For six nights Eunhae did the sensible thing, which was to stay away from Dawnbridge Pharmacy.

She did it with great discipline. She walked her rounds in the other direction, down along the east quay and under the iron bridge, and past the tangled alleys behind the fish market where the old women left saucers of milk on the windowsills and did not look at them. She listened. She counted when she had to. The Hushed were quiet that week, scattered and sluggish, as though the night of the new moon had taken the edge off their appetite, and she was able to settle a small one under the bridge with nothing more than a low count and a turn of her wrist. It cost her little. She slept three hours in her narrow bed each night, which was three more than she was used to, and woke with her hands still and her head clear and a deep, steady, unfamiliar quiet in her bones.

She was well. That was the dreadful thing. She had not felt this well in years, and every morning, when she stood at the iron sink and splashed her face and found no tremor in her fingers, she knew exactly what it was made of.

It was made of someone else.

She went on fixing clocks. She went on listening. She told herself, with a bleak and rigorous logic, that the correct thing to do was to take what she had been given and not ask for more, to let the woman rest, to leave her to her ordinary life of pills and old men and quiet shelves. Haeseul had said, I am always tired, in a voice like a closing door, and Eunhae had heard it. She had understood it. She had gone home and sat on the floor of the back room with the corn silk tea tin's empty twin in her lap, which she had bought for herself on the way home, and which she had not been able to open.

On the seventh night, Garam sent for her.

It was not a message. It was a basket. It arrived on the doorstep of Slow Hours at nine in the evening, a covered wicker thing with a cloth over it and a card tucked in the handle, and the card said, in Garam's looping, sprawling, impatient hand: Come and eat or I shall come and make you.

She went.

The Kettle & Tide was already half full when she pushed open the door, with the ordinary crowd of the sleepless: two nurses in rumpled scrubs sharing a plate of rice cakes, a taxi driver with his cap on his knee, an elderly man playing paduk against himself by the window, a pair of students bent over the same textbook with the glazed expressions of the doomed. The stove was lit. The lamps were low and amber. And behind the counter, with her sleeves pushed up and a streak of flour on her cheek, Garam looked up at the sound of the bell and put down a ladle with the air of a woman who has been waiting a long time for a particular kind of fish.

"Sit," she said.

"I have come to be fed. I did not come to be ordered."

"Sit, and be fed, and be ordered. It is all one service." Garam came around the counter and took her by the elbow, with strong, kind, pitiless fingers, and steered her into a chair at the small corner table by the stove. "Soup," she said, over her shoulder, to the kitchen. "The good soup. And the dumplings, and do not skimp on the egg."

"Garam..."

"Do not talk. You are about to say you are not hungry, and you are not about to say it, because I have eyes." She sat down opposite, folded her hands on the table, and regarded Eunhae with great seriousness. "You look well."

"I am well."

"I can see that." The words were quiet. "It is quite remarkable. I have not seen you look like that since you were twenty-two."

Eunhae looked at the table. The wood was scarred and stained and polished by years of elbows, and she traced one of the rings with her thumbnail.

"It worked," Garam said.

"Yes."

"The whole night? She held?"

"She held." It was hard to say. It came out rough, and she cleared her throat. "She did not let go once. There was a bad hour, after one o'clock. The tall one came to the door. I faltered, and I..." She could not finish. She shut her mouth.

"And she stayed."

"She stayed."

Garam let out a long, soft breath. Something went across her face that Eunhae could not look at directly, a flicker of joy and anguish so naked that it was like seeing a person's skin turned inside out. She reached across the table and covered Eunhae's hand with her own, and her palm was warm, and her fingers were very slightly cold.

"I am so glad," she said. "I am so glad, little one. I cannot tell you."

"You are crying."

"I am not. It is the stove." She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and laughed, unsteadily. Then the laugh faded. When she spoke again her voice had changed, quiet and level and quite without its usual lightness, and Eunhae felt a cold finger of dread begin to trace down her spine.

"Eunhae. Did you tell her the cost?"

The soup arrived. A girl set down two bowls with a clatter, and a plate of dumplings, and a small dish of pickled radish, and went away. Steam rose between them. Eunhae did not touch the spoon.

"I told her it was tiring."

"Did you tell her it was permanent?"

"No."

"Did you tell her what happened to me?"

"I told her you were my anchor. I did not say..." She swallowed. "She guessed. She is very quick. But I did not say."

Garam sat back. She said nothing for a long time. Her face did not change, but it grew, in the lamplight, strangely still, and the shadows under her eyes looked suddenly as deep as wells. At the next table, one of the nurses laughed, a tired, ordinary, sleep-starved laugh, and the sound seemed to come from a long way off.

"Why not?" Garam said at last.

"Because she would have said no."

"Perhaps."

"She would have said no, and I would have had to do it alone, and I cannot do it alone, Garam, I tried, I tried for three years, and I was dying. I was truly dying. You saw. My hands..." Her voice cracked. She lowered it with an effort. "And she is the one. You said so yourself. You said she was rarer than a green moon. There will not be another. There was never going to be another. If I had told her, and she had walked away, it would have been the end of me, and the end of the Keeper's line, and the district would..." She stopped, because she had heard herself. She heard the shape of it. She heard the fluent, plausible, appalling shape of a woman building a case.

"Go on," said Garam, very gently.

"I do not know what I am doing."

"I know you do not."

"I wrote her a note. For the tea. I said I was sorry. I said it was the wrong way. But it was not that, was it? It was not that at all. I was sorry for the wrong thing."

"What were you sorry for?"

"Everything," said Eunhae, and put her face in her hands.

Garam did not touch her. She did the harder thing, which was to wait. The soup cooled between them. The stove ticked. After a long while Eunhae felt a warm, solid, practical pressure on the back of her head, a hand, stroking her hair once, twice, in the way a mother strokes a child who has been sick.

"Listen to me," said Garam, very low. "Your grandmother did exactly this. She did it to me. I was twenty-three years old, and I had a shop, and a girl I was seeing, and I thought the night was a thing that ended in the morning. She came into my mother's tea room one evening and she looked at me for a very long time, and then she said, Child, I need a favor. It will not take long. And I said yes. Of course I said yes. I was a fool, and I was kind, and nobody had ever told me what the word yes could cost."

"Garam..."

"I am not telling you so that you will feel sorry for me. I am telling you because I loved her. She was the best person I have ever known, and she did a terrible thing to me, and I forgave her before I knew what it was. And I have spent twelve years trying to work out whether I would have said yes, if she had told me." A small smile, thin as paper. "I think I would have. That is the worst part. I think I would have said yes anyway. But I would have said it with my eyes open. And that is a thing she took from me, and it is a thing I would give a great deal to have back."

Eunhae lifted her head. Garam's eyes were wet and calm and very steady, and in the lamplight her face looked suddenly neither old nor young but simply true, the face of a woman who had made her peace with a thing and then found that peace was not the same as being finished with it.

"Tell her," Garam said. "Tell her, and soon. Before it is too late to be forgiven."

"I will."

"When?"

"I do not know."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only one I have," said Eunhae, and the words fell into the quiet like a stone into water, and she realized that she had said them before. She had said them to Haeseul, in the shop, on the first afternoon. It is the only one I have. It had seemed an honest thing then.

The bell rang.

She felt it before she saw it. She felt it in the back of her neck, in the soles of her feet, a small sharp thrill like a plucked string, and she did not need to turn her head. She knew the step. It was quick and light and a little uneven, the step of a person who had been walking all day and was not going to admit to being tired.

"Good evening, Pharmacist Yeon," said Garam, with admirable calm.

"Good evening, Garam-ssi. I am on my break. I hope I am not..." The voice stopped. There was a very small silence. "Oh."

Eunhae turned.

Haeseul stood in the doorway in her white coat and her cream cardigan, with her hair coming down from its band and a faint flush on her cheeks from the cold. She had been walking quickly; her breath was a little short. In her left hand she held a small paper bag, and her eyes had gone, with an almost audible click, to the table by the stove, and settled there, and widened.

"I did not expect..." she said, and stopped, and tried again. "I did not know you would be here."

"I did not know you would be."

"I come most nights." Haeseul took a step into the room. She shut the door behind her with her heel. "On my break. It is the only place I..." She gave up. "Garam-ssi. May I sit?"

"It is a public house," said Garam, rising. She had a look on her face of such transparent, beaming, ineffectual innocence that Eunhae could have gladly strangled her. "I will fetch your tea. The usual. Sit, sit. There is plenty of room at this table, I was just going."

"You were not."

"I was just going," said Garam, firmly, and went.

Haeseul stood a moment longer. Then she crossed the floor, in a small straight line, and pulled out the chair that Garam had left and sat down on the very edge of it, with her bag in her lap and her ankles crossed. They looked at each other. The stove ticked. At the window, the old man laid down a black stone on the paduk board with a faint, decisive click.

"I wrote a speech," said Haeseul.

"Did you."

"It was quite good. It had a structure. I am afraid it has gone entirely out of my head." She drew a breath. "I owe you an apology."

"You do not."

"I do. I said a thing that was cruel, and I said it on purpose, and I would like to take it back." She held out the paper bag, with both hands, rather stiffly, like a child presenting a report card. "These are rice cakes. Rose-flavored. There is a shop on the corner of Minjok Street that makes them, and I did not know what you liked. I am afraid it is the second time I have guessed."

Eunhae took it. It was warm. Inside, in a twist of wax paper, were six small pink rice cakes dusted with sugar, and the faint sweet smell of them rose to her face and made her throat ache.

"I was not hurt," she said.

"You were."

"A little."

"I know. I saw it." Haeseul's voice was quiet. "You had a way of standing, afterward. It is the way people stand when they have been told to wait outside. I have seen it a hundred times, in the families, in the corridors. I do not like to be the person who does that." She looked down at her hands. "You asked me how I was, and I was angry about a different thing altogether, and I took it out on you. I am sorry. I will try not to do it again."

"There is nothing to forgive."

"There is, but you are being generous, and I will let you." A small, shy, crooked smile. "Thank you for the tea."

"It was the wrong brand, probably."

"It was exactly the right brand. It was the rooster tin." She looked up. Her eyes were very dark in the amber light, and they held a candor so bare that Eunhae had to look away. "How did you know?"

"I asked Garam."

"And how did Garam know?"

"You told her."

"I told her I drank my mother's tea. I did not say which." Haeseul tilted her head. "Did you go to the market?"

"Yes."

"In the day?"

"It was the only time the stalls were open."

"After a night without sleep."

"I had slept a little," said Eunhae, and then, because she had promised, and because the woman across the table was watching her with an expression that made evasion impossible: "No. Not really. I wanted to bring you something. I did not know what you would accept."

Haeseul did not answer. For a long moment she simply sat there, with her fingers curled in her lap, looking at Eunhae. Something moved across her face, quick and soft and unguarded, like the shadow of a bird across a wall, and then she lowered her eyes and said, in a voice that was not quite steady, "That is the nicest thing anyone has done for me in two years."

"It was a tin of tea."

"It was not."

Garam arrived with the tea and the good manners to say nothing at all. She set down a heavy white mug with a chipped handle, and a second, and a plate of something sweet, and went away, whistling, out of tune, in the direction of the kitchen. And Eunhae sat across from the woman she had lied to, and drank her tea, and ate a rose-flavored rice cake that tasted like the inside of a dream, and was happier than she had been in eleven years.

They talked. She never afterward knew how it began. It was not about anything. Haeseul asked how a clock was made, and Eunhae, who would have said she was incapable of describing her work to anyone, found herself explaining the escapement, the little toothed wheel that releases the energy of the spring one tick at a time, so that the whole great force of the thing is let out in a steady, patient trickle. She used her hands. She drew a diagram on the table with her finger. And Haeseul asked clear, quick, intelligent questions, and then, in return, explained the difference between a competitive and a non-competitive antagonist, with a drawing of her own, a very bad one, of a receptor with a key in it. She drew the key upside down. Eunhae told her so. Haeseul said that this was a scandalous slander and that she had passed her exams with distinction, and Eunhae said that the receptor was probably cross, and then, to her own astonishment, she laughed.

It came out of her all at once. She had not laughed aloud in a very long time, and it startled her, a low, rusty, surprised sound. She clapped a hand to her mouth. Across the table Haeseul went quite still, and her whole face lit, slowly, like a window at dusk, and she said, in a soft, wondering voice, "Oh. There you are."

"I am sorry," said Eunhae, muffled.

"Do not be. It is a very good laugh. You should use it more." Haeseul was smiling. It was a real smile, wide and unguarded and a little dazzled, and it made her look about nineteen. "I wondered what it would sound like."

Eunhae put her hand down. Her face was hot. Her heart was beating against her ribs so hard that she thought it must be visible, and she did not know whether she wished the table would swallow her or the night would never end.

Garam, passing with a tray, caught her eye over the top of Haeseul's head, and raised both eyebrows to the ceiling in an expression of the purest, most unholy delight.

It was nearly half past one. The room had thinned. The nurses had gone, and the students, and the taxi driver, and only the old man at the window remained, bent over his board, and the stove ticking low, and the three of them. Garam had brought a pot of hot water and a fresh tray of tea and sat down with them at last, heavily, on a third chair, with her chin in her hand.

She told stories. She told them very well. She told about the winter that Ongjo had tried to cure a Hushed in the old schoolhouse by reading it nursery rhymes, and the winter that she had dropped a whole tray of dumplings on the harbor master, and the night, forty years ago, that a Keeper's watch had stopped in the middle of a count, and Ongjo had finished the count by humming. Haeseul listened with her chin on her fist and her eyes alight. She laughed in the right places. She asked questions. She said, once, softly, "I wish I had met her," and Garam said, "You would have hated each other for a week and then she would have left you a pair of gloves," and Eunhae laughed again, and this time did not cover her mouth.

"Garam-ssi," said Haeseul, a little later, in the lull. "May I ask you something? As a pharmacist."

"You may ask."

"How do you sleep?"

Garam stirred her tea. She did it carefully, with the spoon making no sound against the china. The lamplight lay along her round cheek, and the curls coming loose at her temples, and under her eyes the two violet shadows that no amount of laughter had ever managed to erase.

"I never learned," she said.

The silence that followed was very small, and very complete.

"I am sorry," said Haeseul. "That was..."

"It was a perfectly good question." Garam smiled, and it was the best smile she had, warm and wry and comfortable, and it did not touch her eyes at all. "I am a night person, Pharmacist. You know that. It is no great tragedy. I have the tea room, and I have good company, and I have a great many hours in which to read." She patted Haeseul's hand. "I would not trade it. Truly."

Eunhae could not look at either of them. She stared into her mug at a few drowned barley husks turning in the dregs, and thought: she is telling her. She is telling her with her face, with her silence, with every wasted night. And Haeseul, who was no fool, was nodding slowly, with a small furrow between her brows and a long, thoughtful, inward look, as though she were adding up a column of figures.

It was nearly two when they rose. Haeseul had to go back to the shop. She wound her scarf round her neck and buttoned her coat with quick fingers, and said goodnight to Garam with a brief, impulsive squeeze of the arm, and at the door she hesitated, and looked back at Eunhae.

"I will walk you up the hill," said Eunhae.

"You need not."

"I would like to."

"It is out of your way."

"It is not out of my way." She heard herself, with some surprise. "I go that way every night."

"Do you?" said Haeseul, and it was very soft.

"I have been avoiding it."

"I know."

"I did not want to intrude."

"I know that too," said Haeseul, and opened the door, and stood aside to let her through, and the night air came in cold and sweet and smelling of the sea.

They walked up the steep street side by side, not touching, not speaking, under a sky where a waxing moon hung low over the harbor, a lopsided half of silver, bright and unhurried. Eunhae looked at it and felt, for the first time in years, that she was not afraid of the sky. The lamps made their yellow pools on the cobbles. Their footsteps fell into step without either of them meaning to. And Haeseul said, a little shyly, "You do not have to tell me what it is. But I have been wondering, all week, about the mark. On my wrist. It has not faded."

"No."

"Is it supposed to?"

"I do not know." That was true. It was a small, clean, honest thing, and she held on to it. "I have never seen it on anyone else. I will find out. I will ask Garam, and I will search my grandmother's journals, and I will tell you what I learn. I swear it."

"Thank you."

"It is the least..."

She stopped.

They had reached the corner by the temple, where the street bent and a white wall ran along one side, and the lamp above the temple gate cast a long, pale, wavering light across the cobbles and the shuttered window of a closed noodle shop. Haeseul had stopped too. She had half turned toward Eunhae, to say something, and the lamp behind her cast her shadow long and thin across the wall, and the edge of her cheek and the line of her jaw were lit gold.

Behind her, on the wall, her shadow was not alone.

It stood very close. It stood so close that its head rested, almost tenderly, in the hollow between her shadow's shoulder and neck, and it was not a shadow at all. It was a woman. She was thin and gray and fifty-five or sixty years of age, in a hospital gown, with a plastic bracelet on her wrist and a scarf tied over a head that had lost its hair, and she was looking at Haeseul's back with a face so full of love and loss and terrible patience that Eunhae's heart stopped.

She had Haeseul's mouth.

She had the same wide, soft, generous curve of the lips, and the same small mole at the edge of the jaw. She had Haeseul's eyes. And she lifted one hand, slowly, as a mother lifts a hand to a child asleep in the next room, and laid it very gently upon Haeseul's shoulder.

"Haeseul," said Eunhae, and could not make a sound.

"What?" said Haeseul. "Is something wrong?"

"Do not move."

"Eunhae, you are as white as..."

"Please." It was barely a breath. "Do not turn around."

The thing on the wall looked up. For an instant its gaze met Eunhae's across the lamplit dark, and there was no menace in it, no hunger, only an enormous, weary, imploring tenderness, the look of one who has been trying to speak for a very long time and does not know the words. Its lips parted. And then the lamp above the temple gate flickered, once, and when it steadied there was nothing on the wall at all but the bare white plaster, and the long, thin, solitary shadow of a woman standing in the cold with her hands in her pockets and her mother's watch ticking on her wrist.

"Eunhae," said Haeseul, and now there was fear in it. "What did you see?"