The meeting broke up at a quarter to nine, in the way of meetings that have done a good deal more than anyone planned.

There was no formal closing. Cha rose from the head of the table and began, with the air of a man trying to look as though he were not in the least moved, to gather the objects before him into a series of labelled envelopes, which he did with such punctilious slowness that it was plain he would have liked to go on doing it all night. Moon had put his box of negatives under his arm and could not seem to find the door. Mr. Ma was shaking Taewon's hand for the third time. The window at the end of the room had filled with dark and snow, and in it, small and gold, the lamps on the opposite side of the street came on one by one, like a procession of people carrying something very carefully.

Ahreum stood in the corridor.

She had gone out because the room had become too warm. It was a long bare passage with a grey carpet and a series of closed doors, and the only furniture in it was a bench of pale wood against the wall, with a vase of dried grasses at one end. At the other end, upright, with her coat folded across her knee and the hard black case between her feet, sat Narae.

She had not gone back in. She sat with her hands on the lid of the case and her head a little on one side, looking at the opposite wall, where a framed print of a mountain hung rather crooked. She did not turn her head when the door closed. She had the look of a person who has done a thing at the very end of her strength and is waiting to find out whether she is still standing.

Ahreum did not make a decision. She had made a great many in her life, and they had all been correct, and she found that her feet were crossing the carpet without one. She stopped at the end of the bench. She did not sit.

"Dr. Ko."

"Director Seol."

"I should like to ask you for something."

Narae turned her head.

She had never done it to a stranger. She had done it to her grandmother, in a hospital room, with a lamp coming up the sky and a man at her elbow, and to a telephone at ten past two in the morning, and each had been a little easier than the last, as a stair is easier when one has put one's foot on it twice. But this was a different stair. It was the lowest, and the oldest, and the one that she had been taught from the age of six that it would kill her to stand on.

"I should like to ask you to be in the room on Saturday," said Ahreum. "The boardroom, on the ninth floor of Seol Tower. At ten. I should like you to read the margin aloud, in your own voice, to the Board. I should like you to say the name."

She did not add anything. She had a hundred sentences, and she let them go by. *You need not. I shall understand. It is a great deal to ask.* They were all true, and they were all an exit, a door left open behind her so that she could retreat through it if the answer should be no. She stood with her hands at her sides and no door at all.

Narae regarded her.

It was a long look. It was dark and clear and unhurried, and it did not soften. She did not say *of course.* She did not say *I will think about it.* She sat on the bench with her hand flat on the black lid, and the silence went on in the grey corridor, and Ahreum stood in it and did not fill it, and she thought: *so this is what it is to ask. One stands and one is looked at.*

"Is that all?" said Narae.

"No."

She drew a breath.

"I am sorry."

It came out so small that she was not sure it had been heard. She heard it herself, in the quiet, and it did not sound like anything that she had practised. It sounded like a girl of fifteen at the back of a classroom, with her chair pushed out and her knees shaking.

"I stood up," said Ahreum. "In Class 1-B. In November. I said that it was false, and I said it loudly, and I believed that a true thing, said loudly enough, would hold. It did not hold. It made you visible. I have thought for twelve years that it was the thing that destroyed you, and I have been afraid for twelve years to say so to your face, because if I said it, you might agree." She did not look away. "I stood up, and it was not enough. I am sorry that it was not enough."

The corridor was very quiet. Through the door at the far end she could hear the faint murmur of Cha's dry voice, and the scrape of a chair.

"No," said Narae. "It was not enough."

It was said without cruelty. It was said as one states a measurement. Ahreum felt it go in under the breastbone and stay, and she did not flinch, and she found that she had stopped expecting to.

"But you did it," said Narae. "I should like to tell you what that was, because I do not think that anyone has. I was sixteen. I sat at my desk with every head in the room turned toward me and my hands flat on the lid, and I looked at the board, because I had learned that if I did not look at anyone I should not have to see them look. And there was a scrape behind me. A chair. It was a very loud chair." The corner of her mouth moved. "And a voice said, *That is false.* It was too high, and it cracked. And I thought, with a clearness that I have never lost, *someone is saying it.*"

She looked down at her hands.

"It did not save me. It was not meant to. But I went to Singapore with that. I lay in a flat with a leaking roof, with my father in the next room, in a country where I could not read the signs, and I said it over to myself at night, in your voice. *That is false.* I do not know if you can understand what it is to have been the subject of a lie in a language that no one will translate, and to have one person say that it is a lie." She raised her eyes. "It is not enough. It is a great deal. They are both true. I find that it is not a contradiction. It is only that I have spent twelve years waiting for you to know it."

Ahreum could not speak. She put her hand against her mouth and held it there.

"Not enough," said Narae, "but enough for me to fly back."

"Thank you."

"Do not thank me. It makes me want to check the figures." The dry voice was not quite steady. "Saturday at ten. I shall bring the case. I shall read the margin, in the voice that I use for my viva. And I shall say the name, as I have said it in this building, and I shall not look at her. I do not think that I could."

"You need not look at her."

"I know that. You told me so, in your way, the first time you said *Today, yes,* in a stairwell." She stood. She lifted the black case with both hands and held it against her chest, small and straight and entirely unbowed. "You have a very odd way of asking for things, Director. You do it by standing still."

"I am learning."

"I can see that. It is very slow." The ghost of a smile touched the clipped mouth. "I shall give you a piece of advice for nothing. When you ask, do not stop in the middle to see if it has been received. Say all of it, and then wait. You tend to leave the last third on the floor."

Ahreum laughed.

It came out wet and cracked and utterly undignified, and she put the back of her wrist to her eyes. Narae watched her with her head tilted, and said nothing. And somewhere beyond the door, in the long warm room, a chair was pushed back and a man's voice, rumpled, cheerful, a little hoarse, called out *Is there any more tea?*

She asked Min next.

It was in the lift, going down. They had come away together, the two of them, at a quarter past nine, in the long steel car with its small humming light, and Min stood against the back wall in her black cardigan with her handbag held before her, as she had stood for thirty years, quite upright, looking at the numbers.

"Min," said Ahreum.

"Director."

"I am asking."

The numbers went down. Eight. Seven.

"On Saturday," said Ahreum, "I should like you to be in the room. Not by the door, with the tablet. At the table. Beside me. I should like you to sit down, and to stay sitting, and to be the one that I look at, if I need to look at someone." She had said it all, as Narae had told her to, and now she stopped, and made herself stand in the quiet. "I do not know how to do it without you. I have never tried."

Min did not answer.

She stood quite still with her handbag held against her chest. Her round tired face was composed into the blankness that she wore for news that she had decided to receive in a single clean stroke, and for a moment Ahreum thought that it would hold, as it had held for thirty years. Then it did not. It did not break. It dissolved, slowly, from the corners of the mouth, like a thing in water, and two plain tears ran down on either side of the round cheeks and dropped on the black wool of her cardigan.

"I have been waiting," said Min, quite steadily, "for twenty-one years for someone in that family to say that."

"Min."

"I do not mean to be reproachful." She did not lift a hand to her face. "I only wish it noted."

"It is noted," said Ahreum, and found that her own voice had gone to pieces.

The lift stopped at the ground floor. The doors opened on a marble lobby and a night guard, and a gust of cold snow-smelling air. Neither of them moved. Then Min drew out of her sleeve a white handkerchief, with a small embroidered pear in one corner, and held it out, and Ahreum took it, and wiped her eyes, and held it for a moment in her hand.

"May I keep it?"

"It is yours," said Min. "It has been for two days. I was only waiting to be asked."

The rest was done in an hour.

She did it by telephone, and in person, and once on the steps of the building in the whirling snow. It was a strange evening. She had spent her life being careful, and she found that this was not care at all. It was a great deal easier and much more frightening, like walking down a street without a coat.

She stopped Principal Moon at the foot of the steps, where he stood with his box of negatives under his arm and his thin hair full of snow, and said, "I am asking," and went on to the end of the sentence without stopping, and he took off his hat in the snow and held it against his chest.

"I have written it," he said. "The statement. It is in my own hand. Four pages. It says what I told you in the green room, and what I did not tell you, and what I should have done." He swallowed. "I shall read it myself. I am not good at reading aloud. I shall do it anyway."

She asked Mr. Ma, who was standing by the kerb with his laptop clutched against his chest, trying to flag a taxi and failing, and he said "Yes, Director," so quickly that she was not sure that he had waited for the end of the sentence, and then, with an apologetic cough, "I should like to say that I have never been asked anything before, by a person at your level. It is a very unusual sensation."

"I am told that it is," said Ahreum.

She went back up in the lift to Attorney Cha's office and found him alone, at the head of the long table, in the lamplight, with his glasses off, polishing them on a handkerchief. He looked up. He did not say anything. She stood in the door with her hand on the frame.

"Mr. Cha," said Ahreum. "I should like to ask whether you will stand beside the Board's counsel on Saturday, and say, if it is required, that the Fund's steward has not been, in your view, in breach of any duty. I know that it is not your habit. I know that it is a great deal."

"Director," said Attorney Cha.

"Yes."

"I have been your family's counsel for twenty-six years. I attended your grandfather's funeral. I held your hand at the graveside, when you were four, because you had been told that you must not cry, and you were doing it very quietly." He put his glasses on. His eyes behind them were bright and dry and extremely tired. "You have never asked me for anything. I have been waiting to be useful to you since you were a child."

"I know," said Ahreum. "I am sorry that I did not notice."

"You are noticing now," said Cha, in his dry old voice, and rose, and bowed to her, very low.

Taewon was on the pavement at ten, under the lamp, in a grey scarf that someone had knitted for him and that he wore as a man wears a scarf that he is not allowed to refuse.

He was alone. He had sent the others on, with a series of small gestures that Ahreum was beginning to recognise as his language, a wave, a lifted eyebrow, a slight flap of the hand, and he stood in the whirling dark with his hands in his pockets and his tired amiable face turned up to the snow.

She stopped in front of him.

"Mr. Bae."

"Director." He gave her a lopsided smile. "I was told that you were going round the building, collecting people. I did not like to presume that I was on the list."

"You are at the top of it." She was quite out of breath. "I have kept you to the last. I did not know how to do it."

"I assumed so."

"I should like to ask you," said Ahreum, and stopped, and made herself go on, "to tell Mr. Yoon something. I should like it to be you who does it, because I do not think that it will be believed from me."

"I am listening."

"I should like to ask you to tell him that I am sorry that I made you keep the rule."

Taewon went very still.

"The rule that you were not to speak of that day. Hajin made it. It was his. But I knew of it. I knew in the first week, in a corridor, from the way that you looked at me. And I let you keep it. I let you carry a thing for ten years that was mine to carry, because I was afraid of what would happen if you put it down." Her voice shook. "I should like you to know that I know what it cost you. A great many sandwiches. A great many rooms with your back against the wall. I should like you to be told that it was not a debt. It was a gift, and I did not know how to thank you for it, and so I stood at a distance and let you give it."

He did not answer. The snow came down between them, soft and thick, and settled on his shoulders and on the grey wool of the scarf. He stood looking at her with an expression that she could not read, and then, quite slowly, his tired face did something that she had never seen it do. It folded, from the corners of the eyes, into a smile of such open and helpless affection that she nearly stepped back.

"You are learning very fast," said Taewon.

"Dr. Ko says that it is slow."

"Dr. Ko is a perfectionist." He took out of his pocket a very crumpled paper bag, in which, as she saw, there were two small tangerines. He put one into her hand, and closed her fingers on it. "I have wanted to say it for ten weeks. It is a pleasure to meet you, Director Seol. At last. Without a document."

She laughed again. It was the second time that evening, and it was a little less wet.

"Tell him," said Taewon. "Tell him yourself. He is at the top of the stairs."

He had come out onto the steps of the building a few minutes before, and was standing under the lamp in his dark coat, with his collar turned up and his hands at his sides.

He was not looking at her. He was looking at the snow, which fell in a slow bright curtain in the cone of lamplight, and at the empty street beyond, where a single taxi went by with its roof-light dim. His breath showed in the cold. He had the look of a man who has been standing there for some time and has decided to go on standing.

She went up the steps.

It was twelve. She counted them, as she counted bridges, and at the ninth she stopped, one step below him, so that her eyes were nearly level with his. A flake of snow lay on his eyelashes and did not melt.

"Hajin," said Ahreum.

"Ahreum."

"I am going to ask you for something. I should like to say all of it before you answer."

"Please."

She had thought that it would be the hardest. She had lain awake and thought that it would be a wall. And it was not. It was a small plain stair, and she was standing on it, in the snow, in a charcoal coat, with a handkerchief with a pear on it in one pocket and a tangerine in the other, and the whole of her was quite still.

"On Saturday I am going to stand in a room, in front of the people who have decided what to do with the Fund, and with a woman whom I wronged, and with a woman who has wronged me, and I am going to say what I know. I am not going to say it well. I have a vote that is suspended, and a reputation that will not survive the telling, and I am not at all certain that I shall manage to keep my voice." She drew breath. "I should like to ask you to stand beside me."

He did not move.

"Not as a vote. I have not the right to ask that, and I will not. I have said that it is yours. I should like to ask you to stand beside me as a person. As the man who left a cup of tea on a floor. Who held an umbrella in the rain with his shoulders bare. Who said that he preferred the chair." She stopped, and made herself go on, and said it all. "I am afraid. I should like to be afraid in the same place as you."

The snow came down. It came down between them in a soft thick whirl, and lay on the steps, and on the shoulders of his coat, and on the dark wool of her sleeve, and the lamp hummed. A long way off, at the end of the street, the last bus of the evening went by, with its windows alight, and was gone.

"I have been waiting," said Hajin, "for you to say that since the day I called you Director Seol."

He said it low, and his voice was not steady. She saw his face. It was bare, in the lamplight, with the snow on the lashes and the grey stubble on the jaw, and it was open in the way that a window is open when someone has taken down the shutters from inside. There were tears on it. He did not touch them.

"Yes," said Hajin. "I shall stand beside you."

She closed her eyes.

"I should like to ask you for something as well," he said, "if I may."

"Please."

"Ask me first." He said it gently, almost wonderingly. "Before you arrange anything. Before you telephone a pension fund, or move a seat, or put a lunch box on a desk. I do not mind what it is. I shall very likely say yes. I only wish to be the sort of person that you ask."

"I will," said Ahreum. "I do not know how to do it without making a ledger of it."

"Then make a ledger." His mouth moved, not quite a smile. "I am fond of ledgers."

She laughed. It broke in the middle, and she let it. She put her hand out, and did not take his, and laid it palm up on the cold stone rail of the step between them, in the falling snow, with the fingers a little open. He looked at it. He looked at it for some time, as one looks at a thing that one has waited for so long that it seems unreal.

Then he put his own into it.

It was the first time. It was not a brush, or a touch at the edge of a sleeve, or two fingers laid on a cuff in a public corridor. It was a hand in a hand, palm against palm, with the fingers closing, quite slowly, round one another. His was cold. It was very large and very steady, and the old white seam across the knuckle lay against the side of her thumb. She felt it as one feels the first warm stone in a river.

Neither of them said anything at all.

They walked back to the car together, the length of the building, with the snow falling and their hands not yet quite let go. At the kerb Mr. Kwak had the rear door open and was looking, with enormous dignity, at a point in the middle of the night sky. Behind them, at the top of the steps, a small figure in a grey scarf stood under the lamp with a paper bag in one hand and the other raised, in a gesture that might have been a wave or a blessing. And beside him a straight, small, grey-coated woman with a black case against her chest had come out to look at the snow, and had stopped, and was watching two people get into a car with her head tilted a fraction to the left.

In the back seat Ahreum took out her notebook. It was a small plain one, with a stiff black cover, that she had bought in a stationer's in Seongbuk on a Tuesday afternoon. She had not told anyone. It had two columns.

She uncapped her steel pen and wrote, in the right-hand column, in her small upright joined hand, with a man beside her who did not look at it:

*Item twenty. Mine. I asked. Discharged.*

He was looking out of the window at the snow. She heard him breathe in, and out. Then, without turning his head, he took the pen from her fingers, quite gently, and wrote beneath her line, in a hard upright hand that she would have known in the dark:

*Item twenty-one. His. I was asked. Received.*

It was a quarter to midnight when the car drew up in front of her flat.

He had walked her to the door. It had not been discussed. He had got out first, and come round the car, and stood with his hands at his sides while she found her key, and she had found that she did not wish him to go, and that she could say so, and had. He had said, "Are you asking?" and she had said, "Yes," and he had said, "Then I shall come up for an hour," in the voice of a man being given a very great present and trying to appear as though it were a small one.

It was a small flat, and it was exactly as she had left it. A low table. A shelf of books with a gap in it. A mattress made up with a grey cover. A glass-fronted cabinet with four bowls and six cups and a teapot. He stood in the middle of the floor in his coat, and did not look round, and she took off her own and hung it on the back of the chair.

He took off his.

He did it slowly, as a man does who has been taught that a coat is a thing that is put on before one goes into a room. He hung it on the second hook, beside hers, and for a moment he stood with his hand on the collar. Then he turned, and she saw that something had come out of the inside pocket and lay on the edge of the chair seat, where it had slipped.

Two papers.

They lay together on the grey cushion in the lamplight, one thin and brown and soft as cloth, the other white and creased in three, with a single word on the outside in a small upright hand. They lay side by side, with a finger's breadth between them, as they had lain in his pocket for three days, against his heart.

He saw her see them.

Neither of them moved. The lamp hummed. Outside the window the snow came down very slowly, in the dark, onto the roofs of Seongbuk.

She thought of a bucket, and a window, and a pencil borrowed from a girl. She thought of a small round thing on the third finger of her right hand, too loose, that turned when she was afraid. She thought: *I could ask him now. I could say, I have it. I could say, here is where I kept it.* The whole of the sentence stood at the front of her mouth, ready and plain, with a door in it and no ledger.

She did not say it.

It was not fear. She examined it carefully, as she did everything, and it was not that. It was a thing that she had promised, to a man on a metal stool, in a kitchen, with the water running: *after the ninth.* She wished to give it to him in a room in which nothing else was happening. She wished to put it in his hand, and not in a paragraph, and not on the night before she stood up and was struck.

He did not ask.

He stood by the chair in his shirtsleeves with the two papers at his elbow, and looked at her across the little room. His face was very gentle. He did not look at her hand, where the ring sat, a little crooked, on the third finger. He did not look at the papers. He looked at her face, steadily, as he had looked at her in an amber corridor, with the whole of his attention and none of its weight.

"Item twenty-two," said Hajin, very softly. "Mine. I know that there is something that you have not yet shown me. I should like to be shown it when you are ready. I am not asking tonight. Carried forward."

She put her hand over her mouth.

"Is that permitted?" he said.

"Yes," said Ahreum, through her fingers. "It is entirely permitted."

He smiled. And she, who had stood on a stair in the snow and asked a roomful of people for everything that she had, went to the cabinet and took out two of the six cups, and put the kettle on.