By twenty to eight on the fourth of January the great wall of the Maru operations room had been grey for four days.

It was a screen the width of a bus, and on it, in tidy rows of small rounded squares, lay every study group that the platform ran for the scholarship pilot: two hundred and ninety-eight of them, each with a tutor's name and a time. For six weeks the squares had been green. Since the evening of the thirtieth they had been the colour of ash, and in each, where a cheerful number of children present used to blink, there was a single line of small white type. *Paused by administrator.*

Hajin stood in front of it with his coat still on and his hands at his sides.

He had not come in by the lobby. He had come up in the service lift at half past seven, because he had wished to see the room before the room saw him. It was a long glass box on the ninth floor, built for forty people and nearly empty at this hour, with the dawn coming up pale over the river and a smell of burnt coffee and warm electronics. A young woman in a grey cardigan sat at the night desk with her chin in her hand. She had the look of someone who had slept in a chair, and she rose when she saw him, too fast, so that her chair rolled back and struck a cabinet.

"Mr. Yoon. I'm sorry. Nobody told me you were coming up."

"Nobody knew. Please sit. What is your name?"

"Dahye, sir. Lee Dahye. Night support." She did not sit. "I have been on since Wednesday."

"Since Wednesday."

"Mr. Han's team went home. Somebody had to answer." She held a printout against her chest, and he saw that she had been holding it for a long time, because the paper had gone soft where her thumb had been. "There are four hundred and twelve messages since the thirty-first. Parents, mostly. Forty-one from the students themselves. Ms. Park's office gave us a sentence, and we have sent it four hundred times. I wished to show you one. I know that I should not. I could not decide who else to give it to."

He took it.

It was a single sheet, a message copied out of the support portal, from an address in Mokpo. It had been written at ten past eleven on the night of the first of January by someone who did not often write to institutions, in careful formal sentences, with one word crossed out and corrected.

*To whom it may concern. My son is fifteen. He has been enrolled in the study group on Tuesdays and Thursdays since October. He did not tell me at first, because he did not wish me to worry about the cost, and I told him that it was free. He has never had a tutor. He has waited all of December for the winter term. He says that he has done every exercise in advance. I do not know what has happened. I have read the news. I understand that grown-up people are quarrelling. I wish only to ask whether it is true that it is cancelled, because I do not know how to tell him, and I should be grateful if somebody would tell me what to say.*

*With respect. His mother.*

He read it twice.

He had signed the suspension at ten past five on the afternoon of the thirtieth, with a black pen with a chipped cap, and he had thought of it, for four days, as a thing done to a woman in a grey suit. He had said to himself that it was a cutting of a cord. He looked at the soft paper in his hand, and at the grey wall, and at a row of ashen squares in the third line down, each of which had a tutor's name in it and a time. *Tue 16:00. Thu 16:00.* He understood that it had not been done to her at all. It had been done to a boy in Mokpo who had done every exercise in advance.

"Please do not send the sentence again," said Hajin.

"Sir?"

"Tell the mother, in your own words, that someone will write to her personally before noon. Not a template. Her name will be on it. Mine will be under it." He folded the sheet along its creases and put it in the inside pocket of his coat, beside two other papers that he had not taken out since the thirty-first. "And please go home, Ms. Lee. I am sorry that you were left."

"I did not mind," said Dahye, and then, because she was twenty-four and very tired, "I minded a little."

"So did I," said Hajin.

At eight the telephone rang once, and he had it at his ear before the ring was done.

"Director Seol."

"Mr. Yoon. Left column."

He gave it to her whole. The grey wall, the four hundred and twelve messages, the woman from Mokpo. He did not soften the sentence in which he said that the suspension had been signed by him, against his counsel's advice, in a temper that he had mistaken for judgement. Then he said, "I should like to withdraw it today. The Fund's side of the pilot requires your countersignature. I am not arranging it. I am asking whether you agree."

The line was quiet. Behind her, faint and far off, he could hear the small rattle of a hospital trolley.

"Yes," said Ahreum. "And I should like to enter an item in the right-hand column, if it may go in first."

"Please."

"At five this morning I drafted the countersignature. It is on my kitchen table. It is signed. I was going to send it to Ms. Park before I telephoned you, and tell you afterwards, as a pleasant surprise." A breath. "I had written ASK HIM at the head of the page, in capitals. I looked at it for forty minutes. I have concluded that it was not decoration."

He put his hand over his eyes. "Item twenty-three," he said. "Hers. Almost arranged. Asked instead. Discharged."

"Noted," said Ahreum.

It was not a stone. It was a small warm thing with a smile folded somewhere inside it, and he stood in the glass room above the river with his hand over his face and let it go through him, and did not need to do anything about the cold, because there was none.

Ms. Park arrived at twenty-five past with her legal pad and her pen and the manner of a woman who has been told by her client that he is about to say something unwise.

She sat in the visitor's chair. He did not sit. He stood at the window with the grey wall in the glass behind his reflection and told her, in plain sentences, what he wished: that the notice of suspension be withdrawn with immediate effect; that every group be restored by noon; that Maru bear in full the cost of the independent audit and of every remedial order the Commission might make, and ask nothing of the Fund; that a statement be published on the platform and sent to every household, over his name.

Ms. Park wrote none of it down. She sat with her pen capped on the pad and her small precise face quite still.

"I should like to say, for the record," she said, "that I had thought you would not."

"Would not what?"

"Withdraw it. I have represented you for four years. In my experience, when you sign a thing in anger, you defend it afterwards with great elegance, for a long time, until it has become a principle." She uncapped the pen. "I had drawn up the arguments for why it could not be withdrawn before the final report. I had eleven. I had not thought that you would ask me to throw them away."

"They are very good arguments."

"They are excellent." Something moved at the corner of her mouth. "Dictate the statement."

He had not prepared it. He found that it came out of him the way a thing comes that has been waiting behind a door. *On the thirtieth of December, Maru Learning paused two hundred and ninety-eight study groups. We did it for reasons that belonged to us, and not to you. The children in those groups did nothing. Their families did nothing. We have restored every group, and we are sorry that we took them away.*

Ms. Park stopped writing. She looked at what she had set down.

"That is not how a lawyer would put it."

"No."

"It admits a motive. It will be read to the Commission."

"Let it be."

"It is better," said Ms. Park, quite quietly. She put down the pen. For the first time in four years he saw her smile, a small, startled, entirely unprofessional smile that took ten years off her face. "May I say that I am glad? It is not in my brief."

"It is noted," said Hajin, and she laughed, once, and picked up the pen again.

She came at noon, and she closed the door.

He had stopped counting the clicks. He heard it, and the corridor sound went, and he turned from the window in his shirtsleeves with a copy of the statement in his hand. She stood just inside in the charcoal coat with her hair pinned and her glasses on, the black canvas tote on her shoulder and a grey folder under her arm, and in the white winter light from the glass she looked as though she had slept for perhaps two hours and did not intend to mention it.

"The countersignature," said Ahreum. She held out the folder.

He took it. She had signed in the right hand, small and upright and joined, and beneath her name, in the margin, in the same hand, in a dry pencil, she had written: *Asked.*

"There is a couch," said Hajin.

She looked at it.

It stood against the east wall of his office, grey and low and unused, where Taewon had left it in November with a vague remark about people who sat. In nine weeks nobody had. She crossed to it, in her shoes, and sat at one end with her tote on her knee, and he sat at the other, and between them lay half a metre of upholstery and a grey winter light.

"I have a proposal," said Hajin.

"Of course."

"I should like to say the things that I am sorry for, one at a time, in order, without a clause. And then I should like you to do the same. And then I should like us to put down what we shall do instead, on one sheet, and sign it, as one signs a treaty."

"I am fond of treaties."

"I know." He pressed his palms together between his knees. "I shall begin. In the basement of the hospital, I asked you three questions that I already knew the answers to. I did it so that you should say yes three times, in a row, in front of a child. I took the softest place in the room, and I knew where it was. I am sorry."

"Thank you."

"Second. On the thirtieth, at ten past five, a woman wrote to me that she was there, whenever I wanted, and I wrote *Yes.* It was not an answer to anything. I used another person's kindness to feel less alone for one afternoon, and I did it to hurt you, and I did not even know that I was doing it until it was done. I am sorry for that, and for her. She did not deserve to be used, whatever else she is."

Her hands tightened on the tote. She said nothing.

"Third. I told you in a corridor that I would not leave. I left, in a basement, with my face quite calm. I am sorry that you had to sit on a plastic chair for a night and keep the next one empty." His voice thinned. "That is all of mine. I find that it is a good deal."

She did not answer at once. She sat very straight with her glasses misting, and he saw her put her thumb to the seam of her cuff and, deliberately, take it away.

"I shall begin with the largest," said Ahreum. "I arranged your life for ten years from the dark, and called it kindness, and did not once ask you. I am sorry. I should have asked you in the first week. I should have asked you at the gate, if I had been braver, with the window down. I did not. I am sorry for every one of the things that you have written in your book as anomalies."

"Thank you."

"Second. I used a word." She looked at her hands. "It was the only honest thing that I ever signed, and for ten years I have been hearing it come out of my mouth as a wall. In the basement, and in the boardroom, and in a corridor in the sleet. I put it down between us like a stone on a door, and you heard it, every time, as what it was. And I let you hear it and said nothing, because the wall was safe." She lifted her eyes. "I should like not to say it that way any more. I should like to say it only when I mean the other thing."

"What is the other thing?"

"*I have seen this. It happened. It was wrong.*" Her voice cracked on the last word and mended. "And, I think, *I am here.*"

He could not speak. He nodded.

"Third. I did not tell you that I loved you in the first week. I told myself that I should wait until I had proof. It is a dreadful thing, to ask a person to love you on evidence." She almost laughed. "I am sorry that I made you do it."

They wrote it on Maru letterhead, because there was nothing else, with the black pen with the chipped cap and the steel one from her tote, side by side on the blotter, he with the red, she with the grey. It took twenty minutes. They disagreed about the third clause and argued with such exactness that the argument became a kind of pleasure, and he saw her cheeks colour, and heard himself laugh, aloud, at a sentence of hers about the definition of *arrangement.*

*GROUND RULES. 4 January.*

*1. Ask before arranging. Anything. A telephone call, a seat, a lunch.*

*2. Neither speaks for the other. Not to a Board, not to a Commission, not to a journalist, not to a cousin.*

*3. The ledger has three columns. LEFT: work. RIGHT: the other things. And a third, DEBTS: what is owed, and to whom, to be paid in kind and not forgiven in advance.*

"Forgiven in advance," said Ahreum.

"It was a poor idea."

"It was a very generous idea. It was simply made of the wrong stuff." She wrote, in her small joined hand, at the head of the new column: *DEBTS.* Under it, after a moment: *Mine to him: ten years, and a window. Paid in: asking. Instalments, daily.*

He took the pen, and wrote beneath her line: *His to her: a basement. Paid in: staying in the room.*

They looked at the page. It was a very small, plain, absurd document, and they signed it, one under the other, he with the full hard stroke, she with the small upright joined one, and he thought that he had signed a great many agreements in his life, and had never in one of them put his name to anything that he was so afraid of failing.

"May I tell you what the cuff is?" said Ahreum.

He turned his head.

She was looking at her left wrist, where the grey wool lay straight and neat over the bone. She had set down the pen. Her hands lay in her lap, the right over the left, and the thumb was quite still.

"My mother did up the top button of my cardigan," she said. "I told you that, in my grandmother's room. I did not tell you the other part. She knelt in the hall. She took my left wrist in her hand, and turned back the cuff, because it had come down over my knuckles, and folded it twice, very neatly, so that it should not get in the way." The level voice did not alter. "That was the last time she touched me. I was six. I sat on the stair, and I held that place, with my other thumb, so that I should know that it was still folded. It was warm where she had held it."

He did not move.

"I did it all through the night. I did it in Class 1-B, when I was afraid. Narae heard it. I have been doing it for twenty-one years, and I did not know, until I said it just now, that I was not holding my sleeve. I was holding the place where I had been held."

He took a long breath.

He wanted very much to take the wrist in his hand. He did not. He sat with half a metre of grey cloth between them and laid his own left hand, palm up, on the couch between, in the white light, and said, in a voice that he did not entirely recognise:

"I started crossing my arms on the second week."

She waited.

"I told you that I was hiding my stomach. I told it to myself for ten years. It was not quite true. I think that I was making a wall of myself, round a thing that hurt, so that nobody should see that it did. A tray, and then a jacket, and then my arms." He looked at his open hand. "I did it in the store-room, with no one there. I did it in a taxi, last Tuesday, at a red light. It was never about my body. It was about being seen to need something."

"Yes," said Ahreum, very low.

"I should like to stop. I do not think that I can do it by deciding. I think that it is a thing that goes when it is not needed."

"Then we shall wait for it to go," said Ahreum. "I have a good deal of practice in waiting."

He laughed. It cracked in the middle. She lifted her own hand from her lap, and held it out, palm up, over the half metre of cloth, as she had on a stone rail in the snow. He put his into it. They sat like that, with their hands joined in the pale light and the grey wall of ashen squares showing through the door of the office, and she said, in the plain level voice of a woman reading out the last item on a list:

"After the ninth, I shall show you where I keep your answer. I have not forgotten. I should like it to be a day on which nothing else is happening."

"I shall not ask."

"I know," said Ahreum. "That is why I shall."

By noon the squares were green.

They went one by one, from the top left, in a slow rolling wave, as a field goes green in a spring wind. He stood in the operations room with her at his side, in her coat, with her tote on her shoulder, and watched two hundred and ninety-eight small rounded boxes lose their ash and light. In each, a number began to blink. *0. 0. 2. 5. 11.* A girl's name came up under a tutor's, and a boy's. Somewhere, a boy in Mokpo, with his exercises done, had a Tuesday.

Dahye Lee had come back in her coat, against instructions, and stood at the night desk with her hand over her mouth.

He sent the letter at seven minutes past twelve. It was four lines, over his name, to a woman whose address he had read twice. *Your son's study group is back. I am sorry that it was taken away. If he would like to write to the tutor before Tuesday, I shall see that it is delivered.* He did not ask Ms. Park to look at it. He asked the woman beside him, who read it, and nodded, and did not change a word.

Taewon came at seven with two carrier bags and the face of a man who has been told that there is nothing to discuss.

He let himself in. He put the bags on the island and began to unpack them: a packet of noodles, a packet of noodles, a third, a block of processed cheese in plastic, a bundle of spring onions that were not yet yellow. Then he looked round the kitchen and saw that the second stool was occupied, and that the woman on it was holding a paring knife, and a radish, and a look of mild determination, and he did not say anything at all.

"Mr. Bae," said Ahreum. "I have been told that this is an egg house."

"It is an egg house," said Taewon, gravely. "With cheese."

"I am told that it is a crime."

"It is the best thing that has ever been done to a bowl of ramyeon," said Hajin, from the stove, "and I shall not hear otherwise."

There was no third stool. Taewon went to the study and came back with a straight wooden chair, which he set at the end of the island with the satisfaction of a man putting up a flag. Hajin cooked. He did it badly, with great concentration, under supervision, and Ahreum, at his elbow, did not touch his hand. She reached past it and showed him with the side of her own where the egg should go. They ate at the island with the river going by in the glass behind them and the first stool turned, as it always was, with its back to the window. She took the cheese on her first mouthful, with an air of scientific enquiry, and put down her chopsticks, and looked at it.

"It is a crime," said Ahreum.

She took a second mouthful.

"I have waited ten weeks," said Taewon, to his bowl, "to see someone else do that."

Hajin laughed so suddenly that he had to put down his chopsticks. And Taewon, who had not looked up, said in the mildest voice, "I think the egg is overdone, but I shall say nothing. I have taken a vow."

It was a quarter to ten when the telephone lit on the stone.

He turned it over. It was a number that he had in the list under *L*, and he looked at it with a small lurch of the heart, because the man who owned it had said, on the thirtieth, in a hotel dining room, that he should not telephone before the fifth.

"Mr. Lim," said Hajin.

"Mr. Yoon." The heavy courteous voice sounded as though it were sitting in a leather chair with its shoes off. "I told you that I should not telephone before the fifth. I find that I am a man who breaks his word once a year, and I wished to spend it on this." A rustle. "My committee meets tomorrow at nine. I thought you ought to hear it tonight, from me. A lady has telephoned me a second time."

Across the island Taewon had set down his chopsticks. Ahreum had not moved, but her thumb lay quite still against the seam of her cuff, and her eyes had come to Hajin's face.

"What did she say?" said Hajin.

"Many things," said Mr. Lim. "She was extremely charming. I shall tell you them all, in the morning, if you will permit me. I only telephoned to say that this time I recorded it."