By nine o'clock he had made the list.

He did it in the black notebook, on a clean page, in his hard upright hand. He ruled a vertical line down the middle, as he had done once before, and at the head of the left-hand column wrote the word FOUND. Then, because there was nothing else that he knew how to do with his hands, he went back through ten weeks of his own handwriting and put a letter beside every line that did not fit.

*Mr. Gu. Daughter's exam. Reading rooms until midnight.* He drew a small neat *A* beside it, in the margin, and went on.

*Jinwoo. Mother's knee. March.* *A.*

*Mr. Kwak. Meeting moved. Recital.* *A.*

*Mrs. Jeon. Husband's name. Fourteen years.* *A.*

*Pharmacy bag. Brace. Not before meals.* *A.*

*N.D. Moved to eight. Box. Smiling.* He stopped, and looked at that one, and added a second letter, for the girl in plastic hair clips who had been lifted out of water on a Tuesday morning by a woman who had told everyone it was a promotion. *A. A.*

He turned the page. He wrote them from memory now. A lunch box with a sesame seed in the middle of the rice, three times. A card with a small crane on the envelope. A cup of barley tea on a bare floor between two pairs of feet. A reading room open until midnight. A pair of silver glasses left on a table. A telephone call to a pension fund on the night that a man had humiliated her in front of the Board.

It filled a page and a half. When he had finished he sat looking at it, with the pen in his fist, and he saw what it was.

It was not a list of anomalies. He had called it that for ten weeks, in the cool dry language of a man cataloguing facts that did not yet add up. It was a map. It was the outline of a woman's life, drawn in the negative, by someone who had never once seen her do any of it. Every item stood in the air round a single missing figure, a person who had been so careful not to be there that she had left, in every room, the exact shape of her absence.

He thought: *ten years of fingerprints.*

He did not write it down.

The cold had come fourteen times.

He sat with that for a while. The kitchen was quite light now, and the bar of sun had crept up the leg of the second stool and lay across its seat like a cat. Fourteen times a thin quick thread had run from the nape of his neck to his shoulder blade, at a word. He had struck the number out in a rage the night before, because it was a thing that he could strike. He had told himself that a man who counted coincidences was a fool.

It had not been a coincidence. It had been a measurement. And what it measured was not the word. It was the distance between a boy on a floor and a woman at a window, and it had gone down with every repetition, a little, as a river goes down in a dry season, until in a hospital basement across a laminate table the stones at the bottom had shown.

He had not been warned by it. He saw that now. He had been called.

He thought of the thing that he had said to her in that basement. *You would have let me hate you.* He had said it in a voice that he had learned in the boardrooms of the world, level and courteous and dry, and he had known, as he said it, the exact place on which it would fall. He had known because he had stood in a corridor at one in the morning and told her that he had put his hand on the softest place in the room on purpose. *I did it on purpose. I have been very good at that for a very long time.* And then, in daylight, in public, with a child watching, he had done it again.

He felt his face go hot.

It was not a clean feeling. He had expected, when the anger came, that it would at least be a straight one, a plain line from her to him. It was nothing of the kind. He was angry that she had decided for him, and he was ashamed that he had used a knife on her, and he sat with the two of them, one in each hand, like a man weighing two stones. They did not cancel. He had always supposed that they would. He had imagined that a wrong done to him must excuse a wrong done back, and he saw now, with a slow cold clarity, that that was the arithmetic of a boy who had learned it from a cafeteria. The two sums stood side by side. He would have to carry both.

He closed the notebook.

He did not go to the hospital.

He told himself that it was because she had not asked him to. It was true. She had asked him, in six pages, a single question, and he did not know the answer, and he was not willing to walk into a corridor on the ninth floor with a thing half said. There was another debt that was older, and he had paid none of it.

He took the rice cooker out of its box.

It was a thing he had never done by himself. He stood at the island in the grey sweater and read the leaflet, which was in four languages, and measured the rice with a cup, and rinsed it three times under the cold tap, as he had seen a woman do. It took him forty minutes. The first batch stuck. The second did not, but when he lifted the lid the bottom layer had gone to a brown crust, and the smell was of toast and smoke. He pressed it into a bowl with the back of a spoon, in a rough round, lopsided and a little scorched on one side. He found the jar of sesame in the cupboard, and took a single black seed between his finger and thumb, and set it in the middle.

It looked, he thought, like a very small black eye.

He found a steel lunch box in the cupboard under the sink, the double-tiered one, with the spring clip, that he had washed so many times he had stopped noticing it was not his. He packed the bowl into the top tier. He put the rest of the rice in the bottom. He wrapped it in the navy cloth.

The road to Mapo ran along the river for the first part, and he took a taxi and sat in the back with the box held on his knees. The day was brilliant and bitterly cold. The ice was out on the water in long grey plates. At a red light on the bridge he looked at the box and found that he had put both hands round it and that they were quite warm.

Taewon's building was a narrow brown block behind a row of shuttered shops, six floors, no lift. He had lived in it for eight years, in a flat on the fifth, and Hajin had been up the stairs, in all that time, perhaps six times, because Taewon was the kind of man who came to you.

He climbed them slowly. He stopped on the landing at the fifth floor, and stood in front of a brown steel door with a paper sign that said *Bae* in biro, and he could not make his hand lift.

It opened before he knocked.

He was in a grey cotton shirt that had been through the wash too often and a pair of tracksuit bottoms with a hole at the knee. His hair stood up on one side. He had not shaved, and the stubble made his tired amiable face look, in the stairwell light, oddly young. His feet were bare. He stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame and the other hanging at his side, and he looked at Hajin, at the coat, at the box held in both arms against the chest, and did not say anything.

Hajin had prepared a speech. It had been a good one. He had composed it in the taxi, in the courteous register of a man making a formal statement, with a beginning and an end. He opened his mouth to deliver it, and found that the whole of it had gone.

"I used what you trusted me with," said Hajin, "to hurt you."

Taewon did not move.

"I stood on a step in front of a hospital and I took the thing that you told me in my own kitchen, in the middle of the night, because you thought I should be able to bear it. I took it, and I turned it round, and I put it back into you at the place that I knew. I knew the place. That was what I did it for." His voice shook, and he let it. "I do not ask you to forgive me. I have brought rice. It is burnt on one side."

The door of the opposite flat opened a crack. An old woman's eye looked out, took in the two men and the lunch box, and withdrew.

"Come in," said Taewon.

The flat was one room and a kitchen, and it was the tidiest place that Hajin had ever seen.

It was small, and low, and full of books. They stood on shelves along every wall in no order that he could see, and in stacks on the floor, and in a long uneven column against the window, so that the light came in over the top of them in a grey slant. A narrow bed was made with military corners. A table held a laptop, a kettle, two mugs, a folded newspaper and a green glass bottle of soy sauce. There was a small plant on the sill that had been bullied into survival, and he saw, with a little jolt, that it was the twin of the one in his office.

"I stole the cutting," said Taewon, following his eye. "In 2019. You were in Singapore. It has never forgiven me."

He took the box from Hajin's arms, as one takes a thing from a person who has forgotten that he is holding it, and set it on the table, and undid the cloth. He lifted the lid of the top tier. He looked at the lopsided round of rice with its burnt edge, and the single black seed in the middle, for a very long time.

"Sit," he said, at last.

Hajin sat. There was one chair. Taewon sat on the edge of the bed with his bare feet on the floor and his hands hanging between his knees, and for a minute neither of them spoke. A tap dripped somewhere. A radio in the next flat was playing a trot song, very faintly, about a woman on a pier.

"I said that it was a debt," said Hajin.

"You did."

"That you cooked for me and counted for me out of shame. That it was not me. That it had never been me."

"Yes. I remember it. It was very well put." Taewon rubbed the back of his neck. "I want to tell you why it was wrong. I have had a day and a half to work it out, and I should like to get through it before I lose my nerve."

"Go on."

"I sat at that table. It's true. I did nothing. I told you on a night bus that I'd keep a rule because I was ashamed, and I was." He looked at his hands. "I was sixteen, and I was a coward, and I thought that if I sat on the bus beside you for eleven stops and said nothing, it would be a kind of payment. That's how it started. A debt. I'll give you that."

"Taewon"

"I'm not finished." He raised his head. His eyes were red-rimmed and perfectly steady. "Somewhere about the second month you started telling me about the encyclopaedia. The letter M. The Mesopotamians. You lectured me for a month on the Mesopotamians, and I didn't understand a word, and I thought, this is the most interesting person I have ever met. I stopped paying. I don't know when. I only know that I woke up one morning and realised that I'd have come to the bus stop if you'd owed me money." He smiled, crookedly. "I cook because I like it. I count because I'm good at it. I stand against the wall of rooms because it is the one place where I can see your face. I stayed for ten years. It wasn't shame. I'd got something much worse."

"What?"

"A friend," said Taewon, quite simply.

Hajin put his hand over his eyes.

He sat in a hard chair in a small tidy room with the light coming grey over a wall of books, and the radio next door finished its song and began another, and he felt the whole of a very long-held thing go out of his shoulders. It was not relief. It was nearer to the sensation of finding that a floor which he had been walking on tiptoe for a decade had been, all along, solid.

"I should not have said it," he said, through his fingers.

"No."

"I did not mean it."

"I know. That's what made it so good." The bed creaked. "You've never said a thing you didn't mean. It's a flaw, in a man in your position. Eat your rice, Professor. You'll be needing it."

They ate it out of the two mugs, because there was nothing else clean. It was dry and smoky and entirely wonderful. When they had finished, Taewon rinsed the mugs at the sink and dried them and set them upside down on the rack, in the quick practical way of a man who had spent years washing other people's dishes for pocket money, and then he sat down again and said, in a different voice:

"Did you read the letter?"

"All of it."

"And?"

"She wrote the note," said Hajin.

Taewon did not say anything for a moment. Then he let out a long breath, with his eyes shut, and it went on for so long that Hajin realised that he had been holding it for ten years.

"I knew," he said. "Not the note. I didn't know about the note. I knew that there was something. I told you in October. It was the knuckles." He opened his eyes. "I should like to say that I'm not going to say I told you so, and I should like to be believed."

"I should like to say that you may."

"No. I'm enjoying not."

Hajin laughed. It came up from somewhere very low and shook him from the chest, and it was a good deal like the other sound, the one that he had made on the stone that morning, and it ended in the same place. He wiped his face with the heel of his hand.

"Now tell me the other half," he said.

Taewon went to the bookshelf and took down a large black ring-binder from a shelf by the window, where it had stood between a dictionary and a book on the history of the Hanseatic League. It had a label on its spine in his own cramped capitals. *SAMIL.* He laid it on the table and opened it, and turned it so that it faced Hajin.

"The Samil Heritage Trust," said Taewon. "The trustee is a law firm in Yeouido. Seongjin Partners. Eleven beneficiaries, schedule sealed. I told you on Wednesday that I couldn't get the schedule without a court order. I've been at it for six weeks. I went through everything in the commercial registry that touched the firm, and I found this."

He turned a page. It was a company extract, in French, with a Luxembourg seal.

"The shell that sold you your first nine percent. The one with the intermediary. Its sole director is a woman called Delphine Roux, who is also the sole director of thirty-one other shells, all of which have the same registered agent in Luxembourg City. The agent's own filing names a correspondent in Seoul for service of process." He laid a finger on the line. "Seongjin Partners."

Hajin read it slowly. "The firm that holds the trust is the firm that fronted the sale."

"Yes. Which means that whoever instructed them to sell you that stock two years ago did it from inside the trust, and did it quietly, and did it so that you would buy." Taewon sat back. "I can't prove which of the eleven. I can't open the schedule. A trustee can be compelled by a court, and the Commission can request a court order, but they won't do it on the strength of a binder and a feeling. Or the trust can be opened by the settlor."

"The settlor."

"Madam Seol. She and her late husband set it up in 1987. The deed says, in a clause that took me two weeks to find, that either settlor may, by written instruction, direct the trustee to disclose the beneficiary schedule to any person." He closed the binder. "She's alive."

"She is in a hospital bed."

"She is a woman who is currently being asked for something by her granddaughter," said Taewon, "for the first time in twenty years. I should think that she'd want to be useful."

Hajin sat with that for some time.

There was a thing that he had not said, and it had been sitting at the back of his tongue since he came through the door. He felt it there like a coin.

"I sent Yurim a message," he said.

Taewon went very still.

"On the thirtieth. At ten past five, after I signed the suspension. She wrote that she was there, whenever I wanted. I said yes."

"Yes to what?"

"To nothing. It was one word. I did not know what I was agreeing to. I wished to be agreed with." He heard how it sounded and made himself go on. "She has not written since. She began to. The little grey dots were there at five past five, and then they went out. I did not see what she was going to say."

"Right."

"I should like to say that I did it because I was angry. It is true. It is also true that I did it because she was the only person in that building who had not asked me for anything, and I wanted so badly to be, for one afternoon, a person who was not being asked." He pressed his lips together. "It was a stupid and ugly thing to do."

"It was," said Taewon, without heat. "And she knows that you did it. She'll be waiting to see what you do next. She's very good at waiting."

"What should I do?"

"Don't lie to her." Taewon said it slowly, as a man says a thing that he has thought about. "I mean it. I know the temptation. You've got the machine and the binder and the whole of it, and you'd like to walk in and put it in her face. But you've got no proof of who, only of what. And she's cleverer than both of us. If you pretend to be hers, she'll know it by the way you move your hands. If you tell her the truth, you tell her the plan."

"Then I do neither."

"You stay honest and you stay quiet. You don't lie. You don't answer. You tell her, when she asks, that you are not at liberty to say. And you give her nothing." He picked up the soy sauce bottle and turned it round. "It is the oldest trick in the family. She'll recognise it."

"Ahreum said that it was the oldest trick."

"I know. I've been reading her mind for six weeks." The corner of his mouth moved. "It's a remarkably good one. I'd like to meet her properly. In daylight. Without a document between us."

"You will."

"When?"

"When she has learned," said Hajin, "what to ask you for."

He left at six, when it was dark, with the empty box under his arm and a paper bag of tangerines that Taewon had pressed on him at the door, saying that they were from the old woman across the landing and were not to be refused. The stairwell smelled of soup. He went down five flights in the dark with a hand on the cold rail and came out into a street full of the end of the year: strings of small coloured lights across the shopfronts, a man selling fish cake from a steaming cart, young people in padded jackets spilling laughing out of a doorway. The whole city had the loose bright restless air of a place about to be handed something.

He walked home. It took an hour and a half.

The doorman at the building in Yongsan bowed to him as he came in, and said, with a small apologetic cough, "Mr. Yoon. A young lady called at four. I said that you were out. She said that she would come back."

"Thank you, Mr. Seo."

"She left a box."

It was on the hall table, white, tied with red string. He did not take it up. He went up in the lift and let himself in, and stood in the dark of the kitchen with the lunch box under his arm and the river lying in the glass. He put the box in the sink. He ran water into it. He stood with his hands on the edge of the counter and let the cold of the stone come up through his palms.

At eleven he made tea. At a quarter to twelve he turned on the television, to see the bell, and turned it off again. Out over the river a few early fireworks went up in long white threads, and burst without sound, very far away, and drifted down.

The bell on the door rang at midnight.

He did not move.

It rang a second time, a polite double chime, and he went down the short hall in his stockinged feet and put his eye to the lens.

She stood on the mat in the corridor in the oatmeal coat, with a snowflake or two melting in her hair, and a white box with red string held in both hands in front of her. The corridor light made her look very young. Her face was lifted a little, the way it was when she was expecting a smile. She had a small bright festive scarf wound twice round her throat and a pair of pink earmuffs pushed up on her head, and she was shifting from one foot to the other on the mat, quite openly, with the happy impatience of a girl at a door on a feast night.

"Hajin?" she said, to the wood. "It's me. I know you're in. Mr. Seo said that you've been in since seven."

He stood quite still with his palm against the cold painted steel.

"I brought rice cakes. For the new year. The ones from the stall by the river, with the red bean, the ones that you like." A pause. "You said you like them. In October."

He had said it once, in a hotel restaurant, in passing, to a woman who had asked what he ate when he was a boy.

He thought of a binder on a table, and a Luxembourg seal, and a small neat note in a cramped hand. *Don't lie to her. Don't answer.* He leaned his forehead against the door.

"Yurim," he said.

His voice came out low and perfectly level, and he heard her, on the other side, draw a quick small happy breath.

"You are not well."

"I am quite well. I am not able to see you tonight. I am sorry."

There was a silence. It went on a good while. Through the steel he could hear the faint electric whisper of the corridor light.

"Oh," said Yurim, and her voice was small. "Is it because of the, because of the message? Because I know that you were upset. I shouldn't have. I only wanted you to know that I was there."

"It is not that."

"Then what?"

"I am not at liberty to say."

He said it as gently as he knew how. It was true. It was, he thought, the first true thing that he had said to her in six weeks that she had not been able to turn.

He wished you a happy new year. He said it through the door, in a voice that he did not recognise. "I will tell you what I think on the ninth. In the room. In front of everyone. I should like you to be there, and I should like to say it to your face."

There was no sound at all.

He counted. He did not mean to. He stood with his eye shut and his forehead against the cold paint, and the seconds went down into the silence one by one like pebbles into a well. A minute. Two. In the street, nine floors below, a great cheer went up from a crowd, and a thread of far-off fireworks cracked over the river. Three. On the other side of the door, nothing moved.

At four minutes exactly, he heard her breathe.

"Is it because of Unnie?" said Yurim.

She said it so softly that it was hardly a voice. It had no sweetness in it. It had no lilt, and it did not laugh, and it did not arrive a beat late. It was flat and small and quite level, the voice of a person standing on a doormat in a bright scarf at five past midnight on the first day of the year, and it was the first time that he had ever heard her speak without anything laid over the top.

He did not answer.

He stood with his hand flat on the steel and his eyes closed, and listened to her not go away. After a long time he heard the faint crackle of a paper bag being set down on the mat, and then the soft retreating tap of small heels across a floor, and the quiet sigh of the lift. He stayed there until it had gone all the way down.

When he opened the door, there was a white box on the mat, tied in red string. He did not take it in. He stood looking at it, in the cold bright corridor, with the sound of a city celebrating the end of a year coming up through the floors, and then, very gently, he closed the door.