The house woke like paper taking ink.
Frost thinned on the reeds; the stream repeated yesterday’s lesson with quiet certainty. Inside, mats waited in even rows and the window made a tidy rectangle of light across the floor. Dalmae had already decided which square of warmth belonged to her. Buk-i sat on the sill as if the door were his exam to proctor.
“Good morning, Seonsaeng-nim,” the girls said, not quite in unison.
“Good morning,” Ah-Rin answered, smoothing calm into the room with her voice. “We’ll start with breath. Your hand listens to it.”
They began with Hangul: consonants and vowels, then the way they live together as blocks. Ah-Rin wrote three syllables on the board and said, “We don’t hide the pieces; we arrange them. 가, 고, 구—listen. The first is ‘ga,’ the second ‘go,’ the third ‘gu.’ Feel how the mouth changes? The brush must follow.”
Han-Byeol, already on her favourite mat, pressed her lips into each shape before the brush moved. Seol-Ha rested her wrist and tried again when a line went stubborn; she did not scold it, just let it breathe.
Ah-Rin tapped lightly twice on the board. “Roof up, roof down,” she reminded them, and the whole room matched the rhythm—two soft heartbeats, then a stroke.
“For markets,” she added, turning the chalk to a single hinge, “you will meet a character like this: 十. We say it sip—ten. You hear ‘sip’ when prices run high or fair. Now you can see it as well.”
“Sip,” Han-Byeol repeated, pleased to put a sound where a shape had been.
They wrote names. They circled dates. They laughed, once, when Dalmae’s tail erased a perfect syllable, and only then learned the art of forgiving a smudge without letting it spread.
Seol-Ha lifted her brush. “Seonsaeng-nim—why does this curve feel like a pause?”
“Because it is,” Ah-Rin said. “Some sounds are doors. You open them slowly; you don’t rush through.”
“Imo—” Seol-Ha began out of habit, then flushed, and corrected softly, “Seonsaeng-nim.”
Ah-Rin only nodded; the corner of her mouth warmed. “Both are true,” she said, and set the next line.
The last strokes of the hour were drying when a shadow paused across the threshold. In-Su stood there, flour at his cuffs, the day’s work on his sleeves, eyes softening the instant they found Han-Byeol.
“Byeol-ah,” he said, voice gone warm. “Show me what your Seonsaeng-nim taught you today.”
Han-Byeol hopped to her feet, nearly rearranging Dalmae—who forgave her solely because forgiveness was warm. She lifted her practice sheet like a banner.
“We learned about time,” she announced, pointing to the tidy corner note. “This one is 日—il—‘day.’ And if you see 月—wol—‘month,’ you stack them in your head when you read a receipt.”
“日,” In-Su echoed carefully, the way you do when your child is measuring you. “Good.”
Ah-Rin stepped closer. “Your brush is lighter today,” she told Han-Byeol. “Your wrist remembered to breathe.”
Han-Byeol glanced up at her. “Seonsaeng-nim says some sounds are doors,” she explained to her father. “We opened one.”
“Did you, now?” He looked pleased in a way that left very little for pride to do. Then he turned to Ah-Rin and bowed a fraction deeper than he used to. “Ah-Rin-ssi,” he said, formal around the edges, “thank you—for the door.”
“In-Su-ssi,” she answered, steady, and felt the small, unexpected catch of it under her ribs. He had once said her name without the porch light of a suffix; now he set it on a step and knocked. She did not invite him in or send him away. The politeness stood between them like a carefully placed tray.
Buk-i, who respected exactly three people and one routine, positioned himself at the lintel to witness the exchange for the ledger of cats.
“What else?” In-Su asked his daughter, breaking the stillness with a smile. “Something ridiculous to impress a baker.”
Han-Byeol brightened. “A price trick! 十—sip—ten. If you see 二十—i-sip—twenty, you do not argue about how many buns that is.” She glanced up at him. “But you can ask for one more.”
“That is not the trick we discussed,” he said, but his mouth betrayed him. “We’ll read labels properly, then negotiate improperly.”
He set a wrapped loaf on the table. No chalk today. Han-Byeol fetched the chalk without being asked, wrote bread in neat letters.
In-Su inclined his head to Ah-Rin again. “Seonsaeng-nim,” he said, respectful, deliberate.
She returned the nod. “In-Su-ssi.”
On another day, long after this one, she would laugh about how two syllables could be a wall and a bridge at once. Today she only felt it, and filed the feeling beside the lesson plan.
“Go on,” she told Han-Byeol. “Take your 日 and see if the sky agrees with it.”
Han-Byeol slipped her hand into her father’s, already telling him about roofs and legs that refuse to wobble. Dalmae escorted them to the step, accepted payment in the form of a chin scratch, and returned to her sun-square to supervise the drying pages as if civilisation depended on it.
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When the hour folded, the girls left their pages to dry on the string like laundry. Buk-i inspected each sheet for structural integrity, which looked very much like sitting in exactly the worst place.
“Guard well,” Jin-Ho said dryly from the doorway, and Buk-i flicked an ear as if promotions were premature.
Most of the girls tumbled away in a ripple of chatter. Seol-Ha lingered, gathering stray bristles and the one brush that always tried to hide. The room felt different in the thin quiet, like a pot left warm on the hob.
“Imo,” she said now, outside the lesson’s frame, and the word fitted the air at last. “May I show you something?”
“Of course.”
Seol-Ha set a fresh sheet on the low table, steadied the corner with two fingers the way Ah-Rin did, and wrote a short couplet she had been carrying behind her teeth all morning. The hand was careful, the lines unpretending. It spoke not about notes at all, but about the way a winter sun unknots a room.
She waited. Not for judgment—she knew the difference—but for the kind of answer that adds wood to a fire rather than water.
“You’ve written lyrics,” Ah-Rin said, as if naming a craft. “You’ve given the music a spine.”
“Is that allowed?” Seol-Ha asked, half laughing at herself. “For… people like us?”
“Allowed isn’t the word,” Ah-Rin said. “Useful is. True is. If a thing is both, it deserves a life. Name the feeling first; the notes will follow.”
Seol-Ha breathed out a sound that might one day be a song. “I want… both. To play and to write.”
“Then we will learn both hands,” Ah-Rin said. She stepped behind Seol-Ha and, with the lightest touch at the wrist, loosened a crease. “Don’t strangle the line. Give it air and it will behave.”
Voices drifted from the lane—someone hawking greens, someone laughing at a joke too long to repeat. The stream kept its steady counsel. On the sill, Dalmae arranged herself like a comma that meant “continue.”
Seol-Ha set the sheet aside. “Thank you,” she said, and meant: for answering the right question, the one under the visible one.
“You’ll thank me when you’re mending your own crooked lines without me,” Ah-Rin said. “Go on. Your brother will count the sky and pretend he’s reading.”
She met Jin-Ho at the door. He had the look he wore when he’d finished three chores and wanted credit for none of them.
“Well,” he said, eyeing the drying string, “you’ve left evidence.”
Seol-Ha rolled her eyes. “Ink stains and daydreams. Is that our indictment today?”
“Only if you bleed on the accounts,” he returned, though he checked the latch without thinking and looked up the lane as if measuring weather.
They walked side by side, not quite matching. Buk-i considered escorting them and decided against it on principle. The winter sun had warmed enough to soften the edges of shadows.
“You treat me like a child,” Seol-Ha said, which was not fully true and very fully felt.
“I treat you like a person who forgets to eat when she’s making beauty,” he said. “Someone in this family is committed to bodily survival.”
“Imo says I’m writing lyrics now,” she said, choosing not to quarrel with the rest. “Not just humming in circles.”
“She’s right,” Jin-Ho said, too quick for teasing. “You’ve been doing it for months. You only needed permission to call it by its name.”
She stopped, surprised, then pretended she hadn’t, then sped up. “You could have said.”
“I am saying,” he replied, neutrally grand. “Don’t make me repeat myself; ink is expensive.”
She laughed and shoved him with her shoulder. He allowed exactly one step of stagger before righting like a well-built plank, then glanced at the slope ahead.
“Race to the willow?” he said.
“You’ll trip.”
“I’ll win,” he said, already gone.
They ran, which is another form of argument: all heat, no injury. Breath burned sweet and cold.
Seol-Ha got to the willow first—or perhaps Jin-Ho allowed it; his face kept its mysteries and his lungs made their objections. They leaned against the old trunk and panted, then laughed as if they hadn’t meant to.
“Daydreams,” he said, softer.
“Ledgers,” she returned, equally kind.
“Both,” he conceded, and nudged her towards home. The stream kept up with them without trying. The day widened by the width of a syllable they’d learned to pronounce.
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The lane tipped them into the market like a stream joining sea. Fish blinked on racks; brass scales argued with beans; the day smelled of brine and hot iron. The girls walked in a small fleet—two by two—Seonsaeng-nim at the prow. Seol-Ha carried the slate; Han-Byeol kept time with the soft two-beat tap against her palm.
“Read the world,” Ah-Rin said. “It’s generous if you ask politely.”
They stopped at a grocer’s signboard. At the top sat a single, fat character, 米.33Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡz98mAz4x0u
Han-Byeol squinted, then ventured, “Mi—rice.” Below it, the Hangul line—쌀—waited like a helpful whisper. She grinned, proud of both.
“Good.” Ah-Rin pointed to the right, where 十 sat in a vertical string of numerals. “We met sip—ten—this morning. You can hear it in prices; you can see it here. Put your ear on the chalk.”
They moved to the bakery. In-Su stood behind the counter, sleeves dusted with flour, expression doing its best to pretend he wasn’t watching for them. “Seonsaeng-nim,” he said evenly, and Ah-Rin felt the politeness land like a neat weight on the table. “Field trip?”
“A small one,” she replied. “In-Su-ssi, may we borrow your board?”
He lifted the chalk with theatrical reluctance and stepped aside. Han-Byeol sounded out the top line, careful as if crossing a stream on winter stones. “Three dous and… ten mun,” she read, eyes flicking from 三斗 + 十文 to the quieter Hangul line beneath. She looked up for permission to be pleased.
“Almost,” In-Su said, the corner of his mouth admitting he had been trying not to smile for at least a minute. “Say dŏ for 斗—close enough for this alley. And if anyone charges you twenty for that loaf, tell them you know the board says ten.”
“Yes, Appa,” Han-Byeol said, not taking her eyes off the numbers, as if praise might run away if she blinked.
They practised prices twice more, then thanked him. “You’ll faint mid-verb if you don’t eat,” In-Su added, setting down a day-old loaf with a sternness that fooled no one. “For the scholars.”
“Thank you, In-Su-ssi,” Ah-Rin said. The honorific tasted like a small distance.
A bolt of colour drew them to Nam Seung-Mo’s stall: dyed threads, neat bales of cloth, a tidy pyramid of tins and packets that made a papermaker’s heart count supplies—alum, starch, felting cloth, skeins for tying frames, and—rare, precious—bundles of tororo-aoi root, dried to pale sticks that would become the neri mucilage a mill bleeds for.
“Seonsaeng-nim,” Merchant Nam said with silk-sleeve courtesy. He was all correct angles and careful teeth. “I hear you are opening doors.”
“We are reading the street,” Ah-Rin said.
“And inside the school?” His gaze slid to Seol-Ha and back. “Do you teach proper characters? The classics? Or only—” a small, civil pause “—women’s script.”
“Hangul first,” Ah-Rin said, voice the same temperature as the morning. “Enough Hanja to read prices, dates, units, names, and seals. We teach what life uses.”
“A practical mind.” He considered the neat stacks of his own livelihood as if they might volunteer an opinion. “Practicality loves attachment. To a house. To a name men know.”
He brushed imaginary dust from a tin of alum. “We will, of course, continue to supply. But the times are… alert. Credit terms must be shorter. Deliveries, post-settlement. Until things are more properly… attached.”
Behind Ah-Rin, the girls’ breaths came a fraction higher. Seol-Ha’s chin turned to a small blade; Han-Byeol’s fingers started counting on their own.
“Understood,” Ah-Rin said. She did not look back at them. “Thank you for your clarity.”
He inclined his head—everything precise, everything deniable. “Tools are fine,” he said, smoothing the tororo bundle with one fingertip. “Who holds them decides the season.”
They moved on. At the well, Ah-Rin let the girls crowd around the slate and release their indignation into numbers—adding, subtracting, turning credit into days of paper the mill would have to make without easy alum and with tired felts. “Count the cost,” she said, quietly enough that only Seol-Ha heard. “We’ll choose where it lands.”
On their way back up, Han-Byeol’s usual joyful little giggles infected them all again and replaced the thin merchant’s politeness. But not for long.
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They saw it before they heard anything—the chalk cut hard into the grain above the door, a set of tall strokes that tried to look like law. Ah-Rin stepped close. The girls bunched behind her, breath snagging.
“Read it,” she said, voice steady.
Han-Byeol swallowed, squared herself to the wood, and traced the air with one finger. “女不讀,” she sounded carefully. “Yeo bul dok— ‘women do not read.’”
Silence held for a small, painful count. Then Seol-Ha’s chin turned narrow. “Shall I find whoever wrote it?”
“No,” Ah-Rin said. “We will find our words.”
She went inside and laid a clean sheet on the low table. “We answer in Hangul first—our everyday door.” She wrote the sentence slowly, letting each block breathe. 이문은배움을환영합니다. She tapped beneath it with the brush-end. “Say it.”
The class read aloud together; the translation tucked inside the sound. “This door welcomes learning.”
Again, softer, as if to stitch it into the room: “This door welcomes learning.”
“Good.” Ah-Rin nodded to Jin-Ho, who had already fetched two bowls—one clear water, one cloudy with rinsed rice-water. “Rice-water is kind,” he murmured for the younger ones. “It softens; it doesn’t bite.”
They carried the bowls to the threshold. Buk-i rose from the sill like a drawn bow and planted himself wide, tail thick, as if claiming the inches that mattered. Seol-Ha stood on the stool to reach; Han-Byeol held the cloth; the two other girls steadied the stool legs with both hands as if they were holding up a small part of the world.
Ah-Rin dampened the cloth in clear water first, loosened the chalk, then pressed the rice-water after, patient circles that made the hateful strokes go pale, then paler, then gone.
She pinned the fresh sheet inside the door, at eye height. “We keep this here for a week,” she said. “And we make a copy to take home to any house that wants it.”
A small hand went up. “Seonsaeng-nim,” the youngest asked, “what if they come back with bigger chalk?”
“Then we come back with steadier hands,” Ah-Rin said. “And more bowls.”
From the lane, Hye-Won watched for a moment—four girls, one teacher, two cats, a clean threshold. Pride rose like heat; behind it, that careful ache again, the one that tells a mother the air is thinning because wings have started to open. She turned away smiling, because some scenes should be witnessed only once.
When the last wet mark had gone to a faint sheen, Seol-Ha hopped down, handing the cloth to Jin-Ho. “There,” she said, and if triumph sounded like a bell in a pocket, this was that sound.
“Lesson’s done,” Ah-Rin said gently. “Go home before the light loses its nerve.”
They bowed. “Thank you, Seonsaeng-nim.” Outside the room, halfway down the step, Seol-Ha added, quietly and without looking back, “Goodnight, Imo.” The word landed like a warm pebble in Ah-Rin’s palm and stayed there.
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Morning light gathered early along the rafters. The mill breathed its wet, even breath; the yard smelled of steamed bark and winter river. Inside, Eun-Jae sat in the half-light with the gayageum across his lap. He tightened one peg a whisper, then loosened it back the same whisper, listening for the honest centre of the note.
Seol-Ha settled opposite, knees tucked, instrument mirroring his. She began the melody she had been courting all week. It came out sure-footed in the first bar, stumbled over its own cleverness in the second, and then—catching itself—walked on with the dignity of someone who meant it after all.
Eun-Jae did not correct. He reached to the bridge and, without drama, replaced a string that had frayed invisibly—a failure you could not see, only hear, the kind that ruins a good day at the worst possible moment. He slid a scrap of paper across the floor: notations in his tidy hand, a slightly different spacing here, a held breath there. When she reached the line he’d adjusted, he tapped a rhythm once—up, down—and left his hand where it had been, as if nothing had happened.
Seol-Ha did not look up. She played the phrase again, this time with the space he had drawn for her. The note opened like a room taking light. Her shoulders unlocked. She didn’t say thank you because it would have been the wrong size of word. She played it again instead.
From the kitchen doorway, Hye-Won watched them bent over the same instrument—the man she had chosen, the girl they had raised—two backs, one patience. Pride swelled, and with it the ache every mother learns to welcome if she means what she says about wings. Dalmae took this as permission to claim the exact length of floor between them, tail a metronome no composition had requested but would tolerate.
Eun-Jae leaned back at last, listening to the melody complete itself without his hand. “Don’t rush the last bar,” he said, which was how he said I hear you. Seol-Ha didn’t rush it. She let it stand the way a grown thing stands when no one is holding it up.
Outside, the river repeated the lesson in its own language—steady, necessary, unremarkable to anyone who hadn’t tried to tune one note all morning.
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Steam from the stew made its own weather in the kitchen. The mill’s breath kept time; the day’s damp clung pleasantly to the rafters. Hye-Won ladled bowls while Eun-Jae checked the latch on the back door—one habit for storms, one for neighbours. Seol-Ha slid the spoons into reach; Jin-Ho arrived with the slate tucked to his chest as if it were a junior ledger to be seated and fed.
“Nam Seung-Mo showed his hand,” Ah-Rin said, taking the place opposite Hye-Won at the low table. “Short credit. Deliveries after settlement. Until things are ‘attached’.”
“Alum?” Hye-Won asked.
“And starch. Felting cloth. A bundle of tororo-aoi I was counting on at month’s end.” Ah-Rin’s tone stayed factual, which meant it had not yet reached her bone. “He was very polite.”
“The worst are,” Hye-Won said. “He’s not blocking the door. He’s thinning the floorboards.”
“Exactly.”
Jin-Ho set the slate between them, careful not to invade anyone’s rice. A neat grid waited: Hangul along the rows for item names—alum, starch, felts, neri—and Hanja at the top for dates and units: 日 (il, day), 月 (wol, month), 斤 (geun, weight), 斗 (do, measure). Beside each, a slim whisper for the reader outside their town. “If the girls help me enter deliveries,” he said, almost shy of offering something large, “they’ll read the rows and recognise the hinges. We’ll see the squeeze in numbers, not only in the gut.”
Hye-Won studied the grid, the steady hand that had made it, the boy who had become himself while she was busy sewing days together. “Good,” she said. “Put it by the window. Light likes honest tables.”
Eun-Jae looked to Ah-Rin. “Space before walls again,” he said. “We’ll shift one rack from the workshop to the stream-house. If Nam starves your paste, you can borrow ours and curse me later.”
“I don’t curse you,” she said, smiling. “Only your stubborn pegs.”
He made a show of being wounded. She let him.
“After tonight,” Hye-Won said. “We eat first.”
They did. Eun-Jae passed a dish and let his fingers stall against Hye-Won’s palm half a heartbeat longer than needed; she tapped his wrist in reply, a private beat that belonged to them and made the room larger by a measure no ledger could show.
When the bowls were set aside, Jin-Ho placed a second slate next to the first—inventory, not just ledger. “If alum drops below this line,” he said, drawing a neat mark where it would sit at a glance, “we switch to the reserve bundle and put the girls on weights practice—how to measure precisely when you can’t afford to waste.”
“Teach them that soon,” Hye-Won said. “Precision is kindness. To paper. To hands. To any house with a budget.”
Ah-Rin laughed softly. “Master Im would have liked you,” she said.
“He would have liked the mill,” Hye-Won answered, which was, in her mouth, the same as saying he would have liked us.
Outside, someone’s lantern caught and became a small star in the window’s edge. Seol-Ha rose to trim the wick; Jin-Ho chalked tomorrow’s date—日 under 月—careful, legible, no flourish. Dalmae installed herself against the warmest bowl, pretending she was an instrument left out to cool. Buk-i reviewed both slates, stepped precisely onto the corner that would prevent further writing, and closed his eyes as if accounting were a patrol best conducted lying down.
“Lanterns by the stream?” Seol-Ha asked, unable to keep the hope from her voice. “They’ll all be there.”
“They will,” Hye-Won said. “Finish your chores, then go.”
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By the time the sun folded itself into the water, lanterns had been coaxed into little moons along the stream below the mill. The reeds drew their shadows thin and the air smelled of sesame and wood smoke, of bread cut on a board that still remembered flour. Friends found the low benches by instinct, making a circle that wasn’t drawn but existed anyway.
Mi-Young arrived first with a basket and the sort of authority a good loaf carries. In-Su followed, setting down cups and a knife so sharp it looked kind.
Madam Hong breezed in with the laugh of a woman who had never once apologised for being right, and no plans to start.
Han-Byeol tucked herself where the light made reading easiest. Seol-Ha tuned her strings with the patient vanity of someone who knows the room wants to hear and intends not to disappoint. Jin-Ho, lantern-keeper tonight, checked each wick and trimmed what would smoke.
Dalmae performed a thorough inspection of laps. Buk-i elected to patrol the perimeter as if enemy accountants might arrive.
A soft throat-clearing sounded at the lane; the sound people make when they’ve arrived with something that matters. Eun-Sook stepped into the light, a cloth-wrapped bundle in the crook of her arm.
“Before anyone argues about who eats first,” she said, “we settle it by seniority.” She handed the bundle to Hye-Won with mock severity; the wrap opened to dried persimmons and a small jar of mulberry-leaf tea.
“Eomeoni,” Hye-Won said, and the word warmed the air.
Eun-Sook brushed her cheek with a thumb that had learned every child’s temperature by touch. Then she turned to Ah-Rin, softer still. “Ah-Rin-ah,” she said, “you’ve set a table with letters on it. I approve.”
From the lane came the steady tread of a man who knew how to carry his own name. Master Baek—In-Su’s father—returned from his short trip with dust on his cuffs and an expression that refused to say what it had already decided. In-Su stood, respectful without ceremony. “Abeoji,” he said.
“Evening,” Master Baek answered, scanning the circle, the neat presence of work done and put away. His gaze settled on Ah-Rin. “You must be the Seonsaeng-nim I keep hearing about,” he said, with the crisp humour of a merchant who knows titles are tools.
Ah-Rin bowed, surprised into a smile. “Thank you for coming, Master Baek.”
“I hear you are teaching girls to read what will be used,” he went on, as if reporting an inventory he liked the look of. “That honours a house more than decorations nobody can price.”
His hand found Mi-Young’s shoulder—the old gentleness of a husband who had learned where a day begins. “If you need felting cloth before a delivery, we’ll find a way. Accounts can keep their own pace.”
In-Su’s eyes flicked, not quite hiding relief. “Thank you, Abeoji.”
“Don’t thank me for ordinary sense,” Master Baek replied. “Thank me when it’s difficult.” He took a seat, the circle breathing out to make room. The matter was settled the way good decisions are—in the open, with bread warm and knives honest.
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Seol-Ha let her fingers discover the first tune—nothing grand, just a road for the room to walk on together. The melody found footholds in the quiet talk: Madam Hong advising Mi-Young on how to bully treacherous dough; Jin-Ho explaining to Han-Byeol how wicks prefer to be trimmed; Eun-Jae adjusting a peg by a hair and pretending he hadn’t; Hye-Won passing a bowl to Ah-Rin and letting their hands meet in that small “we” that makes everything else possible.
In-Su stood near the edge of the light, careful with his distance. “Seonsaeng-nim,” he said once, passing cups. Ah-Rin answered, “In-Su-ssi,” and if the tiny sting showed anywhere, it only showed to her.
Han-Byeol, who had the unerring sense children possess for unspoken temperatures, dragged a cushion between them and announced that Seol-Ha’s second song was better indoors or outdoors depending on whether you believed stars listened.
“Indoors first,” Seol-Ha decreed, and played a chorus that made the paper walls hum and then a softer part that slipped back outside to see how the reeds felt about it. The lanterns swayed as if they approved.
The stream carried the last crumbs of light down to the harbour. In the circle, hunger quieted into talk, talk into listening, listening into the kind of silence that arrives when a house is full and no one is missing who should be there.
Hye-Won looked across the circle to Ah-Rin and asked the question that had been waiting all day. “When did this begin for you?”
Eun-Sook’s hand found Ah-Rin’s shoulder—steady, warm, not urging. A small nod: I’m here. Whatever it is, you don’t carry it alone.
Ah-Rin set her hand on the bone folder she had brought from the shelf, its smooth weight warmed by her palm. She did not hide it; she placed it on the low table where anyone could see. “In Hanyang,” she said, and the circle adjusted itself a little closer, like pages pressed together. “A page that should have lived was pulped.”
“By whom?” Master Baek asked, not as a challenge, but the way a ledger asks for a name to complete the line.
“By the kind of good manners that empties a room,” Ah-Rin said. “I will tell you.”
The lanterns made small oceans on the paper walls. Seol-Ha set her instrument down and folded her hands like a student again; Jin-Ho let the flame he had been guarding drop into a steady blue; Mi-Young wiped a crumb from Han-Byeol’s cheek with a tenderness that refused to apologise for itself.
Ah-Rin looked quietly back to the circle of the people closest to her. Friends. Family. Her voice, when it came, was even.
“There’s a reason I won’t back down.”
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