a quilted vest over a flowered blouse and carried a string bag, and she stumped up to the counter with the dour, assessing expression of a general inspecting a defeated army.

"Pharmacist Yeon."

"Good evening, Mrs. Seo. The cough drops?"

"And a bottle of that rub for my knees." She leaned on the counter with both forearms and studied Haeseul with narrowed eyes. "You look peaked."

"I have been told."

"You look like you spent the night on a cold floor."

Haeseul kept her face quite still. "I beg your pardon?"

"Somebody did." Mrs. Seo sniffed. "I was up before dawn, going to the market. My husband used to say the hour before the milk carts was the hour that mattered. And I saw a person come down the hill from the old quarter in a very fine state of weariness, with a blanket-smell on her, and a flask in her pocket, and a face like a girl who has just been to a funeral and come back from the dead." She pursed her lips. "I will not say who. It is not my business. But I will say that I have lived on this hill for seventy years, and I know what it looks like when somebody has been up to the clockmaker's."

Haeseul opened her mouth, and found nothing in it.

"The Baek girl," said Mrs. Seo, and she said it as one says the name of a landmark. "Her grandmother was a very particular woman. She was the reason this street slept in the night, you know, all those years, and nobody ever asked how, which is as it should be. Some things you do not ask. You put a plate of fish at the door at the new moon and you say thank you and you shut your shutters." Her sharp little eyes held Haeseul's. "The girl has been alone since the old one died. She has been alone a long time. She is a good girl. I want you to know that I think so."

"I am sure she is," Haeseul managed.

"Then be kind to her," said Mrs. Seo, with great severity, and counted out the coins for the cough drops on the counter, one at a time, as if each was a verdict. "But do not give her more than you can spare."

She took her bag and her bottle of rub and stumped out, and the bell rang after her, and Haeseul stood very still behind the counter with her face burning and her heart pounding and the clear, ringing, humiliating understanding that the entire hill had known about this for decades, and that she was the last person in the district to be told.

"Noona?" said Gyeol, gently. "Are you all right? You have gone red."

"It is warm in here."

"It is nineteen degrees."

"Then I am coming down with something." She turned her back on him and began, with great precision, to alphabetize a shelf that was already in order.

She had been telling herself all evening that she would not look at the door. She looked at it nine times before ten o'clock.

It opened at five past, and the bell rang its one bright note, and Baek Eunhae came in out of the dark with her hands in the pockets of the thin gray jacket and the collar turned up against the wind.

Haeseul's pulse did something absurd. She told it to stop. It did not listen.

Eunhae had stopped just inside the threshold, as she had the first night, and stood with the door shut behind her and her gaze fixed on the floor in front of her boots. She looked better. That was the first thing Haeseul noticed. The gray had gone out of her face, and the hollowness from beneath her eyes, and she stood straighter, with her shoulders back, and her hands were quite still. She looked like a woman who had slept, and eaten, and been, for one night, relieved of a weight. It was ridiculous to resent it. It was ridiculous to feel, in some small, mean, scraped-out corner of herself, that it was not entirely fair.

"Good evening," said Eunhae.

"Good evening."

"I need..." She cast about the shelves with the abstracted air of a person who has not decided in advance what she needs. "Something for a cut. A plaster. A small one. I caught my thumb in a mainspring."

"Show me."

Eunhae held out her left hand. There was a tiny crescent of red at the base of the thumb, dry already, an almost invisible scratch. Haeseul looked at it, and then at her, and said, "That is not a cut. That is a hangnail."

"I was thorough."

"You are a very poor liar."

"I have been told." A faint, harried, helpless flush crossed her cheekbones. "It is a flaw."

"I would call it a condition." Haeseul took down a box of plasters, with some firmness, and rang them up. She was acutely conscious of Gyeol at the far end of the counter, pretending to arrange a display of lip balm and listening with his entire spine. She was conscious of the cardigan sliding off her shoulder, and the tick of the watch on her wrist. She was conscious, most of all, of the fact that Eunhae had not said a word about the message, or the night before, or the mark. They both stood in the white light of the pharmacy, pretending that it had not happened.

"That will be eighteen hundred won," she said.

"Of course."

The coins were counted out. They passed from one hand to the other without touching, with elaborate care, and she was irritated to find that she had noticed.

"You look well," Haeseul said, because the silence was beginning to ring.

"I slept."

"Good."

"And you?"

"I slept eleven hours." It came out harder than she had intended. "I had the most thorough rest of my adult life. It was, I believe, a medical event. I should like to write a paper."

Eunhae flinched. It was very slight. A tightening at the corner of the mouth, a tiny drawing in of the shoulders, the reaction of a person who has been struck in a place she was already guarding.

"I am sorry," she said. "I did not know whether to..."

"To what?"

"To ask." She lifted her eyes at last. They were dark and wary and a little desperate. "I did not know how you wished to be spoken to, afterward. I did not know if you wanted me to come. I thought perhaps it would be intrusive. I only wanted to see if you were all right. I did not know how to do it. I have never..." Her voice dropped. "I have never had to ask."

"You could have said so."

"I did not know how."

"You said rest." Haeseul heard her own voice rising, and could not seem to prevent it. "One word. I sent you a question, and I got a command. It was a very cold sort of kindness, Eunhae."

"It was not meant coldly."

"Then what was it meant as?"

"It was meant..." Eunhae stopped. She pressed her lips together. She stood in the middle of the aisle, with a box of plasters in her fist, and looked so entirely wretched that Haeseul's anger faltered for a moment, and she very nearly stepped around the counter. "I did not know what else to say. You looked so tired. At the end, in the morning, when you left. You looked so tired, Haeseul."

"I am always tired."

It was a terrible thing to say. She knew it as it left her mouth. It was a sharp, flat, closed sort of sentence, a door shut in a face, and she had meant it to be. She had said it in the voice she used for relatives who wanted to know whether the patient was comfortable, the voice that meant nothing more can be done, please go home.

Eunhae went entirely still.

For a moment she did not speak. A faint paleness had come over her face. She looked down at the box in her hand, and her thumb moved once over the lid, and then she set it on the counter with extreme care.

"Yes," she said. "I see that."

"Eunhae..."

"Good night, Pharmacist Yeon."

It was said so gently that it was far worse than any reproach. She inclined her head, in a small old-fashioned bow, and turned, and walked to the door. The bell rang. The door closed. And through the glass Haeseul watched her go up the street under the lamps, with her hands in her pockets and her collar up and her head bent, and she felt a deep, sick, sinking sense of having kicked something that had not been expecting it.

"Noona," said Gyeol, very small.

"Do not."

"I only..."

"Gyeol. Please."

He subsided. He took a breath, and after a moment, she heard him begin, with painful tact, to count the lip balm.

Haeseul stood at the counter with her hands flat on the glass and her eyes shut. The shop was silent. The refrigerator hummed, and the clock ticked, and a small, miserable, honest voice at the back of her skull said: you were not angry at her. You were angry at the word. You were angry that she looked at you and saw it. You were angry that, for one night, in the lamplight, someone had held your hand and said you are doing exactly right, and now you do not know what to do with it in the morning.

She opened her eyes.

It was only then that she noticed the paper bag.

It stood at the end of the counter, beside the plasters, small and brown and neatly folded at the top. She had not seen Eunhae set it down. It had simply appeared, as such things did, in the shuffle of coins and boxes and pretending. She picked it up. It was light, and it rustled. There was no name on it, and no note.

She opened it, and looked inside.

It was a tin of corn silk tea.

It was the old kind, the kind in a round red-and-gold canister with a picture of a rooster on the lid, the kind that her mother had bought from a stall in the market every second week for thirty years and kept on the shelf above the stove. It had been sealed with a strip of paper, and on the strip, in a fine, upright, extremely careful hand, somebody had written: For the blanket. And below that, smaller, as if added at the last moment, as if the pen had hesitated for a long time above the page: I am sorry I said it the wrong way.

Haeseul stood quite still.

She turned the tin over in her hands. It was perfectly new, and perfectly ordinary, and it smelled very faintly of toasted grain. She thought of a tea room at half past two in the afternoon, with a lamp burning on the counter and a round, tired, shrewd woman setting a mug in front of her. She thought: Garam told her. She went down the hill and asked, and Garam told her, and she walked all the way to the old market, in the daytime, after a night without rest, and found the exact brand of tea that my mother drank.

It was a very small thing. It was a tin of tea. She would have been embarrassed to try to explain to anyone why her throat had closed.

"Noona," said Gyeol, at her elbow, in a tiny voice. "Are you crying?"

"No," said Haeseul, with great dignity, and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, where a ring of twelve pale ticks lay cool against the skin. "It is the fluorescent lights. They are very bad for the eyes."

"They are very new."

"Then I am allergic to them."

He did not argue. He only brought her a tissue, and a cup of warm water from the dispenser, and stood beside her for a moment with the awkward dignity of the very young. After a while he said, in a low voice, "I think she meant it kindly."

"I know she did."

"People do not always say the right thing."

"No."

"You did not either," he pointed out, with the stern innocence of twenty-three.

"I am aware."

"I only mean that you could say it back." He reddened. "The sorry. You could say it back, tomorrow, or whenever."

Haeseul looked at him. She felt the corner of her mouth give, very slightly. "When did you become wise, Han Gyeol?"

"Last night," he said, with great seriousness. "I slept eight hours."

She laughed. It broke out of her in a short, wet, helpless burst, and she covered her mouth with her hand and leaned against the counter and shook, and Gyeol, delighted, shook a little too. And for a moment, in the humming white light of the pharmacy, with a tin of tea in her fist and a boy laughing beside her and a thin ring of cold on her wrist, she felt something she had not felt in a very long time, which was the sensation of being entirely and unreasonably cared for, and not minding it.

It was gone by morning. She went home at six with the tin in her pocket and made a cup, and sat on the edge of her bed with the steam rising, and drank it slowly, and it tasted exactly like the kitchen she had lost.

She did not write the number in the notebook that day. She wrote only: Must say sorry. And then, below it, after a moment's thought, a thing she had no intention of putting into words, which was a single question mark, and beside it, in a hand that did not look quite like hers: why does it feel as though I am being rehearsed for something?

She shut the book and drank the last of the tea. The watch ticked on her wrist. Outside, the milk carts rattled over the stones, and the sky went from gray to pink, and Haeseul lay down on top of the quilt in her clothes and slept for four hours more, and when she woke, she was, to her dismay, just as tired.