Chairman Pyo did not use the gavel.

It lay on its walnut block beside his right hand, a small plain mallet of black wood that had been struck at the opening of every meeting of the Board since 1993, and he did not reach for it. He sat with his dry hands folded on the blotter and his silver head a little bowed, and for perhaps half a minute nobody in the room spoke, and Ahreum, standing at the foot of the table with a man's sleeve against her own, understood that he was giving the silence to someone.

She did not know to whom. She thought that it might be to the girl at the far end. She thought that it might be to himself.

"The Chair has a motion," said Pyo at last.

His voice was not the voice of the boardroom. It had lost its unhurried courtesy somewhere in the last two hours, and what remained was very plain and very old, the voice of a man who has been reading a long document and has come to the page on which his own name appears.

"That Director Seol Yurim be suspended, with immediate effect, from every office that she holds in the Seol Group, including the acting stewardship of the Fund, the leadership of the Strategy division, and her seat upon this Board, pending the outcome of any proceedings that may be brought. That the whole of the schedule read this morning, and the instruments on which it rests, be delivered to the Personal Information Protection Commission, and to the Public Prosecutors' Office, as the law requires of a company that has learned of a possible offence." He paused. "That the Group cooperate in full. I shall second it myself, if no one else will."

"Seconded," said Mr. Lim, from the wall, without rising.

"The Chair thanks Mr. Lim, who is not a director, and who will be reminded that he is not." The dry mouth moved. "All those in favour."

They went up one by one. She watched them. They were the hands that had gone up on the fourth of December for a Resolution about a Merit Pool, in the same order, round the same walnut, and some of them lifted slowly, as if the arm had to be persuaded. Director Jang's went up last. He did not look at the ceiling. He looked at the table, and his heavy florid face had gone the colour of old candle-wax.

"Carried," said Pyo. "Eleven for. One abstaining."

The abstention was at the far end of the walnut, and it was the person for whom the motion was named. Yurim had not lifted her hand. She sat as she had sat for the last quarter of an hour, in a lavender jacket, small and upright, with the pad of lined paper before her and her fingers lying very still on either side of it. She had not spoken since Ahreum's sentence. She had not wept. She looked, Ahreum thought, like a person who has been told the time and is working out what it means.

Chair Commissioner Hwang inclined his head to the Chair, a degree and a half. "The Commission will accept the delivery," he said, in his grey exact voice. "It will examine it in the ordinary way. It will forward whatever the law requires it to forward. I should like it noted that the Commission has not, today, formed any view on the guilt of any person."

"It is noted," said Pyo.

"I should like it noted also," said the small woman in navy beside him, quite quietly, "that I have sat on this panel for nineteen years, and that I have never before seen a company deliver up its own file."

Nobody answered. At the far end of the table Yurim lifted her head.

"I am the only one," said Yurim.

She had risen. She did it quickly, with a small hard jerk, as though something under her had given, and she stood with both hands flat on the walnut and her eyes fixed on a point somewhere over the Chairman's shoulder. Her voice came out high and quick and perfectly clear. "I am the only person in this family who has ever done anything for the Fund. I have been there every day. I have read every file. I sat with Halmoni in the hospital, I took her flowers, I"

She stopped.

It was not a pause. Ahreum had heard her pause a hundred times, a small, pretty hesitation, with the smile arriving after it like a servant with a tray. This was something else. The sentence simply went out of her. She stood with her mouth a little open and her hands on the wood, and the sound that was meant to come next did not come, and she seemed to listen for it, with her head tilted, as one listens for a step on a stair that has been taken away.

Nobody helped her.

It was the most terrible thing in the room, Ahreum thought. Twelve directors and three Commissioners and an old woman in a wheelchair, and not one of them reached out, because the sentence had been finished for her by every piece of paper on the table.

She felt the sleeve at her side move. It was a very small movement, a shift of weight, and then a hand, open, came to rest on the back of the nearest chair. She looked up. Hajin had not turned his head. He was looking down the length of the walnut at the girl in lavender, and his face, in the light of the long window, was quite bare.

"May I say something?" he said.

"The Board has heard from Mr. Yoon," said Pyo. "It will hear him again."

"I should like to speak to Yurim," said Hajin. "Not to the Board. I shall try not to make it a speech."

He did not walk down the table. He stood where he was, a little to the left of Ahreum, with his hand on the back of a chair, and spoke in the low rough voice that he had used for the boy in the video.

"I was seventeen. It was the week after the cafeteria. I had not eaten for a day and a half, and I was sitting on the back stairs between the science wing and the gymnasium, because it was the only place in the building where nobody went. A girl came down the steps. She was out of breath. She held out a packet of tissues as if I were an animal that might bolt."

At the far end of the table, the lavender figure had gone quite still.

"It had a rabbit on the front. A cartoon one, with a blue bow. She said that not everyone thought it was funny. She said that she was sorry that she had not spoken. She smelled of soap." His voice thinned and steadied. "I have carried that packet for ten years. I should like you to know that. It was in my head the whole of that time, in every room I walked into, in four flats and two companies. It was the only thing that anyone did for me that week that I could account for."

He drew breath.

"I have thought a great deal in the last ten days about whether it was real. I have not been able to settle it. I have looked at it from every side, with the best attention that I have, and I think that it was." He did not look away from her. "I think that it was the one real thing that you ever did, Yurim. I think that you did it because you were sixteen and a boy had been hurt in front of you, and something in you hurt too. And I think that afterwards you saw what it was worth, and you used it. You made it into a thing that would make me trust you. You kept it for ten years, like a coin, to spend."

Her lips had parted.

"I do not say it to wound you," said Hajin. "I say it because I think that nobody has ever said it to you, and because I do not think that you know the difference. I think that you can no longer tell which of your kindnesses were kind."

There was no sound in the room. The clock above the door ticked, and a long way off in the building a lift went by, and beside the Chairman's chair an old woman in a wheelchair closed her eyes.

"I should have liked to be able to keep the tissues," said Hajin. "I find that I cannot."

She broke, and it was not at all as Ahreum had imagined.

She had imagined, in the dark, a hundred times, in a number of rooms, how it would be. She had imagined rage. She had imagined a scene, a white and terrible face, a cry, the whole beautiful machine coming apart in a storm of accusation. She had been afraid of it for fifteen years, and she had prepared for it as one prepares for a blow, by turning the shoulder.

Yurim did not scream. She sat down.

She did it quite slowly, as a person sits who has been standing a very long time on a bad leg, and she folded her hands in her lap, and looked at them. The lavender jacket was creased at the elbow. Her hair, which was always so neat, had come a little loose over one ear. The wide bright eyes had gone dull and small and quite dry, and when she spoke it was in a voice that Ahreum had heard only once before, from the other side of a steel door, on the first night of the year, in a recording that Hajin had played her at his kitchen counter. It was flat and small and perfectly level. It was the voice of a girl of about sixteen.

"I only wanted to belong."

She said it to her hands.

"My father is a very clever man. Was. He took me to the garden at the house in Seongbuk when I was five, and showed me which window was Halmoni's, and which was the Chairman's, and told me that we were the lateral branch. I did not know what it meant. He said that it meant that we were the ones who would have to be useful." The small voice did not rise. "He said that a branch that is not useful is cut. He said that they had cut his, in a corridor, in front of a clerk, and that I should have to be so good, so very good, that nobody could ever do it to me."

Nobody moved.

"I was nine when I first drew the rabbit. I did it on his papers, in the margin, while he was working. He said that it was a good mark. He said that I might use it for things that were mine." She lifted her eyes, and they were not directed at anyone. "I did what I was asked. At fourteen, and at sixteen, and at twenty-two. I typed what I was told to type. I knew that it was wrong. I knew it at the time, I think, in a place at the back, and I did not look at it, because if I looked at it I should have had to stop, and if I stopped I should be nothing. I should be a girl with a stupid mark, in a house where she was only ever let in by the kitchen."

She drew a slow breath.

"And then it was mine," said Yurim. "I do not know when. He had the stroke, and I held the paper, and it was mine. I did not stop. I did not know how."

She did not ask to be forgiven. Ahreum watched for it, as one watches for a thing on a long road. It did not come. The small flat voice stopped, and she sat with her hands in her lap, and her face was bare, and it was not triumphant and it was not sorry. It was nearer to the face of a woman who has put down a very heavy bag and discovered that her arms do not know what to do.

"I visit him on Sundays," said Yurim. "At Gapyeong. He cannot speak. He holds my wrist. He holds it so hard that it leaves a mark." She looked at her wrist. "I used to think that it was love."

Ahreum had not decided to move. She had known that she would not say *I forgive you*. It was not hers to say, and it would have been a lie, and she had said, in a hospital room, with a tangerine in her hand, that she did not lie to the people she loved, and she did not love this girl, or she did, or she had once and did not know now. She stood at the foot of the table with the whole of that in her chest, and a handkerchief in her pocket, and felt her feet take her down the long side of the walnut.

She walked past eleven chairs. She walked past Director Jang, who did not look up, and past a young man with a thin moustache, and she came to the far end where the lavender figure sat alone between two empty seats, and stopped.

Yurim raised her eyes.

She did not speak. Ahreum did not either. She took out of her pocket a white handkerchief, ironed, with a small pear embroidered in one corner, and laid it on the walnut in front of the girl, beside the pad with the rabbit on it, square to the edge.

It was the whole of what she had.

It was not forgiveness. It was not a gift. It was an object put down on a table by a woman who had been given it twice, in a corridor, at a bad hour, by someone who had not said a word. It said nothing at all. It said only, in the plain language of cloth, *you are crying, and I have seen it.*

Yurim looked at it for a long time.

Then, very slowly, as one touches a thing in the dark, she put out her hand and laid two fingers on the corner with the pear.

"She is still my niece," said Madam Seol.

The voice came thin and dry from the head of the table. It did not rise. Ahreum turned.

Her grandmother had opened her eyes. She sat in the wheelchair in her grey coat, upright, with the steel lunch box on her knee and the porcelain cup at her right hand, and she was looking down the whole length of the walnut at a girl in lavender, and her face, which had held for seventy years, had come undone at the edges. It was not weeping. It was something drier and much older. It was the face of a woman who has seen a thing that she should have seen at the beginning.

"She called me Halmoni when she was five, in a garden," said Madam Seol, "to see what would happen. I did not correct her. I am a convalescent and I shall be brief. I let a child take a name that was not hers because I liked the sound of it, and because I did not know how to give her the thing that she was asking for. I did not give it. I let her go on asking." Her hand moved on the lid of the box. "What she has done is hers. I shall not excuse it. The Commission will do what the law requires, and so will the Prosecutors, and I shall not lift a finger to prevent them. But I should like it entered in the minutes of this Board that she is still my brother's child, and that I have not yet stopped being the old woman who taught her to hold a pen."

"It is entered," said Pyo, very low.

Yurim had her hand over her mouth.

"Dr. Ko," said Madam Seol.

Narae had been standing by the window with the hard black case closed against her chest. She had not moved since she said a name. She turned her head, and the old woman looked at her, across the long room and the whole breadth of twelve years.

"I should like to say a thing to you," said Madam Seol, "and I should like to say it standing. I am told that I may not. I shall say it from this chair, and I shall ask you to forgive the indignity."

"There is no indignity," said Narae.

"There is a very great deal. I am a woman who told a child that her parents had gone somewhere safe." The thin voice did not shake, and it cost her. "I wrote a cheque. Forty-one million won, a flight, a flat. I told myself that it was a mercy. I did not follow you. I did not ask what became of you. Your father drove a taxi for nine years in a country where he did not speak the language, and I did not know until September, and I am so very sorry." She stopped. "I do not ask you to forgive me. I should only like you to have heard it said, aloud, to your face, in a room that matters, by the person who did it."

Narae did not answer at once.

She stood with her head tilted a little to the left and the black case held against her coat, small and straight in the grey winter light. Her face was quite composed. It was, Ahreum saw, the composure of someone who has carried a very exact sentence a long way and is not sure that she will recognise it when it is given back.

"I accept it," said Narae.

She said it in the voice that she used for the sampling question.

"I should like to be precise. I do not forgive you. I do not think that I can, and I do not think that you would wish me to say that I had. It is not a thing that is mine to give on behalf of two people who are dead." Her voice was perfectly level, and her hand on the case had gone white. "But I accept the apology. I have it. It is the first thing that anyone in your family has ever given me that was not a payment. I shall keep it."

Madam Seol closed her eyes.

"That is quite enough," she said, very softly. "That is a great deal more than I deserve."

"If I may," said Cha, rising.

He had sat so quietly through the last half hour that Ahreum had forgotten him. He stood at the head of the table with his glasses in his hand and his dry face composed, and when he spoke it was in the level voice of a man reading a contract.

"Two matters of form, so that no one may say later that they were not placed on the record. The first concerns Section 14(c) of the Fund's charter. It provides that the voting rights of the Steward are suspended while proceedings touching the Fund remain unresolved. The Commission's proceeding remains open. Its final report is expected in March. The suspension therefore continues, in my opinion, until that report is delivered, and I should like it recorded that it is the sole respect in which the morning's events have not altered the Steward's position."

"It is recorded," said Pyo.

Ahreum found that she did not mind. She had stood in that room for two hours with her thumb away from her cuff, and the clause that had held her hands for twelve years had turned out to be a small and ordinary thing, a piece of paper that said *until March*. She looked at it, in her mind, as one looks at a stair that one has climbed.

"The second," said Cha, "concerns the requisition under Article 12. Maru Learning and the Daon Pension Fund, who hold between them eleven point four percent of the voting capital, were prepared to lodge it on Sunday. In view of the result of the vote, it is no longer required for the purpose for which it was drawn. I have been instructed by both holders to say that it will be held in reserve." He turned his head, a degree, toward the wall, where Mr. Lim sat with his hands on his stomach. "It will be withdrawn if the Board, within sixty days, adopts a resolution to separate the stewardship of the Fund from the Strategy division, and to place its discretionary reserve under independent review. It will be filed if it does not."

"The Board will so resolve," said Pyo.

"I am sure that it will," said Cha. "I should like it said that I never thought that I should hear a chairman say it first."

He sat down. His hand, on the blotter, was not quite steady, and Ahreum saw that he had not put his glasses on.

They went out through the double doors at noon, in the order in which they had come in.

It was a strange procession. Pyo went first, with his dry hands behind his back, and the three Commissioners behind him, talking low. Mr. Gwon went on the arm of his young associate, down the three stone steps with his stick, one at a time, stopping on each. Director Shin and Director Yoo and a thin man in spectacles went together, close, like people walking on ice. At the foot of the table Min and Mr. Kwak lifted the wheelchair between them, and carried it down, and on the landing Nurse Baek, who had been waiting for two hours in her good coat, took the handles and wheeled Madam Seol off down the corridor toward the lift without a word, and the old woman, as she passed, laid two fingers on Ahreum's sleeve and did not look round.

Nobody had spoken to the girl.

She left last. She went down the room alone, in her lavender jacket, with her bag over her shoulder and a white handkerchief folded small in her hand, and at the doors a young man in a dark suit, an associate of Cha's, who had been told that he was to see her to a room on the eleventh floor where counsel for the Commission would be waiting, held one of them open. He did not touch her. He bowed. She looked at him as if she did not know what the gesture meant, and then she bowed back, very low, with perfect exactness, as she had been taught.

She stopped on the landing.

She did not turn her head. She stood on the top step, small and straight, with her face to the grey window at the end of the corridor, and Ahreum, who had followed to the door and stood in it, heard her say, to the glass, in the flat small voice, quite without sweetness:

"The rabbit was never for anyone else."

Then she went down the three stairs, one at a time, with her hand on the rail, and the young man went after her, and the lift took them.

It was twenty past twelve, and the corridor had emptied.

She stood against the wall by the high window with her coat over her arm and her glasses in her hand. She had taken them off without noticing. The pale winter light lay along the carpet. Somewhere far off, behind a closed door, a man's rumpled cheerful voice was asking whether there was any more tea, and another, much drier, was telling him that there was not.

She did not feel triumphant. She had looked for it, with the care of a woman looking for her keys. There was no flag in her anywhere. There was only a long grey quiet, such as one finds in a house after a funeral, and a small steady ache under the breastbone, and the plain physical fact that her knees were not quite certain that they would go on holding her up.

He was standing a hand's breadth away.

He had come out after her. He did not speak. He stood with his back against the wall beside her, in the charcoal coat, with his hands at his sides and his head tipped back against the plaster, looking at the ceiling. His face was wet. He had not wiped it. He looked like a man who has walked a very long way, in the dark, and has arrived at a place that is smaller than he feared, and quite ordinary, and has found that he can sit down in it.

"That was not winning," said Hajin, at last, to the ceiling.

"No."

"I had thought that it would be."

"So had I." She turned her head against the wall and looked at him. "I find that I should prefer it not to have been."

He made a small sound that was almost a laugh. His hand, hanging at his side, moved by an inch, and lay palm upward against the wall, between them, in the light.

She looked at it.

It was the hand with the old white seam across the knuckle. She had kissed it once in a grey room. She had held it on a stone rail in the snow, and in a crowded boardroom that very morning, in front of twelve directors, with the whole of her face bare. She looked at it, open on the plaster, in the pale noon, and her own right hand, with the gold ring too large on its third finger, turned over of its own accord, and she felt the small round shape of it press against her palm.

It had a lid. She had not opened it in ten years but four times.

"Hajin," said Ahreum.

"Ahreum."

"I have one thing that I have not yet given you."

He turned his head. He did not ask. He looked at her, with the tears drying on his face and the grey light on his hair, and the whole of his attention came to rest on the ring on her finger, and then on her face, and she watched him decide, very gently, to wait.