At a quarter to midnight on Tuesday, for the fourth time in six weeks, Hajin sat down to watch the cafeteria, and this time he did it with a sheet of paper.

It was a sheet of Maru letterhead, folded to the size of a paperback and taped across the middle of the laptop screen, so that the picture showed only its edges. He had thought of it in the lift. The centre of the frame was the part he knew by heart: the round boy, the tray, the golden one with the friendly voice, the girl in the cut uniform walking through the crowd. He had looked at the centre for ten years until he could no longer see anything else. If he covered it, he thought, he might be forced for once to look at the margins.

The kitchen was dark except for the screen and the river. The black notebook lay open at his elbow, at a page headed WORK, and under the heading, in his own hard hand, was a line he had copied that morning from the telephone. *hanbit-svc. Created 19 Oct. Export 17:38.* She had read it to him at eight, flat and exact, with a small pause before the last word, as if setting a cup on a saucer. *Nothing is to be withheld.* He had said thank you. He had said that thirty people used the sixteenth floor. She had said, quite gently, that she knew.

He pressed the key.

The first eight minutes gave him nothing. The corner of a table. A tray of grey rice. A boy's elbow, a boy's ear. It was a very dull piece of film once the one thing that mattered had been taken out of it, and he found the dullness soothing, like a long walk on a flat road.

At nine minutes and four seconds a pale ribbon entered the lower left of the frame.

She had half risen from her chair at the next table. He remembered it: the hand pressed flat against her collar, the soft stricken face. He had thought of her for ten years as the girl in the ribbon, as one thinks of a saint in a window, and it struck him now that he had never once given her an age. She was sixteen. At the edge of the picture she looked younger than that, small and very still, with her neat features arranged in an expression of grief.

He watched her eyes.

They were not on the boy. He had always believed they were on the boy. They were on the east door at the far end of the hall, and on the big round clock above it, and then, in the space of a breath, on Kangmin's right hand, which was hidden behind his back. Door. Clock. Hand. Then back to the door.

He stopped the film.

It was nothing. He told himself so with some firmness, in the dark, with his thumb on the cold pad. It was the only clock in the room. A hundred children had looked at it that day. It was a very ordinary thing to do in a cafeteria, to check whether lunch was nearly over, and a girl who was about to see a boy set upon might well glance at a hand that was hiding something, if she had noticed the hand, which half the room had.

He let it run on. At nine thirty-one the tall pale figure came through the crowd. The ribbon sat down. The girl folded her hands in her lap, and her face changed.

He had seen it in October and put it away. He took it out now and looked at it. When Ahreum said, in that fast flat voice, *the date*, and the thin teacher unfolded a typed page, the girl in the ribbon turned her head, very slowly, and looked at Kangmin. It was not fear. He had called it fear because it was the nearest word. It was the plain steady attention of a person who has added a column and found that it does not come out, and is waiting, with no expression whatever, to see where the error lies.

Then she dropped her eyes, and sat, and folded her hands.

He took the paper off the screen and closed the lid. The kitchen went dark except for the river.

*She was sixteen,* he thought. *She had just watched a boy of her own school be set upon. She was afraid of what Seol Ahreum would do next.* It was a sensible reading. It had the great virtue of being what he had believed for ten years. He sat for a while in the dark with it, and it sat there beside him, and neither of them spoke.

Taewon came at twenty to nine on Wednesday with a folder, a paper bag, and the face of a man who has been arguing with himself since dawn and has lost.

"Egg sandwich," he said, and put the bag on the blotter. "Eat. Then Haneul."

Hajin ate. It was Taewon's one remaining tyranny. When he had finished, Taewon took a single sheet from the folder and laid it in front of him with the careful deliberation of a man setting down a cup that is very full.

"The second account at Haneul Express. The one I told you I wasn't speaking about. I'm speaking about it now."

It was a payment schedule under a bank's header, a long column of dates and figures. Courier fees. Storage. A line marked *intermediary custody, Luxembourg.* Each payment was small. Together, over two years, they made a considerable sum, and every one had been settled from the same account.

"Whose?"

"The Samil Heritage Trust." Taewon sat down on the arm of the couch. "A family trust. Not Maru's, not a company's. Settled in 1987 by Madam Seol's late husband for what the deed calls the lateral branches of the Seol family. The beneficiary schedule is sealed."

"Lateral branches."

"Cousins. Nephews. Everybody who wasn't in the direct line."

"There are a great many cousins."

"Eleven," said Taewon. "I counted. It's what I do instead of sleeping."

"And you cannot say which."

"I can't say a name. The trustee is a law firm in Yeouido that will tell me nothing without a court order, and I haven't got a court order, and I don't know how to get one without telling the Commission things we would prefer not to say yet." He rubbed his eyes. "I'm not accusing anyone. I'm telling you that the people who sold you your first nine percent two years ago were paid, through a courier, out of a pot that belongs to the family. Somebody in the family wanted you to have that stock. Somebody wanted it quietly."

Hajin looked at the page.

Two years ago. A seller nobody could identify. A price slightly too low. He had not asked again. He had been a man in a hurry with a plan and a ledger, and a gift had arrived out of the dark, and he had not looked it in the mouth because it was exactly the thing he wanted.

"Everything," he said slowly, "has been put into my hand at the moment I was about to go looking."

"Yes."

"By someone who knew what I wanted."

"Yes."

"That is not the same as someone who wished me harm."

"No," said Taewon. "It's the same as someone who knew you better than you knew yourself."

The silence went on. Hajin heard the bullied plant rustle faintly in the draught from the vent.

"You are saying that it is Yurim."

"I haven't said a name."

"You have said it with your face for six weeks." It came out sharper than he meant, and he heard it with a kind of dismay. "Taewon. She was kind to me. When I was seventeen. When there was nobody. She is the only person in that whole family who"

"Or the only person in that family who turned up at exactly the right time," said Taewon.

It was said quietly. It went into the room like a stone into a pond, and the rings went out.

"That is unfair."

"Probably."

"You were there. You saw what she did."

"I saw her hand you something," said Taewon. "I was on the stairs below. I thought it was a kindness. It may have been."

"It was a packet of tissues."

"I know what it was."

Hajin got up. He went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets and his back to the room. Beyond the glass the river lay grey under a low white sky, and a barge went down it in slow motion.

"It had a cartoon rabbit on it," he said, to the glass.

Taewon said nothing.

"The morning after the video. I was on the back stairs between the science wing and the gymnasium. I had not eaten for a day and a half. I had not spoken to a living person. And a girl came down the steps, a little out of breath, and held out a packet of tissues as though I were an animal that might bolt. She said that not everyone thought it was funny. She said she was sorry she had not spoken. She smelled of soap." His voice thinned. "I do not know why I remember the soap. I have carried that packet in my head for ten years. It is the only thing that anyone did for me that week that I could account for."

"The only thing that you could account for," said Taewon, very gently.

Hajin turned. His friend sat on the arm of the couch with his hands hanging between his knees and his tired amiable face quite empty, and he did not look like a man who was winning an argument. He looked like a man who had been carrying one end of something heavy for a very long time.

"I'm not telling you it was a lie," said Taewon. "I'm telling you I have been counting the packets. Every kindness I know of in your life since that week. There are a good many. And I've started to notice that I can name who gave you each one, and that I can't name one that wasn't, somehow, extremely convenient."

"Convenient to whom?"

"That," said Taewon, "is what I haven't got."

He stood up. He did not take the folder. He straightened the paper bag on the blotter by a centimetre, and said in an ordinary voice, "The kettle's done. I'll bring you tea," and went out, and the door closed behind him with a small careful click.

She rang at ten past six.

It was a video call, which she had never done before, and the screen lit on the desk with a little photograph of her in a yellow scarf, laughing. He looked at it for three rings. Then he answered, because refusing would have been a decision, and he had made enough of those for one week.

"Hajin!" She filled the frame at once, bright and breathless and a little too close, in a kitchen full of lamplight, with a glass vase behind her and a white orchid in it. "Don't look so frightened. I'm not going to ask you anything. I only wanted to see your face. You haven't answered since Friday and I have been so silly about it."

"I have been busy."

"I know! I know you have. I told myself that." She turned the screen to show the vase. "Look. I took one to Halmoni. I thought she'd like it, orchids last, she can look at it all day. And she turned her face to the wall again when I put it down. I sat there an hour and she didn't say a word." Her eyes filled, quite suddenly, and she laughed and wiped them with the heel of her hand. "I'm sorry. I'm being a baby. I think someone has been telling her things about me, that's all. I can't think who. She was always so fond of me."

He watched her face.

He had not meant to. It was a thing he did now, like a man who has been told that a floor is rotten and cannot stop testing it with his foot. She said *things about me*, and her mouth went down at the corners in a small quivering pout of hurt, and her eyes, wide and wet and directed straight at the lens, held his. And then, half a breath late, the mouth lifted. It came up into a smile of rueful sweetness, and the wet eyes crinkled to meet it, and the whole face arrived at its expression a moment after the face had set out for it.

He thought: *the connection.* A lag on the line, a skipped frame. He had been on a hundred calls with Singapore in which the mouth ran ahead of the sound. He leaned a little closer to the screen and listened to her words, and they came in time with the movement of her lips. It was not the line. The line was perfect. The delay lay entirely between one part of her face and another.

He had stopped counting on purpose, in the back of a car, on a pavement. He counted now without wanting to, as one hears a clock in a quiet house, and the number was a beat and a half. It was the longest he had measured. He hated that he knew it. He hated more the small cold feeling in his chest, like a coin set down on a table, because she had said *she was always so fond of me* in the voice of a woman with nothing at all to hide.

"I am sure she is only tired," said Hajin.

"Oh, you're so kind." The smile, again, a fraction late. "Anyway. How is the count? Don't tell me, I'm not allowed. I'm only asking because I care. Are you eating? You look thin."

"I am eating."

"Good. Don't let anyone make you feel bad. About anything. You know I'm on your side." She leaned forward and kissed her fingertips and touched them to the camera, a small foolish childish gesture, and his stomach turned over. "Goodnight, Hajin."

The screen went dark.

He sat looking at his own reflection in the black glass. It was a thin man in shirtsleeves with a line between the brows. He did not like him very much.

She came to the small conference room at half past nine on Thursday with a grey envelope in her hand, and she closed the door.

It had become a habit that she did it. He noticed the click each time, as one notices the first stair in a house, and each time something under his breastbone lifted by a finger's width. She sat down at the narrow table in her charcoal suit with her glasses on and her hair pinned, and laid the envelope on the wood between them. Then she took out the pages.

"Mr. Ma's export," said Ahreum. "By hand, as I asked. It is eleven pages. I should like you to read all of it."

He read. It was a plain grey list of lines in a plain grey font. A service account called *hanbit-svc*, created on the nineteenth of October at 21:14 under the cost centre STR-PL-02. A single login on the Tuesday of the Commission's hearing, from a machine on the sixteenth floor. An export. A second export of the same document, four minutes after the first, with a handful of lines changed. The four discrepancies were marked in pencil in the margin, three dates and one initial, in a hand he recognised from the Maru letterhead, small and upright and joined. She had gone through every one of them herself.

He read it to the end. He laid the last page down.

"The initial is N.D.," he said.

"Yes. In the Commission's copy, the consent register shows the intern as the clerk who entered the late dates. In ours it shows the proper clerk."

"Dayeon was already out of the building on that day."

"She was in Gwangju. Her mother had a fall." Ahreum folded her hands. "I should like to say plainly what this is and what it is not. It proves that someone with access to a Strategy cost centre created an account that should not have existed, and used it to alter a document before it went to the Commission. It does not tell us who. The machine is shared. The password is shared. I have no name."

"No."

"Mr. Ma believes that the person must have had knowledge of the account's existence. That is a short list. I should not like to give it to you, because I do not believe that I can prove it."

He sat looking at the pencil in the margin, at the four small neat marks, and something in him, which had been holding its breath since Wednesday morning, let go.

"Thirty people use that floor," he said.

Her eyes lifted.

"It is a shared machine, as you say. It could have been anyone. A junior. A contractor." He heard his voice and went on regardless, as one goes on down a stair in the dark. "Taewon has been pursuing a line. A courier. A family trust. He has no name, and neither have you. I would not like to see us build a case out of a feeling."

"I am not building a case."

"I know that. I only mean" He stopped. He pressed his fingers against his eyes. "Ahreum. Yurim has no motive."

The room was very quiet.

"If the Fund falls, she loses everything she has put into it. She is the acting member. She has her name on every paper. She told me herself that she wanted it made safe. She was" His voice cracked, unaccountably, and he steadied it. "She was kind to me, when I was seventeen, when no one else was. I have never said so to anyone but Taewon. I do not think that I can sit at this table and watch her be made into a villain by a list of times."

He had said it all in a rush, to the wood of the table. When he looked up, he found that she had not moved.

She was sitting quite upright with her hands folded, and her face had gone very still, not blank, but still, as the surface of water is still when a stone has gone down through it and the rings have not yet reached the edge. Her thumb lay quiet against the seam of her cuff. Her eyes behind the thick lenses were very dark. They rested on him with an expression so gentle and so entirely without reproach that for a moment he did not understand it. Then he did. It was the look of a person who has been handed a thing she could break with a single word, and has decided not to.

"I am glad," said Ahreum, "that someone was."

He stared at her.

"Kind to you," she said, very low. "At seventeen. I am glad that there was someone."

She meant it. He knew that she meant it, as one knows the depth of a well by the sound of the stone. It was the plainest sentence she had ever said to him, and it was true, and it carried no accusation anywhere in it, and he felt the old heat rise to his face as it does in a man who has been forgiven in advance for something he has not yet done.

She took the pages and squared them against the table, once, twice, and slid them into the envelope.

"Item eight, right column," she said. "Mine. I have a view on this matter, and I have not said it, because I have no proof, and I will not put a suspicion into your hand that I cannot support. Carried forward."

He made a small sound. He wanted to say a great many things. He said, "Noted," and it came out hoarse.

She almost smiled. "Principal Moon has asked us to visit tomorrow at four. He has a sheet of paper that he wishes us to see, and he would not say what it was on the telephone."

"I will be there."

"Thank you." She rose, and bowed to the depth that the agreement required, and said in a clear cool voice, for the benefit of the corridor, "Good morning, Mr. Yoon." And she was gone, and he sat with his hand flat on the table and a feeling in his chest that he could not name, and did not want to, because he thought that it might be shame.

At ten minutes to midnight he sat on the edge of his bed in the dark with the telephone in his hand, and did not turn on the lamp.

He had come in from the office at eleven and eaten half a bowl of rice standing at the island. He had washed the cup. He had opened the black notebook, looked at it, and closed it. The apartment was silent around him, with the faint underlying hum of a building that never quite sleeps, and in the window the river went by in its long black ribbon, strung with the lights of its bridges.

*I am glad that someone was.*

He had been turning it over for fourteen hours. It was not a clever sentence. It did not have a hook in it. It had been said by a woman who, as far as he could tell, had every reason in the world to say something else. And it had gone into him like a small cold key into a lock, and had turned, and some door in a back room that he had thought was a wall had come open about the width of a hand, and he could not make himself look through.

The telephone lit up in his palm.

He had known that it would. He looked at the screen with a tired, resigned, almost curious attention, and read, in the small bright friendly type of a woman who had never sent him an unkind word:

*Sleep well!! I know I'm the only one you can trust. Y x*

He read it once. He did not answer it. He did not turn the screen off either. He sat on the edge of the bed with the blue light on his hands, and he looked at one word in the middle of the line.

*Only.*

He had heard it twice that week in a different voice. A tired amiable voice on the arm of a couch: *the only person in that family who turned up at exactly the right time.* And his own, higher, defensive, in a narrow room with a pencil in the margin: *she is the only person who.* It was a small word. It was a word that people used a hundred times a day and never thought of. And he lay back against the dark with the telephone on his chest, and for the first time in ten years he asked himself, quite calmly, who it was that had needed him to believe it.