Mirae came to him without notice, which was her way. She appeared at the east wing gate in the late morning, three days after the hearing, and the household staff brought word in the way they now did for people who were regular enough visitors to have established an informal status.
He received her in the east library.
She sat across from him with the specific composed quality she maintained in all circumstances, and she looked at him with the assessment quality she had used at their first meeting in the Uiwon and that he had come to understand was not distance but attention.
She said: "I have made my decision."
He waited.
"I am going to stay," she said. "Not because I cannot go back, or because I have not found a mechanism for it. I am staying because this is where I am doing something that matters and because the vessel I am in made a choice that I am honoring." She paused. "Both of those are true simultaneously, and I have found a way to live with both."
He said: "The chosen presence case."
"Yes." She looked at the window. "The physician who documented it described something similar. The incoming soul choosing to remain not from inability but from orientation. I have read that record many times. I found it more useful than most things I have read in this world."
He thought about what she was telling him. She had arrived at a conclusion he had arrived at weeks ago through a different route, the route of the morning garden and the plum tree and the letters about books and the gathering of people who trusted him and the presence in the dark room approaching the threshold.
"How did you know it was the right decision?" he asked.
"I asked the question you told me the physician described," she said. "Is this the life I want to live? And I found that the answer was yes." She paused. "It is not the life I had before. It is not the life I expected to have. It is the life that is here, and it is a good life."
He thought about this. He thought about his own answer to the same question, and when he had arrived at it, and how it had happened without his quite deciding to arrive at it, the way certain decisions happened through the accumulation of daily choices rather than through a specific moment of choosing.
"I am glad," he said.
"I know you are." She looked at him. "I also wanted to tell you about the balance state documentation I have found since the hearing."
"Tell me."
She had found three more cases in the archive, each from a different period, each with different specifics but with the same essential pattern: the incoming soul established genuine orientation toward the vessel's world, the original soul gradually reemerged, and the resulting state was one of coexistence rather than competition.
"In two of the three additional cases," she said, "the original soul's emergence became primary within approximately six months of the incoming soul establishing full orientation." She paused. "Full orientation, in the documentation, is described as the incoming soul having genuinely chosen the vessel's world rather than managing an imposed situation."
He thought about the hearing and the garden and the threshold and everything that had happened over the five months.
"When do you estimate full orientation was established?" he asked.
She looked at him with the specific directness that was hers. "I think it was established several weeks ago. Possibly longer." She paused. "The threshold crossing is consistent with the point in the documented cases where full orientation had been reached and the original soul's reemergence was accelerating."
He sat with this.
"Six months from full orientation," he said.
"In two of the three additional cases. The third was slower." She looked at the window. "I cannot give you a timeline with confidence. But I can tell you the pattern suggests the reemergence is not a distant possibility. It is an active process."
He thought about the presence in the dark room. The approaching quality. The morning when the threshold was crossed. The subsequent daily presence that was more specific each week.
"What does the reemergence look like in the documented cases?" he asked.
"It varies. In all cases it is gradual rather than sudden. The original soul does not displace the incoming soul abruptly. There is a period of increasing presence, of both souls being active, before the original soul achieves primary status." She paused. "In the chosen presence case, both remained in some form of coexistence for years."
He thought about what that meant. For himself. For Woohyeon. For the life they were both living, in different ways, in the same body.
"I am going to tell her," he said.
Mirae looked at him.
"Lady Yeonhwa. I said I would tell her the full truth when the context existed. The context exists now." He paused. "I want to give her the information before the reemergence is further along. She deserves to know what she has been in the middle of."
Mirae was quiet for a moment. "That is the right decision," she said.
"Yes." He looked at the window. "It is the right decision and it is also the most difficult conversation I am going to have in this life."
"Probably," she said. "But she will not be surprised in the way you might fear. She has been paying attention. She has concluded things you have not told her." A pause. "She is not someone who needs to be protected from information. She needs to be given it with the respect it deserves."
He thought about TP-3. About what she had said: I know you will not ask for what you are not ready to say, and I expect to be told when the context exists. She had been waiting. She had been patient, not from ignorance but from the specific patience of someone who trusts that the full picture is coming.
"Soon," he said.
"Good," Mirae said.
She left with the efficient quality that was hers, the visit concluded because its purpose was served.
He sat alone in the east library and thought about the six months and the balance state and the conversation that was coming.
He thought: I have been preparing for this since the day I arrived. Not deliberately, not with a plan. But everything I have done has been building toward the moment when it is possible to tell the truth.
The moment was close.
He was going to use it.
He spent the rest of the morning in the east library with the natural philosophy text and the question of how to begin the conversation that needed to happen.
He had been thinking about this conversation since the early weeks, when he had first understood what he was in and had begun to realize that the understanding would eventually need to be shared. He had told Yeonhwa partial truths at various points, the truth about Woohyeon and the truth about his own orientation and the truth about the things he had not told her yet. She had accepted each partial truth with the patience of someone who trusted that the full picture was coming.
The full picture was coming.
He thought about how to tell it. Not the mechanics of it, the specific words and sequence, which he would figure out in the moment in the way he figured out difficult things. The orientation from which to tell it, which mattered more than the mechanics.
He was going to tell her as himself. Not as the strategist who had been managing information carefully, not as the professional who had learned to deliver difficult truths with clinical precision. As the person he had become in this household over five months, the person who had arrived in a borrowed life and had put down roots and had chosen to be here. That person.
He thought about what she had said: with help. About what she had said about her mother wanting someone who thought she was worth understanding.
He thought: she has been worth understanding from the first morning in the garden when she answered a question honestly in a way that cost her something. I have been understanding her, and it has been worth it, and I am going to continue.
And in return, she was owed the full truth.
He thought about what Mirae had said: she will not be surprised in the way you might fear. She has been paying attention.
He believed this. Yeonhwa had been paying attention since the ceremony. Her Sigeul had told her there was something unusual about the reading she was getting from him. She had built a picture and she had included in that picture the specific quality of someone who was not simply Ryu Woohyeon performing differently. She had given him TP-3 and the room to not explain, which was the grace of someone who already suspected the explanation was larger than what was available.
He was going to give her the explanation.
He was not afraid of it.
He was, in fact, almost ready for it.
The afternoon arrived with its ordinary requirements and he met them with the quality of someone who is fully in the present because the future is arranged and can wait for its moment.
He sent a note through the book channel: I would like to come to you. This week. Not for the investigation or anything strategic. To tell you something I have been preparing to tell you.
She replied within the hour: Yes. Whenever you are ready.
He wrote back: Friday. In the morning.
She wrote back: Friday morning. I will be in the garden.
He folded the note. He put it in the notebook on the clean pages.
He thought: Friday morning. The garden. The full truth.
He was, for the first time since arriving in this world, genuinely looking forward to a conversation he had been dreading. Not because the dread was gone, because the dread was still present. But because the trust was larger than the dread, and the trust had been built by the months of small careful honest things that had accumulated between them into something strong enough to carry what was coming.
He was going to Friday morning.
He was going to tell the truth.
It was going to be the right thing.
He had been building toward it for five months.
He was ready.
The week moved toward Friday with the specific quality of time that moves toward something anticipated: the days ordinary in their texture and slightly more vivid than usual, each one sharper because it was numbered.
He continued the morning garden practice. He continued the dark room visits, which had taken on a new quality since the threshold crossing, more presence and more specific, the quality of someone who was not quite accessible but was genuinely there. He reviewed the household's post-hearing situation, the formal investigation now in process by the appropriate institutional body, Sangwon's authority suspended, the household operating under a temporary oversight arrangement that would last until the formal outcome.
The household staff had adjusted to the new arrangement with the particular quality of people who had been waiting for something to change and were now discovering what they were capable of when the change occurred. Elder Jang had stepped into a more active role, as Seonu had anticipated. The household's daily texture had changed from the careful management of a constrained situation to something more straightforwardly functional.
He watched this and found it good.
He also worked through the conversation he was going to have on Friday.
Not scripting it. He did not prepare conversations in advance in that sense, did not write out what he would say and what he hoped she would say in response. He prepared the way he prepared for important things: by being clear about what he was trying to do and why, and trusting that the clarity would produce the right approach in the moment.
What he was trying to do: tell her the full truth, about Yeomun and the vessel and the balance state, about who he was and where he had come from and what he was now and what Woohyeon was and what was happening between them. Tell all of this in a way that honored what they had built and that gave her the information she needed to make her own choices.
Why: because she had trusted him with partial truths for months and had been patient about the rest, and she deserved the full version, and he was, finally, in the position to give it.
He thought about how to begin. The beginning mattered. Not because it would determine the whole outcome, but because she deserved to know from the first words that this was genuine and not managed, that he was telling her because it was right, not because it was strategic.
He thought: I am going to tell her because she is someone who thinks carefully and honestly and because the careful honest thinking has been directed at me for five months and it deserves to know what it has been directed at.
Thursday evening he sat in the east library with the lamp and the winter dark outside and wrote nothing and thought.
He thought about his previous life, the therapy practice, the research, the years of sitting with people in the middle of the hardest things they were living through. He had been good at that work. He had believed in it. He had, in the specific way of people who do work that requires sustained engagement with human difficulty, cared about it.
He had also been, he now understood, someone who maintained a professional distance that was not quite the right relationship with the things he was in. The distance had been useful and had been protective and had allowed him to be present for others in ways he could not have been if he had been fully in the experiences he was accompanying.
He was fully in the experience now. Had been, since arriving, learning to be, becoming over five months the kind of person who was in his life rather than managing it.
He was grateful for the becoming.
He was going to tell her about it.
Friday morning.
The garden.
He was ready.
On Thursday evening, something small but real happened.
He was in the east library, in the chair, in the ordinary quiet of the pre-sleep hours, when the dark room presence made itself known in a way it had not before. Not in the meditation visit, not in the intentional internal space. In the ordinary room.
It was brief. The quality of the air changed for a moment, not physically, not in any sense that could be documented, but in the way he had come to recognize from the threshold visits, the specific texture of two presences in the same space. He sat very still and did not try to do anything with it. He simply received it.
After a moment, it passed.
He sat for a while after.
He thought: you are more here than you have been. You found your way to the east library. This is good.
He said this aloud, quietly, to the room.
The room was quiet.
He thought about what Mirae had said: in the documented cases, the reemergence was gradual. Both souls present. The original soul becoming more primary over time. No sudden displacement, no dramatic transition. Simply the ongoing process of someone finding their way back to their own life.
He thought: you are finding your way back. The east library is a good place to start. This is where you used to read.
He stayed in the chair until it was late enough to sleep.
Then he put out the lamp and went to the sleeping mat and lay on it and looked at the ceiling.
He thought: tomorrow the investigation continues its formal process. Friday I tell her the full truth. And in the meantime, you are here in the east library, which is exactly where you should be.
He slept.
In the morning he would go to the garden, as he always did, and the day would have its requirements, and he would meet them, and Friday would come.
He was ready for Friday.
He was also, underneath the readiness, at peace with whatever Friday produced.
The trust was there.
The truth was ready.
He was here.
That was sufficient.
He was ready for it.
He was here.
He was in this life, genuinely and completely, and everything about being in it was worth the being. He spent Friday preparing the same way he prepared for important things: not by rehearsing, but by being fully in the days leading up to it. He reviewed the household's ordinary operations, handled the correspondence, met with Elder Jang about the ongoing formal investigation. He walked the garden in the mornings and sat in the east library in the afternoons and did the dark room visits each evening.
The presence in the dark room was more specific every day.
He did not try to accelerate this. He simply noted it and received it and went on with the day's requirements. Mirae's documentation suggested the process had its own pace and that the correct approach from his side was the same approach he had been using all along: full presence, genuine orientation, the daily maintenance of a life that was worth coming back to.
He was maintaining it.
The east library visit on Thursday, the presence making itself known in the ordinary room, had been the most significant development yet. Not because it changed anything structurally, but because it demonstrated that the threshold was no longer the boundary. The presence was not confined to the specific meditative space of the dark room visits. It was moving into the wider space of the actual life.
He thought: this is what the physician called full emergence of the balance state. Not dramatic. Not sudden. Simply the gradual occupation of more space.
He was making space.
He intended to keep making space.
Friday was coming.
He was going to the garden.
He was going to tell the full truth.
He was ready.
More than ready.
He was, in fact, in some way he could not entirely articulate, glad about it. Not glad about the difficulty of it, though the difficulty was real and he was not minimizing it. Glad in the sense that this was the conversation that the whole five months had been building toward, in parallel with the investigation and the household and Woohyeon's reemergence, and that he was finally in the position to have it. The long preparation was done. The moment was here. He was going to walk into it with everything he had.
That was, he thought, the only way to do it.
He went to sleep on Thursday night with the clarity of someone who has prepared fully and is simply waiting for the morning.
In the morning, he would go to the garden.
He was ready.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Mirae came to him without notice, which was her way. She appeared at the east wing gate in the late morning, three days after the hearing, and the household staff brought word in the way they now did for people who were regular enough visitors to have established an informal status.
He received her in the east library.
She sat across from him with the specific composed quality she maintained in all circumstances, and she looked at him with the assessment quality she had used at their first meeting in the Uiwon and that he had come to understand was not distance but attention.
She said: "I have made my decision."
He waited.
"I am going to stay," she said. "Not because I cannot go back, or because I have not found a mechanism for it. I am staying because this is where I am doing something that matters and because the vessel I am in made a choice that I am honoring." She paused. "Both of those are true simultaneously, and I have found a way to live with both."
He said: "The chosen presence case."
"Yes." She looked at the window. "The physician who documented it described something similar. The incoming soul choosing to remain not from inability but from orientation. I have read that record many times. I found it more useful than most things I have read in this world."
He thought about what she was telling him. She had arrived at a conclusion he had arrived at weeks ago through a different route, the route of the morning garden and the plum tree and the letters about books and the gathering of people who trusted him and the presence in the dark room approaching the threshold.
"How did you know it was the right decision?" he asked.
"I asked the question you told me the physician described," she said. "Is this the life I want to live? And I found that the answer was yes." She paused. "It is not the life I had before. It is not the life I expected to have. It is the life that is here, and it is a good life."
He thought about this. He thought about his own answer to the same question, and when he had arrived at it, and how it had happened without his quite deciding to arrive at it, the way certain decisions happened through the accumulation of daily choices rather than through a specific moment of choosing.
"I am glad," he said.
"I know you are." She looked at him. "I also wanted to tell you about the balance state documentation I have found since the hearing."
"Tell me."
She had found three more cases in the archive, each from a different period, each with different specifics but with the same essential pattern: the incoming soul established genuine orientation toward the vessel's world, the original soul gradually reemerged, and the resulting state was one of coexistence rather than competition.
"In two of the three additional cases," she said, "the original soul's emergence became primary within approximately six months of the incoming soul establishing full orientation." She paused. "Full orientation, in the documentation, is described as the incoming soul having genuinely chosen the vessel's world rather than managing an imposed situation."
He thought about the hearing and the garden and the threshold and everything that had happened over the five months.
"When do you estimate full orientation was established?" he asked.
She looked at him with the specific directness that was hers. "I think it was established several weeks ago. Possibly longer." She paused. "The threshold crossing is consistent with the point in the documented cases where full orientation had been reached and the original soul's reemergence was accelerating."
He sat with this.
"Six months from full orientation," he said.
"In two of the three additional cases. The third was slower." She looked at the window. "I cannot give you a timeline with confidence. But I can tell you the pattern suggests the reemergence is not a distant possibility. It is an active process."
He thought about the presence in the dark room. The approaching quality. The morning when the threshold was crossed. The subsequent daily presence that was more specific each week.
"What does the reemergence look like in the documented cases?" he asked.
"It varies. In all cases it is gradual rather than sudden. The original soul does not displace the incoming soul abruptly. There is a period of increasing presence, of both souls being active, before the original soul achieves primary status." She paused. "In the chosen presence case, both remained in some form of coexistence for years."
He thought about what that meant. For himself. For Woohyeon. For the life they were both living, in different ways, in the same body.
"I am going to tell her," he said.
Mirae looked at him.
"Lady Yeonhwa. I said I would tell her the full truth when the context existed. The context exists now." He paused. "I want to give her the information before the reemergence is further along. She deserves to know what she has been in the middle of."
Mirae was quiet for a moment. "That is the right decision," she said.
"Yes." He looked at the window. "It is the right decision and it is also the most difficult conversation I am going to have in this life."
"Probably," she said. "But she will not be surprised in the way you might fear. She has been paying attention. She has concluded things you have not told her." A pause. "She is not someone who needs to be protected from information. She needs to be given it with the respect it deserves."
He thought about TP-3. About what she had said: I know you will not ask for what you are not ready to say, and I expect to be told when the context exists. She had been waiting. She had been patient, not from ignorance but from the specific patience of someone who trusts that the full picture is coming.
"Soon," he said.
"Good," Mirae said.
She left with the efficient quality that was hers, the visit concluded because its purpose was served.
He sat alone in the east library and thought about the six months and the balance state and the conversation that was coming.
He thought: I have been preparing for this since the day I arrived. Not deliberately, not with a plan. But everything I have done has been building toward the moment when it is possible to tell the truth.
The moment was close.
He was going to use it.
He spent the rest of the morning in the east library with the natural philosophy text and the question of how to begin the conversation that needed to happen.
He had been thinking about this conversation since the early weeks, when he had first understood what he was in and had begun to realize that the understanding would eventually need to be shared. He had told Yeonhwa partial truths at various points, the truth about Woohyeon and the truth about his own orientation and the truth about the things he had not told her yet. She had accepted each partial truth with the patience of someone who trusted that the full picture was coming.
The full picture was coming.
He thought about how to tell it. Not the mechanics of it, the specific words and sequence, which he would figure out in the moment in the way he figured out difficult things. The orientation from which to tell it, which mattered more than the mechanics.
He was going to tell her as himself. Not as the strategist who had been managing information carefully, not as the professional who had learned to deliver difficult truths with clinical precision. As the person he had become in this household over five months, the person who had arrived in a borrowed life and had put down roots and had chosen to be here. That person.
He thought about what she had said: with help. About what she had said about her mother wanting someone who thought she was worth understanding.
He thought: she has been worth understanding from the first morning in the garden when she answered a question honestly in a way that cost her something. I have been understanding her, and it has been worth it, and I am going to continue.
And in return, she was owed the full truth.
He thought about what Mirae had said: she will not be surprised in the way you might fear. She has been paying attention.
He believed this. Yeonhwa had been paying attention since the ceremony. Her Sigeul had told her there was something unusual about the reading she was getting from him. She had built a picture and she had included in that picture the specific quality of someone who was not simply Ryu Woohyeon performing differently. She had given him TP-3 and the room to not explain, which was the grace of someone who already suspected the explanation was larger than what was available.
He was going to give her the explanation.
He was not afraid of it.
He was, in fact, almost ready for it.
The afternoon arrived with its ordinary requirements and he met them with the quality of someone who is fully in the present because the future is arranged and can wait for its moment.
He sent a note through the book channel: I would like to come to you. This week. Not for the investigation or anything strategic. To tell you something I have been preparing to tell you.
She replied within the hour: Yes. Whenever you are ready.
He wrote back: Friday. In the morning.
She wrote back: Friday morning. I will be in the garden.
He folded the note. He put it in the notebook on the clean pages.
He thought: Friday morning. The garden. The full truth.
He was, for the first time since arriving in this world, genuinely looking forward to a conversation he had been dreading. Not because the dread was gone, because the dread was still present. But because the trust was larger than the dread, and the trust had been built by the months of small careful honest things that had accumulated between them into something strong enough to carry what was coming.
He was going to Friday morning.
He was going to tell the truth.
It was going to be the right thing.
He had been building toward it for five months.
He was ready.
The week moved toward Friday with the specific quality of time that moves toward something anticipated: the days ordinary in their texture and slightly more vivid than usual, each one sharper because it was numbered.
He continued the morning garden practice. He continued the dark room visits, which had taken on a new quality since the threshold crossing, more presence and more specific, the quality of someone who was not quite accessible but was genuinely there. He reviewed the household's post-hearing situation, the formal investigation now in process by the appropriate institutional body, Sangwon's authority suspended, the household operating under a temporary oversight arrangement that would last until the formal outcome.
The household staff had adjusted to the new arrangement with the particular quality of people who had been waiting for something to change and were now discovering what they were capable of when the change occurred. Elder Jang had stepped into a more active role, as Seonu had anticipated. The household's daily texture had changed from the careful management of a constrained situation to something more straightforwardly functional.
He watched this and found it good.
He also worked through the conversation he was going to have on Friday.
Not scripting it. He did not prepare conversations in advance in that sense, did not write out what he would say and what he hoped she would say in response. He prepared the way he prepared for important things: by being clear about what he was trying to do and why, and trusting that the clarity would produce the right approach in the moment.
What he was trying to do: tell her the full truth, about Yeomun and the vessel and the balance state, about who he was and where he had come from and what he was now and what Woohyeon was and what was happening between them. Tell all of this in a way that honored what they had built and that gave her the information she needed to make her own choices.
Why: because she had trusted him with partial truths for months and had been patient about the rest, and she deserved the full version, and he was, finally, in the position to give it.
He thought about how to begin. The beginning mattered. Not because it would determine the whole outcome, but because she deserved to know from the first words that this was genuine and not managed, that he was telling her because it was right, not because it was strategic.
He thought: I am going to tell her because she is someone who thinks carefully and honestly and because the careful honest thinking has been directed at me for five months and it deserves to know what it has been directed at.
Thursday evening he sat in the east library with the lamp and the winter dark outside and wrote nothing and thought.
He thought about his previous life, the therapy practice, the research, the years of sitting with people in the middle of the hardest things they were living through. He had been good at that work. He had believed in it. He had, in the specific way of people who do work that requires sustained engagement with human difficulty, cared about it.
He had also been, he now understood, someone who maintained a professional distance that was not quite the right relationship with the things he was in. The distance had been useful and had been protective and had allowed him to be present for others in ways he could not have been if he had been fully in the experiences he was accompanying.
He was fully in the experience now. Had been, since arriving, learning to be, becoming over five months the kind of person who was in his life rather than managing it.
He was grateful for the becoming.
He was going to tell her about it.
Friday morning.
The garden.
He was ready.
On Thursday evening, something small but real happened.
He was in the east library, in the chair, in the ordinary quiet of the pre-sleep hours, when the dark room presence made itself known in a way it had not before. Not in the meditation visit, not in the intentional internal space. In the ordinary room.
It was brief. The quality of the air changed for a moment, not physically, not in any sense that could be documented, but in the way he had come to recognize from the threshold visits, the specific texture of two presences in the same space. He sat very still and did not try to do anything with it. He simply received it.
After a moment, it passed.
He sat for a while after.
He thought: you are more here than you have been. You found your way to the east library. This is good.
He said this aloud, quietly, to the room.
The room was quiet.
He thought about what Mirae had said: in the documented cases, the reemergence was gradual. Both souls present. The original soul becoming more primary over time. No sudden displacement, no dramatic transition. Simply the ongoing process of someone finding their way back to their own life.
He thought: you are finding your way back. The east library is a good place to start. This is where you used to read.
He stayed in the chair until it was late enough to sleep.
Then he put out the lamp and went to the sleeping mat and lay on it and looked at the ceiling.
He thought: tomorrow the investigation continues its formal process. Friday I tell her the full truth. And in the meantime, you are here in the east library, which is exactly where you should be.
He slept.
In the morning he would go to the garden, as he always did, and the day would have its requirements, and he would meet them, and Friday would come.
He was ready for Friday.
He was also, underneath the readiness, at peace with whatever Friday produced.
The trust was there.
The truth was ready.
He was here.
That was sufficient.
He was ready for it.
He was here.
He was in this life, genuinely and completely, and everything about being in it was worth the being. He spent Friday preparing the same way he prepared for important things: not by rehearsing, but by being fully in the days leading up to it. He reviewed the household's ordinary operations, handled the correspondence, met with Elder Jang about the ongoing formal investigation. He walked the garden in the mornings and sat in the east library in the afternoons and did the dark room visits each evening.
The presence in the dark room was more specific every day.
He did not try to accelerate this. He simply noted it and received it and went on with the day's requirements. Mirae's documentation suggested the process had its own pace and that the correct approach from his side was the same approach he had been using all along: full presence, genuine orientation, the daily maintenance of a life that was worth coming back to.
He was maintaining it.
The east library visit on Thursday, the presence making itself known in the ordinary room, had been the most significant development yet. Not because it changed anything structurally, but because it demonstrated that the threshold was no longer the boundary. The presence was not confined to the specific meditative space of the dark room visits. It was moving into the wider space of the actual life.
He thought: this is what the physician called full emergence of the balance state. Not dramatic. Not sudden. Simply the gradual occupation of more space.
He was making space.
He intended to keep making space.
Friday was coming.
He was going to the garden.
He was going to tell the full truth.
He was ready.
More than ready.
He was, in fact, in some way he could not entirely articulate, glad about it. Not glad about the difficulty of it, though the difficulty was real and he was not minimizing it. Glad in the sense that this was the conversation that the whole five months had been building toward, in parallel with the investigation and the household and Woohyeon's reemergence, and that he was finally in the position to have it. The long preparation was done. The moment was here. He was going to walk into it with everything he had.
That was, he thought, the only way to do it.
He went to sleep on Thursday night with the clarity of someone who has prepared fully and is simply waiting for the morning.
In the morning, he would go to the garden.
He was ready.
You've reached the end of this chapter