It was Taewon who cooked, because it had always been Taewon who cooked.

At twenty to midnight the kitchen of Hajin's apartment smelled of boiling water and sesame oil and the faint metallic tang of a pot that was owned far more often than it was used. The apartment was on the thirty-first floor of a building in Yongsan with a doorman and a concierge and a lobby like a hotel, and in the nine months Hajin had lived in it he had cooked there exactly twice. Taewon had arrived at eleven with a plastic bag from the corner store, said nothing about the hour, and gone straight to the cupboard where the one good pot lived.

"Sit," he said now.

"I'm not hungry."

"That isn't what I asked."

Hajin sat. The island counter was white stone, cold under his forearms, and the whole south wall of the room was glass. Beyond it the river lay black and wide, strung with the lights of its bridges, and beyond the river was the long dark rank of towers behind which, he knew without looking, there was a hill. He had arranged the stool so that his back was to the window. He had told himself it was for the warmth of the stove.

Taewon worked with the unhurried economy of a man who had been feeding himself on a budget since the age of sixteen. Two packs of instant noodles into the water. A single egg cracked against the rim of the pot and slid in whole. A fistful of spring onion, chopped with a knife that was far too expensive for the purpose, and a slice of processed cheese laid on top to melt, which Hajin's stylist would have called a crime and which was, in his private opinion, the best thing that had ever been done to a bowl of ramyeon. The smell rose and filled the room, and something in his stomach, which had been closed like a fist since the boardroom, made a small, undignified sound.

Taewon heard it. He said nothing. He ladled the noodles into two white bowls and put one in front of Hajin with a pair of chopsticks laid across the top.

"Eat, Professor."

"Don't call me that."

"You earned it. You read the encyclopedia in the school library. Alphabetically."

"I got as far as the letter M."

"You got as far as the letter M and lectured me on the Mesopotamians for a month." Taewon sat down on the next stool and blew across his own bowl. "Eat. I'm not going to talk until you've had at least five mouthfuls. I counted the last three weeks. You eat when I tell you to eat or you don't eat at all."

Hajin picked up the chopsticks. The first mouthful was so hot it hurt. The second was better. By the fourth he was aware that his shoulders, which had been set at the same rigid angle since the signing of the pilot agreement, had begun very slowly to come down, and by the sixth he had stopped pretending that this was a favour he was doing his friend.

"Good," said Taewon, without looking up.

They ate in silence for a while. The refrigerator hummed. The window held their two reflections, a man in shirtsleeves with his cuffs rolled and a man in a rumpled blazer with a tie hanging out of his pocket like a tongue, sitting side by side under a pool of yellow light, and behind them the unlit room went back into darkness.

The notebook was on the counter between the salt and the pepper mill.

Hajin had not meant to leave it there. He had brought it out of the study at some point in the evening, in the course of a restless circuit of the apartment, and set it down beside the stove and forgotten it. It lay with its black cover turned up. Taewon's eyes went to it once, then away, with the delicacy of a man stepping around a sleeping dog.

"You've been writing in it again," he said.

"It's nothing."

"It's the one from the stationery shop. You haven't taken it out since the second year of the company."

"It's a list." Hajin put down his chopsticks. "Details that don't fit. That's all. I have a habit of recording anomalies. Mr. Gu's daughter. The boy in the pantry. The driver. The woman on the stairs." He heard his voice tightening and could not stop it. "It means nothing. She remembers people's names because remembering is useful. It's the oldest technique there is. Every politician, every salesman, every manipulator who ever lived understands that the cheapest way to make a person feel owed is to remember how his mother's knee is healing. Seol Ahreum is the most efficient person I have ever met at making people feel owed. That's all it is. It's efficiency."

He stopped. The silence that followed had a particular quality, and it took him a moment to place it.

Taewon had set his chopsticks down across the rim of his bowl. He was looking at Hajin with an expression that Hajin had seen exactly once before, on the night bus ten years ago, in the long yellow light of a bad winter. It was the face of a man standing at the edge of a frozen pond and deciding whether to step out.

"What?" said Hajin.

"You've said her name five times in the last two minutes."

"It's the plan, Taewon. It's the target. I say it all the time."

"You say it," said Taewon, "when it's the plan. I say it when it's the plan. That's the arrangement." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "There's another rule. The one under it. You remember it."

Hajin remembered it.

It had been the week after the video. He had been sitting in the back row of the last bus home with his forehead against the window and a face like wet paper, and Taewon had come and sat beside him and had not said a word for eleven stops. And then, at the twelfth, Hajin had said, in a voice that did not sound like his own: *We never talk about that day. Not what you saw, not what anybody said, not what it was like. If it comes up, you change the subject. You promise me.* And Taewon, sixteen and awkward and furiously loyal, had said: *I promise.*

"We don't discuss it," said Hajin now, very quietly.

"No."

"That was the rule."

"It was a good rule. I kept it for ten years." Taewon looked down at his bowl. "I'm going to break it, Hajin. I'm sorry. I thought about it all the way over here, and I'm going to anyway."

Hajin's hand had closed on the edge of the counter.

"Don't."

"I was at the table by the kitchen doors. The one behind the pillar. You can't have forgotten, we always sat there. When Kangmin stood up and called your name, I saw it. I saw the whole thing from the side, and I couldn't get through the crowd." His voice was steady, and it cost him. "I could have shouted. I could have thrown something. I sat there with my tray and I did nothing, because I was afraid of losing the stipend, and because everyone else was doing nothing, and because I thought, God forgive me, that it would be over in a minute. That's why I kept the rule. Not because you asked. Because I was ashamed."

"It wasn't your fault."

"I know it wasn't. Let me finish." Taewon drew a breath. "After you left, I went out after you. I waited a minute so nobody would see, and then I went, and I couldn't find you. You'd gone into the east stairwell. I stood at the corner of the corridor, by the water fountain, and I saw her."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"Seol Ahreum was standing in the hallway," said Taewon. "By herself. About ten metres from the fountain, with her back flat against the wall. She hadn't gone back to her table. She hadn't gone back into the cafeteria. She was standing there looking at the place where you had been, and her hand was closed around her sleeve so tightly that I could see the whites of her knuckles from where I was. She wasn't smiling. She wasn't talking to anyone. She looked," and here he hesitated, and chose the word with care, "she looked like a person who had been sick and had not yet been able to sit down."

Hajin did not move.

"She stayed there a long time. I counted. Almost four minutes. Then she saw me, and her whole face closed, like a door, and she walked off in the other direction. That's all. I didn't see anything else. I didn't hear anything. I have nothing, Hajin, I have a feeling and a pair of white knuckles." He turned on his stool at last and looked straight at his friend. "But she did not laugh. She didn't film. She wasn't one of them. I've known that for ten years, and I've kept it in a drawer because you asked me to, and I think I was wrong to."

The anger came up so fast that he could taste it.

It was not hot. It was never hot, not anymore. It was a cold clean steady thing, as smooth as a blade, and it rose through him from the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair and left him perfectly, courteously calm.

"That's very interesting," said Hajin.

Taewon closed his eyes briefly.

"A girl stands in a corridor with her hand on her sleeve. She is, as you say, unwell. There are many reasons for a person to feel unwell after an incident of that kind. Guilt is one. A sense that she has gone further than she intended. A fear of being reported." His voice was low and even, polite as a letter. "Or perhaps it was only the smell of the fish."

"Hajin."

"Or perhaps she was waiting to see if the show would continue. It is a common habit among the people who enjoy these things, I understand. They like to see how it ends."

"You don't believe that."

"I believe," said Hajin, "that a woman stood in the middle of a cafeteria with two hundred witnesses and told a boy to pick up his mess. I believe there is a forty-one-second recording that says so. I believe I have been looking at it, on and off, for ten years." He lifted his chin. "I am not going to revise ten years of evidence because you saw some knuckles in a hallway."

"I'm not asking you to."

"Then what are you asking?"

"I'm asking," said Taewon, so gently that it was worse than shouting, "whether you want the truth. Or whether you want somebody to hate."

The refrigerator hummed on. Somewhere very far below, a car alarm began to whoop and stopped. The noodles in Hajin's bowl had gone cold, and a thin skin of fat was setting over the broth.

It was not that he had no answer. He had a great many answers. He had a clean, hard, devastating one ready, the kind of sentence that left a mark. He opened his mouth to deliver it and found that it would not come, as if the words had been wedged somewhere behind his sternum by a hand he could not see.

"That," he said at last, and his voice had a crack in it, "is the cruellest thing you have ever said to me."

"I know."

"I could fire you for that."

"You could," Taewon agreed. "You'd have to find somebody else to cook."

A sound escaped Hajin that was not quite a laugh. He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes and sat like that for a few seconds, in the yellow light, with his elbow on the cold stone. When he lowered it again the kitchen had come back, small and bright and ordinary, and Taewon was still sitting there with his tired amiable face and his tie sticking out of his pocket.

"Do you have evidence?" Hajin said.

"No."

"A name. A photograph. A witness."

"Not yet." Taewon picked up his chopsticks and put them down again. "But I'm going to look. Quietly. Without telling you every step, so you can't talk me out of it. If I find nothing, I'll say so, and I'll never raise it again. If I find something, you'll hear it from me first, and you'll listen. That's my price for the last ten years."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then I'll look anyway, and you can fire me properly."

Hajin looked at him for a long moment. He saw the familiar rumpled collar, the shadows under the eyes, the long, stubborn line of the jaw. He thought of a boy of sixteen sitting at the end of a bus seat, saying *I promise*. He thought: *this is the only person in the world who has never once asked me for anything.*

"Fine," he said.

"Fine?"

"Look. But you don't bring me anything until it's solid. No impressions. No knuckles."

"Understood."

He picked up his chopsticks. His hand was shaking very slightly, and he held it against the rim of the bowl until it stopped.

It was a quarter past midnight when he spoke again, and he had not intended to.

They had cleared the bowls. Taewon had washed them, because he always did, and had left them upside down on the rack with the quick, practical tidiness of a man who had spent years washing other people's dishes for pocket money. The kitchen had gone quiet and dim. Hajin sat on his stool with his hands loose between his knees, looking at nothing.

"Do you know what I was most afraid of?" he said.

Taewon, drying his hands, did not answer. He had learned long ago that the best way to receive a confidence was to stand still and let it arrive.

"It wasn't them. Kangmin and his friends. I knew what they were. They were weather. You put on a coat and you waited." He turned one palm upward and looked at it. "It was that somebody might look at me. Properly. Not the way you look at a joke, but the way you look at a person. And see all of it. The jacket, and the tray, and the whole stupid way I'd learned to hold my arms. And not laugh. And not leave." His voice dropped. "That seemed worse. Because then I would have to be somebody."

He was not aware that his arms had crossed. He was aware only that his forearms had folded themselves flat across his stomach, one over the other, and his hands were tucked into the crook of each elbow, and that his body had curled very slightly forward, like a hand around a flame. It was an old shape. He felt the warmth of his own sleeves against his ribs.

Taewon looked at the arms. He looked at the wall. He looked at the clock above the refrigerator, which said that it was nineteen minutes past midnight, and then he went to the cupboard and took down a glass and filled it at the tap with a great show of attention.

"Water," he said. "You haven't had any."

"Thank you."

"Drink it."

Hajin drank. By the time he set the glass down his arms had returned to the counter, and neither of them said anything about it.

The light in the apartment had gone amber by the time Taewon began putting on his coat. He did it slowly, folding the tie into a pocket, patting down the plastic bag for his keys, and as he reached the door he paused with his hand on the frame.

"One more thing," he said. "Since I'm already in trouble."

"Go on."

"The Daon pension block. The one you told Yurim about at lunch."

"I didn't tell her. She told me."

"That's my point." Taewon did not look round. "I went back over my notes tonight. Two years ago, when you bought the first nine percent, the seller was a Luxembourg intermediary nobody could trace. It was too neat, I said so at the time. You said we were lucky. And I let you, because we were tired and it was cheap. But I've been thinking." He turned the keys over in his hand. "Every time you've needed a piece of information in the last two years, someone has put it in your hands. The first block. The board calendar. The reserve. The pension block. Every time, at the exact moment you were about to go looking. And I've noticed that every time, Seol Yurim was somewhere in the room."

"She's well connected."

"She's very well connected. I keep wondering why."

"She wants the Fund cleaned up."

"Maybe," said Taewon, without conviction. "I'm not saying it's anything. I'm only saying she's always been useful at precisely the right moment, and I've spent my whole life distrusting people who are useful at precisely the right moment." He looked back at last, and his face was careful. "That's all. Good night, Hajin. Sleep. I'm going to put a sandwich in your fridge and you're going to eat it."

The door closed.

Hajin sat alone in the amber light with the black notebook before him and the cold glass in his hand. The apartment ticked and settled around him. He thought, with great clarity, that he ought to go to bed. He thought of nothing else for a long minute.

His phone lit up against the stone.

It was a short message, with a little yellow smile on the end of it, from a name he had saved only a week before.

*Still up? Probably shouldn't be texting, but I had a thought. Before Thursday's committee, it might be worth looking at the consent dates in the pilot's data annex. Just a thought!*

The timestamp read 12:21.

He read it once, and then again, slowly. Then he sat with his thumb over the screen and his friend's last sentence still in the room, as faint as the smell of sesame oil.

*Every time. At the exact moment.*

On the island counter, beside the notebook, the screen dimmed itself, and went dark, and left him alone with his reflection in the glass.