By the time Ah-Rin’s voice found its way back to the mill-house, the night had settled itself comfortably around the eaves.
Lantern-light made small lakes on the paper walls. The stream below kept its own quiet rhythm, the sort of sound that had listened to stories long before any of them were born and fully intended to go on afterwards. Inside, the circle around the low table had drawn tighter of its own accord, like pages pressed to a single spine.
“…and the driver snored all the way through the southern hills,” Ah-Rin was saying, the corners of her mouth tilting. “If a wheel had come off, we would only have known because the snoring rolled to the other side of the cart.”
Han-Byeol’s eyes shone, fixed on her as if nothing else in the world had ever been worth listening to.
“The last stretch was all mud and complaints,” Ah-Rin went on. “His, not mine. I’d run out of complaints by then. And then, one afternoon, the trees opened and I thought, ‘If that isn’t our sea, I’ll climb down and walk back to Hanyang to scold every map-maker personally.’”
A small, held-in ripple of amusement moved through the adults, but no one spoke. Grown mouths knew to let a story finish its own breathing.
Seol-Ha, chin resting on her folded arms, could not quite help herself. “And the lynx?” she asked, gently, as if nudging a familiar melody back to its refrain.
“Ah.” Ah-Rin’s eyes crinkled. “That was a day earlier, near the foot of the pass. We’d stopped so the driver could argue with a stone about whether it was a pothole or a mountain. I was stretching my legs and thinking very proper thoughts about grain prices and curriculum.”
“Proper thoughts?” Han-Byeol echoed, suspicious.
“Very proper,” Ah-Rin assured her. “And then I heard something in the underbrush. I turned, and there it was—a scrap of fur with ears far too large for its body, spots like some careless painter had sneezed ink on it.”
Han-Byeol’s mouth fell open. “A baby lynx?”
“A baby lynx,” Ah-Rin confirmed. “It stared at me as if I had interrupted its very important business. I thought about climbing down to scoop it up, but I decided it would end with me scratched, the lynx offended, and the driver telling everyone in three provinces that I’d lost a fight with a cat the size of a cabbage. So I kept my dignity and stayed in the cart.”
That earned a quiet smile from Hye-Won; even Jin-Ho’s shoulders loosened.
“And then,” Eun-Sook prompted softly from her place at Ah-Rin’s side.
“And then,” Ah-Rin said, voice softening, “the hills emptied themselves out. The air began to smell like home salt instead of city salt. I saw the curve of our bay, and the mill roof, and the old mulberry by the bend. I did what I always do when I don’t know quite how to begin again.”
She looked across to Hye-Won.
“I went to the mill first,” she said. “The rest…” Her hand opened, taking them all in. “The rest is sitting in front of me now.”
The words settled. For a moment, no one spoke.
The stream went on muttering to itself outside. The lamp-flames swayed once in a draught and then held steady. Dalmae, claiming the warmest patch near the hearth, yawned with the kind of indelicate sincerity that only cats and small children are permitted. Buk-i flicked his tail against the leg of the table as if to say that he had been listening the whole time and found the account acceptable.
Inside that breath of silence, each face answered the story in its own way.
Eun-Sook’s hand stayed where it had been all along, resting on her daughter’s shoulder—steadfast, proud, eyes shining but not spilling. Madam Hong’s jaw had set somewhere in the middle of the telling and never quite relaxed; it had the look of a woman quietly recalibrating how many people she was prepared to fight for the rest of her life. Mi-Young’s fingers lay still on her knee, knuckles pale from gripping back all the small noises she might have made in the most dangerous parts.
Jin-Ho sat cross-legged between his parents, hands braced on the floor, gaze a little dazed. His mouth was half open, as if he had questions, too many to choose from, and no idea where to begin with any of them. He glanced at Ah-Rin, then looked quickly away again, cheeks colouring for reasons he could not have explained.
It was Han-Byeol who broke the silence.
“Seonsaeng-nim,” she said, almost whispering at first. Then, stronger: “Ah-Rin Seonsaeng-nim.”
“That story…” She frowned, searching, small fingers knotting in the hem of her jacket. “It feels like… like you went so far away that you became a different person, and then you walked all the way back so you could be that person here instead.”
Her ears flushed pink as she heard herself, but she held Ah-Rin’s gaze. “I’m glad you came back,” she finished simply. “To us.”
In-Su’s mouth softened. He lifted his hand and smoothed it over her hair, fingers lingering at the back of her neck the way you do when you’ve nearly lost things before and intend not to again.
Laughter loosened the room—low, grateful. The thin, strained wire that had hummed under Ah-Rin’s telling eased back into something more like a string on Seol-Ha’s gayageum: still capable of music, but no longer on the brink of snapping.
Madam Hong exhaled loudly through her nose. “Well,” she said. “You chose a steep hill to climb, Ah-Rin-ah. I’m glad you climbed back down in time for supper.”
Eun-Sook gave a small snort. “Next time you decide to wrestle the entire capital,” she said, squeezing her daughter’s shoulder, “you send your mother a letter first.”
“Letters were the problem,” Ah-Rin pointed out. “But I take your meaning, Eomma.”
Seol-Ha, who had been unusually quiet, shifted a little closer and brushed her fingers against Ah-Rin’s wrist. There was something in her eyes now that hadn’t been there when she was a child—an understanding that lives had weight and shape, that choices left marks.
“I’m glad you didn’t stop walking,” she said. It came out calm, almost adult.
“So am I,” Ah-Rin replied.
Jin-Ho cleared his throat. “It’s… good you came back here,” he managed, staring very hard at the table. “It would feel wrong, someone else sitting in your place at the school.”
Ah-Rin’s mouth curved. “I’ll do my best to deserve the seat,” she said.
Across the circle, Eun-Jae’s head was bowed as if he were merely studying the surface of his tea. To anyone who did not know him, his face might have seemed unchanged from the moment the story began: the same still mouth, the same composed gaze, the same hands loose around his cup.
But he wasn’t in the mill-house, not quite.
When Ah-Rin had spoken of the woman in the palace—the one with cranes walking across her sleeves and a voice that never needed to be raised to be heard—something in his chest had tilted.
He had seen her in Ah-Rin’s words as clearly as if she stood by the door now: the careful hands that did not touch paper without reason; the way she could move the weight of a season by lifting a brush no more than half a finger’s width. The unshowy authority of someone who knew exactly where every wall in the palace was, and when to stand in front of one.
Of course it was you, he thought, with a quiet, unexpected warmth. Who else would push the ink in the right direction and pretend it was nothing?
He had told Hye-Won, years ago, the neatest version of his own leaving—enough for trust, not enough to weigh the house down. He had not spoken Yeon-Seo’s name often since. He did not need to, now. Recognition moved through him without ache.
He was grateful, he realised. Grateful in the simple way you are when someone you once loved has done a kindness to someone you love now.
He felt Hye-Won’s gaze before he looked up.
She was watching him from across the circle; head canted the smallest degree. To anyone else, her expression would have seemed simply attentive. But she had spent nearly half her life beside this man. She knew the difference between his listening face and his remembering one.
Her eyes met his. For a heartbeat, something unspoken passed between them—I saw you go somewhere else and I came back—and then the moment slipped into the larger hush as people began to move.
Bowls were stacked; cups refilled for the walk home; children collected blankets and half-drowsy cats. Madam Hong gave Ah-Rin a brisk pat on the shoulder that nearly counted as a hug. Mi-Young promised to send day-old rolls “for those who argue with ink instead of dough.” Master Baek pressed his palm briefly to Ah-Rin’s in the kind of blessing that did not need words.
In-Su helped Han-Byeol into her outer jacket, fingers quick and practised. “Come, my little star,” he said. “Tomorrow you can ask your Seonsaeng-nim about lynxes again.”
Han-Byeol’s hand brushed Ah-Rin’s as she bowed. “Sleep well, Seonsaeng-nim,” she said. “I’m glad your last life is here.”
“So am I,” Ah-Rin said softly. “Sleep well, Byeol-ah.”
The house thinned slowly. The last of the neighbours’ lanterns bobbed away down the path like slow, thoughtful fireflies. Finally, only family remained: Hye-Won, Eun-Jae, their two, Eun-Sook, and Ah-Rin, lingering in that particular after-silence a home wears when guests have left but the night has not quite arrived.
“You should rest,” Hye-Won said at last, laying a hand briefly on Ah-Rin’s arm. “Tomorrow will need you upright.”
“Tomorrow will have to bargain,” Ah-Rin replied, but there was no bite in it. Only tired affection.
They banked the hearth coals, checked the latch, whispered the small practicalities that keep houses standing. Then, one by one, the doors slid shut along the corridor, paper thinning the sounds of sleep but never abolishing them.
The ondol had done its work well; warmth pooled in the floorboards of the mill-house bedroom. Outside, the stream wrote its old line under the window. Inside, Hye-Won lay on her side, back curved to fit the familiar line of Eun-Jae’s chest, his arm resting around her waist.
For a while they said nothing. It was not an empty quiet; it was a full one, like a bowl that had been generously filled and was now simply standing, holding.
“You went somewhere tonight,” Hye-Won said eventually, her voice low enough not to wake the children in the next room.
His breath stirred the loose hairs at the nape of her neck. “I was here,” he answered, equally soft. “On this mat, in this house.”
“Your face was,” she agreed. “Your eyes…” She let the sentence trail, giving him room.
He huffed a very small, rueful sound. “My eyes have too much practice wandering,” he admitted. “Old habit.”
“When she spoke of the court lady,” Hye-Won said, not unkindly. “With the cranes on her sleeves.”
Silence again, but a different kind now—more like two people checking the depth of the same pool with their toes.
“She once stood between me and a wall I was running at,” he said after a moment. “Today I learned she stood between Ah-Rin and a wall as well.”
Hye-Won nodded against his arm. It was what she had suspected, but hearing it put plainly settled something in her.
“I am glad,” she said. “For both of you.”
He tightened his hold on her by a fraction. “I am glad too,” he said. “And gladder that I am here. With you. That whatever doors she held open then brought me eventually to this one.”
His hand slid from her waist to her palm, fingers tracing the calluses there from pulp and ledger and needle.
“I am well, Yeobo,” he added, the word warm and sure. “Because you are here. Because Ah-Rin is here. There is nothing left to run from.”
Hye-Won turned in the circle of his arm until they were face to face. In the thin light leaking through the paper door, his features were gentled, the years etched there not as regret but as proof of having lived.
“Good,” she said. “I would hate to have to chase you as well as the children.”
“You would catch me,” he said. “You always did.”
She snorted softly. “Only because you never learned to run in straight lines.”
He smiled then, properly, the kind of smile that had bridges and storms and quiet mornings in it. She reached up and smoothed a fingertip over his brow as if rubbing away the last shadow of an old life.
“Sleep,” she murmured. “Tomorrow, you have paper to tune and soup to oversalt.”
“I oversalted it once,” he protested.
“Once is enough for a proverb,” she replied.
He laughed under his breath and tucked her closer. Outside, the stream went on telling its story to the dark. Inside, breathing fell into a shared rhythm. Whatever had been left unresolved in Hanyang, whatever names remained unspoken, lay very far away from the warmth of this mat, this arm around this waist, in a house where all the important doors were already open.
34Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡb9k1DSZKtW
The first real snow came and went. One morning, the yard lay clear and brittle. Hye-Won stepped out with a bundle of firewood and stopped.
Dalmae was still curled in her usual place by the wall. Too still.
For a moment Hye-Won simply stood there, listening to the mill’s rhythm, to the soft churn of the stream. Then she set the wood down, went over, and knelt. Dalmae’s fur was cool under her hand, not frozen, but with that peculiar, distant coolness of something that had already turned its attention elsewhere.
“Yeobo,” she called, not loudly.
Eun-Jae came, wiping pulp from his fingers. He didn’t speak when he saw. He only bowed his head, once.
They told the children together.
Jin-Ho’s first instinct was to argue with the fact. “She was fine yesterday,” he said, as if the world might apologise and reverse itself. “She ate the fish scraps; she swatted at my sleeve—”
“She was very old,” Hye-Won said, pulling him gently closer. “Older than you. Older than this house, in her mind. When you were learning to walk, she was already teaching you how to land without crying.”
Seol-Ha didn’t say much. She just went very quiet and knelt beside Dalmae, tucking the cat’s paws neatly under her chest as if arranging a sleeping child.
“She should be under the mulberry,” Seol-Ha said at last. “She liked the tree.”
Jin-Ho swallowed hard, then nodded.
They dug together, the four of them, in the strip of earth where roots and stones liked to argue. Ah-Rin came with a scrap of cloth to wrap Dalmae in; Eun-Sook stood nearby with her hands pushed deep into her sleeves, murmuring more to herself than to anyone else.
Buk-i watched from the sill of the open kitchen window, ears pinned back, tail still.
When the small grave was filled, Seol-Ha laid one of her old broken strings on top, coiling it in a neat circle.
“For listening,” she said, voice catching once.
That night Buk-i did not sleep on the racks. He jumped, stiff and awkward, onto Seol-Ha’s bed and settled there with a grumpy huff against her legs, as if staking a claim. When Jin-Ho came to complain that now the cat liked her best, Buk-i opened one eye and flicked his tail in a way that could have meant anything at all.
Two months later, one morning when the frost returned, they found Buk-i under the drying rack where he had liked to curl, paws tucked, eyes closed, as if he had finally agreed that perhaps retirement meant rest after all.
“He didn’t want to leave her alone,” Eun-Sook said, patting Seol-Ha’s shoulder while Jin-Ho pretended very hard not to be crying as he dug the second small grave beside the first.
They planted a little clump of wild mint over that one.
34Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡitQ5LfVdbP
Midwinter had a way of making the mill sound older than it was. The beams creaked more sharply, the waterwheel groaned as if it resented the ice nibbling at its teeth, and every breath came out of people’s mouths like small thin thoughts that hadn’t learned yet to speak out. The only warm thing in the building was the vat, and that was because they bullied it into being so.
“Deeper, Jin-Ho-yah,” Hye-Won said. “Let the paddle feel the bottom. You’re not stirring rice porridge.”
“I know,” Jin-Ho muttered, but he widened his stance and drove the paddle down through the slurry until he felt the soft resistance change, the fibres lifting and turning properly in the water. Steam rose up around him, wreathing his hair, clinging to his lashes. His shoulders burned pleasantly with the effort.
Fifteen sat on him strangely. His arms and legs had lengthened in a hurry; his voice had stumbled lower a month ago and was still getting used to the path. When he caught his reflection in the water at the right angle, he saw more of his father than he expected. When he looked down at his hands, wet and rough from years of mill work, he saw his mother.
The door slid open with a gust of air sharp enough to bite.
A man stood there, stamping snow from his boots. He bowed, first to Hye-Won, then to the space of the room as a whole, the way people do when they’re not quite sure who holds the most authority but intend not to offend either way.
“Han Hye-Won-ssi?” he said.
“That’s me,” Hye-Won answered, wiping her hands on her apron. “Come in or you’ll freeze into the frame.”
He stepped inside, closing the door quickly behind him. His coat smelled of travel: horse, river damp, smoke. His cheeks were raw with cold, but his eyes were quick and careful.
“I am Kim Do-Seung of Guryong,” he said. “I supply ledgers and account books to the markets there.” He smiled briefly, the way merchants do when they are offering both courtesy and coin. “Master Nam Seung-Mo spoke highly of your paper. Said it ‘does not argue with ink’.”
Jin-Ho’s grip tightened on the paddle. He tried not to look as though he had heard that.
“We are grateful for his praise,” Hye-Won said. “What brings you across the ridge in this weather, Master Kim?”
Do-Seung reached inside his coat and unwrapped a packet of papers, laying them gently on the workbench away from stray splashes.
“I came because my customers are greedy for better books,” he said. “And because the valley road is very good at keeping things that are not nailed down. I would rather trust your wheel than those slopes.” He tapped the list he’d written. “I need enough sheets for thirty ledgers this quarter. Perhaps more, if they like the feel of it.”
Thirty. Jin-Ho did the count without meaning to. That was more than they usually sent in one season to anyone who didn’t live within walking distance. Not impossible. But not a mouthful to swallow without chewing, either.
Hye-Won’s eyes moved down the list, measures lining themselves up in her head against bark and neri and drying lines.
“Winter is not kind to paper,” she said. “Drying is slow. The vat does not like to be hurried in the cold.”
“I understand,” Do-Seung replied. “If you say it cannot be done, I will bow and go back the way I came and tell Master Nam his faith was misplaced.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “But I would rather carry your bundles on my back than another argument with the valley miller.”
Jin-Ho heard himself speak before he had fully decided to.
“We can do it,” he said.
Hye-Won turned her head. “We?”
He felt colour creep up his neck, but he didn’t step back. “We’ve handled more bark than this,” he said. “We know the vat. If we plan the batches, we can make the sheets in time. Thirty ledgers is a good mouth to feed us for a while.”
Do-Seung glanced between them, weighing the boy’s confidence against the mother’s silence.
“Master Kim, please excuse us for a moment”, Hye-Won said and ushered her son into an adjacent room. Do-Seung bowed curtly and went outside.
“It is a larger order than we have taken from one person,” Hye-Won said slowly. “And we have Ah-Rin’s school, and Master Nam’s regular bundles. If we stretch too far—”
“It’s a chance,” Jin-Ho cut in, then bit his tongue. “If we say no now, he’ll give it to someone else and not look back up here.”
Hye-Won looked at her son. Steam had drawn damp lines along his hairline; a smear of pulp marked his sleeve near the wrist. His jaw was set a little too tight; his eyes were bright, not only with the heat. He wanted this. Not only for the mill, but for himself.
“You understand,” she said quietly, “that if we do this, you will have to work harder than you think you can. And that if the paper isn’t right, we do not send it. Even if it means admitting you bit off more than you could chew.”
“I understand,” he said. “If it goes wrong, I’ll face him. Not you.”
“That is not how families work,” she said. “If it goes wrong, we face him. But your name will be in my mouth when I explain it.”
His throat bobbed. “Then I’ll make sure, what you have to say is worth listening to,” he replied.
She huffed, not quite a laugh. “You sound like your father,” she said. “Come, let’s not make him wait for too long in the cold.”
Jin-Ho approached the merchant with the resolve of his youth. He looked Do-Seung in the eye. “If you let us try, I’ll see that you get good paper,” he said. “Paper, you don’t have to apologise for.”
The merchant blinked, startled by the directness. There was something in the way the boy spoke—the mixture of bravado and earnestness—that reminded him of his own son arguing about carrying loads on market days.
He bowed to Hye-Won. “I will trust your judgement,” he said. “If you accept, I will pay as agreed. If you must send fewer sheets, send me what is good and charge me only for that.”
The decision sat between them like a weight.
“We’ll take the order”, Hye-Won said. “We’ll send you our best work. If that falls short of your list, we’ll send what meets our standard and talk again when the weather is kinder.”
Do-Seung’s shoulders eased. “That is more than fair,” he said. “I will stay one night at Madam Hong’s and head back in the morning. Send a boy with word if you change your mind before I go.”
“We won’t,” Jin-Ho put in.
Hye-Won didn’t scold him for speaking out of turn. She simply inclined her head. “We will begin today,” she said. “Let your legs rest while our arms earn their keep.”
When the man had gone, taking the sharp winter air with him, the mill felt smaller suddenly, as if it had pulled its shoulders in against the size of what had just been agreed.
Hye-Won looked at the empty doorway a long moment, then at her son. “All right, apprentice,” she said. “Show me how you plan to make us bigger, than we were this morning.”
He grinned, quick and young. “First, we shift the second vat day forward,” he said, already calculating. “We can beat the bark longer, so the fibres are ready, then run smaller batches more often. If I couch without stopping, we can keep the lines full.”
“Smaller batches mean more lifting,” she pointed out. “Your arms will complain.”
“My arms are not in charge,” he said.
“We’ll see what they say tomorrow,” she replied. But she moved to the bench and began sorting felts anyway, the way you do when you have decided to trust someone and will suffer through the consequences together.
The plan almost worked.
For the next ten days, the mill moved like a well-rehearsed song. Jin-Ho drove the paddle through the vat, muscles burning; Hye-Won adjusted the mix of neri and water until the fibre floated just right; the frames dipped and rose, the fresh sheets kissed the couching cloths and slid onto the stack with satisfying weight.
He shortened the soaking time for one batch of bark by a fraction to keep up with the schedule—only a fraction, Jin-Ho told himself; he knew this bark, he’d watched it in the tubs for years. They cut the pressing time between felts by just a little, trusting the cold air to do its share of the work. And when the day grew long and the light thin, he told himself he could skip one of the checks they usually made: the one where his mother would take a random sheet from the line, bend it gently near the ear, and listen for the right kind of quiet.
“We know what it sounds like,” he muttered, more to the vat than to anyone. “We don’t need to listen every time.”
“We listen because the vat lies, when it is tired,” Hye-Won said, but she didn’t stop him. There were other things demanding her attention: bark to be pounded for the next run, accounts to check, a note from Ah-Rin about paper for the school.
The drying room filled. Lines sagged a little under the weight of damp sheets. The smell of wet fibre and sizing threaded itself through their clothes and hair until it felt like part of their own skin.
On a morning towards the end of the second week, Jin-Ho went in early, before the fire in the stove had properly remembered its job.
By the time the first runs had hung a few days in the cold drying room and new batches were already forming in the vat, the real truth of the paper began to show. At first glance that morning, everything looked right. Rows of pale sheets, a little stiff with cold, hanging patiently in the dim light. He reached up and laid his fingers on the edge of one.
It flexed under his touch, too easily.
He frowned and tried another. The same give, the same thin, papery crackle instead of the soft, firm whisper he was used to. He moved down the row, faster now. Some sheets felt fine. Others hid their weakness until he pressed a little harder and saw the surface scuff, the grain bruise.
His stomach tightened.
He plucked one down, holding it up, and saw the faint unevenness where the pulp had run just a little too freely towards one corner. On another, the surface sizing had dried with a sheen that promised trouble in damp weather. He could almost hear Nam Seung-Mo’s voice in his head: Paper remembers, what you did to it. It tattles under the brush.
Half the batch, he thought, feeling cold that had nothing to do with the air.
Footsteps approached behind him. Hye-Won’s, by the sound—steady, no hurry, the walk of someone who has already worked through a dozen kinds of crisis and will not give this one the satisfaction of seeing her run.
She stopped beside him and reached for a sheet. Tested it. Bent it. Held it by the corner and watched how it hung.
“How many?” she asked.
He swallowed. “At least half,” he said. “Maybe more. Some are all right, I think. Maybe for inner pages. But not the covers. Not ledgers that have to live on someone’s shelf for twenty years.”
She nodded once. There was a beat where she might have said, I warned you, and did not.
“Which step did you rush?” she asked instead.
He could have lied. The truth was already written in the paper. “We pulled the bark out of the water two days earlier than we should have on the second batch,” he said. “The outer layer looked clean, so I told myself it was enough. I cut the beating time a little on one load too. The fibres already looked soft. I thought I was just saving my arms. And I didn’t check as many sheets as usual before we hung them. I wanted to keep the lines full.”
“And the pressing?”
“Quicker,” he admitted. “Just a little.”
Her mouth tightened, but her voice stayed calm. “In summer, paper might forgive that,” Hye-Won said. “In midwinter, water clings where you think you’ve pushed it out.”
He stared at the row of almost-right sheets, throat thick. “We can’t send them,” he said.
“No,” she agreed. “We can’t. We send what is good, and we tell Kim Do-Seung why the rest is not in his bundle.”
“He’ll think we’re careless,” Jin-Ho said.
“Only if we lie about it,” she replied. “If we tell him we pushed too hard and refused to sell him the result, he may decide we are careful enough to trust next time.”
“And if he doesn’t?” he asked.
“Then he has his choice,” she said simply. “We keep ours.”
The shame burned hot in his chest. “I wanted to prove I could carry it,” he said. “So, you could step back more. So, we wouldn’t stay small.”
She turned to look at him properly. “You proved you can carry more than you did last year,” she said. “You also proved what happens when you try to carry what isn’t ready to be lifted.”
“That sounds like failing,” he muttered.
“It sounds like learning at the right time,” she said. “Better now than ten years from now with ten times the order and mouths behind you waiting for rice.”
He let out a shaky breath. “You trusted me,” he said.
“Yes,” she answered. “I did. I still do. Trust is not the same as pretending you’ll never misjudge a vat.”
He looked at the sheets again. “We’ll have to scrap them,” he said. “All of these.”
“We’ll have to scrap what doesn’t meet our own eyes,” she corrected. “Not what can still live as inner leaves or practice sheets. Waste is part of the craft. What matters is whether we learn how not to make the same waste twice.”
He nodded, the movement small and stubborn.
“I’ll sort them,” he said. “You can watch if you want.”
“I will watch for the first ten,” she said. “After that, you’ll know what your own hands say yes to.” She touched his shoulder, light and brief. “Then we’ll sit down together and write a letter to Guryong.”
He flinched at the thought, but did not argue.
As she left the drying room to stoke the stove and fetch a basket, he reached up and took down another sheet. This one was almost right. Almost. He bent it gently, listened to the sound, felt the way the fibres whispered protest at the edge.
“Not quite,” he murmured, more to the paper than to himself, and moved it to the growing stack of not this time.
Outside, the wheel turned on, indifferent. Inside, the mill adjusted itself a fraction around a fifteen-year-old boy learning that being trusted did not mean being perfect; it meant being willing to see where he had run ahead of the craft and walk back, admitting it, with his mother beside him.
By the time they stopped for the day, Jin-Ho’s arms felt like they belonged to someone else.
The good sheets—those that passed both his hand and his mother’s eye—were stacked and wrapped, set aside to dry a little longer before cutting. The not-good-enough ones sat in a separate pile near the door, edges warped, surfaces just a shade too fragile when he ran his thumb along them.
He kept catching himself looking at that pile as if it might shrink if he glared hard enough.
“Enough for today,” Hye-Won said, tugging the mould from his grip. “If you fall asleep into the vat, I refuse to fish you out.”
“I’d float,” he muttered. “Like bad fibre.”
“Bad fibre sinks,” she said. “Tired boys fall over.”
He didn’t argue. His shoulders had moved past complaining and into a sullen ache that promised to revisit him tomorrow with interest.
34Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7RZd794a9i
Dinner came late and a little chaotic.
Seol-Ha had returned from Ah-Rin’s school with ink on three fingers and a splatter on her sleeve; Eun-Sook had stayed to help Mi-Young with a last-minute rush at the bakery and arrived smelling of sweet bread and exasperation. Ah-Rin herself had spent the afternoon untangling an argument between two students over whose turn it was to sit nearest the window, and was now sitting with her head tipped back against the wall, eyes half closed, as if she were listening to music only she could hear.
Eun-Jae, who had spent most of the day between the mill and his workshop, had insisted on making the soup as penance for letting Hye-Won’s back carry too many baskets the day before.
“Sit,” he’d told her, gently but firmly. “If you don’t, I’ll burn the rice and then you’ll have two things to scold.”
Now he stood over the pot, spoon in hand, brow furrowed as if he were scoring a new melody into its surface.
“Not too much salt,” Hye-Won said from the table. “We’ve had enough of too much this week.”
“I know how much soup needs,” he replied, utterly sincere. He pinched salt between his fingers, let it fall, stirred, tasted, frowned, added a little more. The stove popped in quiet disagreement.
Jin-Ho, watching from the bench, realised he was holding his own spoon like a tool instead of cutlery. He forced his grip to relax.
They sat when Eun-Jae finally declared the soup ready: family gathered on the floor around the low table, bowls steaming in their hands. The fire in the hearth had settled into a steady glow; outside, the world had gone crisp and white.
For a few precious mouthfuls, there was only warmth and the soft scrape of spoons.
Then Seol-Ha’s face did something complicated.
She swallowed, carefully, as if the soup might fight back, and set her bowl down very slowly.
“Appa,” she said, voice strangled. “Did the sea move into the kitchen while I was out?”
Jin-Ho blinked and took a proper mouthful.
Salt slammed into his tongue like a wave. He coughed, clapped a hand over his mouth, and wheezed, “Aigoo—”
Across the table, Ah-Rin grabbed for her water cup, eyes watering. Eun-Sook stared into her bowl as if hoping the salt would evaporate under her gaze.
Hye-Won stared at her spoon, then at her husband.
“Yeobo,” she said slowly, “did you decide to pickle us instead of feed us?”
Eun-Jae looked genuinely wounded. “I tasted it,” he protested. “It kept changing.”
“It changed because you kept throwing things at it,” she pointed out. She took another cautious sip, winced, and then, to everyone’s surprise, began to laugh.
“Well,” she managed, setting her bowl down and fanning her mouth, “there’s your metaphor.”
“For what?” Jin-Ho croaked, reaching for the water jug.
“Too much of a good thing,” she said. “Salt is fine. Salt is necessary. Salt in a hurry, salt with a heavy hand…” She waved at the pot. “The whole bowl complains.”
“We can thin it,” Ah-Rin said, still hoarse but amused. “There’s plenty of water outside.”
“Good,” Hye-Won said. “I’d like to see the bottom of my bowl again before spring.”
As Eun-Jae carried the pot back to the stove to add water and humility, the tension that had been sitting in Jin-Ho’s shoulders since he’d felt the first weak sheet seemed to loosen a fraction. It was ridiculous, but the sight of his father—so precise with strings, so confident with wood—misjudging something as simple as salt made the day feel less like a solitary failure.
“At least I didn’t ruin dinner,” Seol-Ha murmured under her breath, leaning towards him.
“You ruined my peace,” he muttered back. “You keep making me laugh when I’m trying to be miserable.”
“That’s my job,” she said. “Older sister tradition.”
He snorted despite himself. The sound came out halfway between a laugh and a sigh.
Hye-Won caught his eye over the table. There was salt on her tongue and weariness in her bones, but her gaze didn’t carry reproach. Only that steady, searching warmth he had known since he first learned to walk on mill floors.
“We’ll fix what we can,” she said, as if picking the thought out of his head. “Soup and orders both.”
He nodded, not trusting his voice. He forced down a few more mouthfuls of the thinned broth, which now tasted less like the sea and more like something that had merely grown up there.
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Later, when the house had settled, the spoiled pot rinsed and scolded into obedience, Jin-Ho slipped back out into the cold with the stack of flawed sheets under his arm.
The stars were sharp and numerous, pricked into a sky that had turned hard and dark. The air bit at the skin of his hands; his breath ghosted in front of him. Behind the mill, the small fire pit waited, a ring of old stones blackened from years of brush and broken bits.
He knelt, set the stack down, and began to lay kindling.
If he burned them all, he thought, there would be nothing left but ash and a gap in the shelves where good paper should have been. He could live with that. It would be clean. Simple.
His throat tightened. It didn’t feel simple at all.
He had always thought of waste as the enemy: the clumps of bark that refused to soften properly, the scraps of trimmed edge that curled underfoot swept into baskets for fuel. You turned waste into fire, and that was that. You didn’t give it space in your mind.
The first spark caught, licked along the straw, began to chew at the ends of the wood. He reached for the stack.
“Burning the evidence?” a voice said, mild as winter smoke.
He jumped. A sheet slipped from his grasp, landed askew on the ground.
Hye-Won crouched down on the other side of the fire pit, cloak pulled tight, breath clouding the air. He had been so wrapped in his own thoughts he hadn’t heard the door.
“It’s cold,” she said. “If you intend to sit out here and scowl at paper, you might as well have company.”
He scowled at the fire instead. “It’s not scowling,” he muttered. “It’s… thinking.”
“Thinking usually does less glaring,” she said, but without bite. She picked up the fallen sheet, turned it between her fingers. In the firelight, its flaws were more obvious and less important at the same time.
“I was going to burn them,” he said. “All of them. Then we could forget.”
“Could we?” she asked.
He hesitated. “…No,” he admitted.
She gave a small nod. “When I first came here,” she said, eyes on the flame, “I ruined an entire batch.”
He glanced up, startled. “You?”
“Yes,” she said calmly. “Me. I was tired, and angry, and determined to prove I could keep the mill upright with my own hands.” She shifted, the snow creaking under her feet. “I rushed the beating. I told myself the bark had softened enough. I skimmed the checks because I wanted to see the lines full. The sheets looked fine until they dried. Then they tore if you looked at them too hard.”
He winced in sympathy; he didn’t have to imagine the sound.
“Nam Seung-Mo had to go home with half an order and a great deal more patience than he brought,” she said. “I thought I would carry the shame of it forever.”
“What did you do with the bad ones?” he asked.
“Most of them?” She nodded at the fire. “Exactly what you’re doing now. The stove ate my mistake that winter.”
“Most of them,” he repeated. “Not all?”
She smiled, a small, crooked thing that showed a hint of the young widow she had been when she arrived in Haesong. “One I kept,” she said. “I put it where I couldn’t help seeing it whenever I thought about hurrying.”
“Why?” he asked, genuinely baffled. “Why would you keep the worst one?”
“Not the worst,” she corrected. “Just… a true one. Bad in an honest way.” She held his gaze. “You keep one, Jin-Ho-yah. Not because it’s good. Because it’s yours.”
He looked down at the stack. The edges that curled, the surfaces that would betray ink at the first hint of damp. His stomach twisted again.
“I don’t want to be reminded,” he said.
“You already are,” she pointed out gently. “That won’t change if we burn every sheet. The difference is whether you choose how you remember it, or let it bite you whenever it likes.”
The fire crackled, taking small bites of kindling.
She leafed through the stack until she found a sheet that was almost right—flat enough, but with that subtle weakness in the grain when she flexed it.
“This one,” she said. “It tried, at least.”
He took it from her, turned it over in his hands. It felt thinner than it looked. The surface took the firelight and dulled it.
“What if I make the same mistake again?” he asked, low.
“Then you’ll have two ugly sheets on your wall,” she said. “And I will make you look at both before we start a third.”
He huffed, breath ghosting. It wasn’t quite a laugh. “Cruel,” he said.
“Honest,” she answered. “We learn because the work doesn’t forgive us automatically. It’s a good thing. It means when the paper is strong, we know we earned it.”
He looked at her, at the way the fire picked out the lines at the corners of her eyes, the set of her shoulders. “You trusted me,” he said quietly. “To take that order. To not ruin us.”
“I trusted you to try,” she said. “Trying comes with risk. If I only let you do what you couldn’t possibly fail at, you’d never grow strong enough for me to step back.”
His chest gave a strange, painful little jump. “So this is your fault,” he said, grasping for levity.
“Entirely,” she agreed, lips twitching. “I’m a terrible mother. I give my son work that can hurt him and then sit beside him when it does.”
He looked down quickly so she wouldn’t see his eyes sting.
The fire was ready now. He took a breath, picked up the rest of the stack, and fed it to the flames in armfuls. The paper curled, blackened, and flared, giving off a brief burst of heat and a smell that was not entirely unpleasant—like wet bark remembering the sun for a moment before forgetting again.
He watched until the last corner collapsed into glowing embers.
Only when the bulk of it was gone did he realise he was still holding the one sheet she’d chosen.
He hesitated, then reached for the small brush and inkstone he’d brought almost without noticing. Squatting on his heels, he balanced the sheet on his knee and, in the lower corner, wrote carefully:
Another mistake.
He paused, then added, smaller:
Not final one.
The ink bled a little more than it should have on the thin surface. He let it. It was honest.
“Where should I put it?” he asked.
“Where you’ll see it when you make plans,” Hye-Won said. “Not where it can shout at you, just where it can clear its throat politely.”
He nodded. “By the vat, then,” he said. “Near the hooks.”
“Good,” she said, rising with a small groan from her knees. “Every time you think about shortening a soak or skipping a check, let it stare at you until you change your mind.”
He stood too, tucking the sheet carefully under his arm so the cold wouldn’t buckle it further.
“We’ll write to Kim Do-Seung tomorrow,” she said as they walked back towards the house. “Together. We’ll tell him exactly what we did and exactly what we’re sending.”
“And if he decides we’re not worth the trouble?” Jin-Ho asked.
“Then he and his ledgers can go argue with the valley miller’s paper instead,” she said. “We’ll still have a mill that doesn’t lie.”
He glanced at her. “And you’ll still… trust me?” The question slipped out before he could sit on it.
She stopped in the snow and turned fully to face him. Her hand came up to rest, briefly, against his cheek.
“I didn’t trust you because you’d never make a mistake,” she said. “I trusted you because I thought you’d tell the truth when you did. You just proved me right.”
Heat rose in his face that had nothing to do with the fire. He nodded, awkward and relieved.
“Come on,” she said, letting her hand fall. “If we stay out here any longer, we’ll freeze and your father will find us in the morning and complain about the extra work.”
He snorted, and this time the laugh came easier.
As they went back inside, the kept sheet under his arm felt less like a mark of shame and more like the first page of a new account—one he would be writing in for a long time, in ink that knew how to tell the truth.
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By the time the worst of the snow had gone from the lanes and retreated sulking to ditches and shadows, Ah-Rin’s school had learned the rhythms of its own small year.
In the mornings, the room filled with the sounds of stiff fingers rubbing warmth into ink-sticks, of brushes tapping softly against porcelain, of breath being held as letters took shape. In the afternoons, the sound softened: reading aloud, muttered counting, the occasional stifled giggle when someone’s ㅎ decided it would rather be a ㅁ.
On days when the mill needed less of her spine, Hye-Won would send Seol-Ha down to the house by the stream with a stack of offcuts and a reminder to be home before the light failed.
“Ah-Rin-imo needs hands,” she’d say. “And paper doesn’t arrange itself.”
“I know,” Seol-Ha would answer, trying not to sound too eager.
She liked the mill well enough—it smelled like home and hard work and the kind of tired that let you sleep—but the school had a different kind of air. It smelled of ink, and paper, and chalk dust, and future.
The room had never quite forgotten it had been a workshop.
Even now, with the frames long gone and the benches pushed back, there was something in the shape of the walls that remembered wood shavings and plans. The front space, nearest the door, held three low tables and a scatter of mats; the back half had shelves tacked up along the plaster, some straight, some politely pretending not to notice that the wall itself leaned.
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On this particular afternoon, the last of the day’s pupils had gone, leaving the air full of quiet and the faint echo of recited syllables.
“Gan-na-da-ra…” Seol-Ha sang under her breath, mocking the cadence the younger girls used when they tried to rush their way through the order of the alphabet. “And then they trip at 사 and fall on their faces.”
“Be kind,” Ah-Rin said, though her mouth curved. She was standing on a stool in the corner, one hand braced on the wall, the other trying to coax a stubborn nail into agreeing that it wanted to live there. “You probably did it too when you were their age.”
“I did not,” Seol-Ha said automatically, then thought about it. “All right. I did. But I did it with more dignity.”
“Your dignity must have been mostly in your hair then,” Ah-Rin replied. “When it got stuck in everything.”
Seol-Ha laughed and shifted the bundle of papers in her arms. She had been tasked with sorting the day’s work: keeping the best practice sheets, stacking the usable scraps for future drills, and collecting the truly hopeless ones to be pulped again or turned into kindling.
“Which ones go on the display shelf?” she asked, nodding towards the narrow board above the blackboard where Ah-Rin had begun tucking particularly proud efforts. Today a shaky but determined 하늘 (“sky”) leaned slightly over a very tidy 밥 (“rice”), both written in careful 한글 (“hangul”) by girls who would have been told, not long ago, that their hands were only for cooking and sewing.
“The ones where they tried again after they failed,” Ah-Rin said. “Not the ones that were perfect the first time. Perfection is suspicious.”
“Yes, Seonsaeng-nim,” Seol-Ha said, but her eyes were bright. She sifted through the stack, plucking out a sheet where 엄마 (“mother”) had been written three times, each more sure than the last.
She hummed as she worked, almost without noticing. At first it was nothing in particular—a rise and fall that matched the rustle of paper, the tap of her fingernail against the table. Then, as her fingers fell into a pattern, so did the tune.
It was a melody she knew from storms.
Years ago, on a night when the wind had howled along the eaves and the rain had hammered on the roof hard enough to make the house flinch, Eun-Jae had sat in the main room with his gayageum and played as if he were tuning the weather. The notes had rolled and curved around the sound of the rain until the noise outside seemed to belong to the song instead of the other way round.
Seol-Ha had fallen asleep with the last of that tune caught in her chest like a lantern.
Now she found it again by accident. Humming it a little faster, a little lighter, smoothing out one bend, brightening another. Where Eun-Jae’s version had held the weight of a man thinking himself through a bridge, hers had the quickness of a girl, whose eyes were turned more towards doors than debts.
“Again,” Ah-Rin said from the stool. “That bit at the end. I like it.”
Seol-Ha repeated the phrase, a little self-conscious now, fingers unconsciously moving on the table as if there were strings beneath them.
“What is it called?” Ah-Rin asked.
“It doesn’t have a name,” Seol-Ha said. “It was Appa’s. For storms. I only… borrowed it.”
“That’s what music is,” Ah-Rin said. “Borrowing and paying back differently.”
The nail finally decided it was easier to go into the wall, than be argued with. She hammered it the last fraction and stepped down, dusting her hands.
“Here,” she added, reaching into a box of scrap and pulling out a narrow strip of decent paper. “If you’re going to steal melodies, you may as well trap them properly.”
Seol-Ha raised a brow. “Trap them?”
“On the page,” Ah-Rin said. “You keep saying you’ll learn the court notation system properly one winter when life isn’t busy. Until then—” she picked up a brush and drew a quick line of boxes and curves, nothing formal, just a set of marks that meant something to the two of them— “use this. Your own map.”
Seol-Ha took the brush, heart ticking faster. She wasn’t sure whether she was more excited by the idea that she could write a tune down as if it were a phrase, or by the fact that someone she admired treated it as an entirely reasonable thing for her to do.
“What about letters?” she asked. “You said music and words are sisters.”
“They are,” Ah-Rin said. “Sisters bicker. Let them share a page.” She nodded at the scrap. “Write a word with it. One that feels like the tune.”
Seol-Ha bit her lip, thought of storms, of bridges, of her father’s hands on strings and her own hand now, brush hovering. Then she bent and, in neat, firm strokes of Hangul, wrote:
길 — gil — road.
“Good,” Ah-Rin said, satisfied. “Now it has somewhere to walk.”
Seol-Ha laughed. “It’s just a scribble.”
“Everything starts as a scribble,” Ah-Rin replied. “Some of them grow up to be books.”
They spent the next while in companionable work: Seol-Ha labelling the low shelf of readers, sounding out each title under her breath as she wrote 첫 글 (“First Letters”), 바다 이야기 (“Sea Stories”), 숫자 놀이 (“Number Games”) on small slips to group the stacks. Ah-Rin rearranged the mats, brushed chalk dust from the board that still held 가, 나, 다 (“ga, na, da”) in a child’s hand from earlier.
At some point, Seol-Ha’s humming came back, absent-minded and soft, the little road of melody weaving in and out of the scratch of brush on paper.
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Outside, the lane along the stream had almost lost its ice. Patches of earth showed through like old scars; the water itself ran a little faster, knocking at the stones as if impatient for spring.
Eun-Jae was on his way back from the mill, hands tucked into his sleeves, thoughts half on fibre and half on the way Jin-Ho’s kept sheet had looked nailed up by the vat that morning—ugly, honest, exactly where it needed to be.
He wasn’t intending to stop by the old workshop-house. He had passed it so often in his life that his feet could have walked the curve of the path in their sleep. But as he came close, a thread of sound slipped out through the door left slightly ajar.
He recognised the bones of the melody before he recognised that his pace had slowed.
He had written that tune on a storm-night years ago, not on paper but in the tightness of his chest, letting his fingers find a way through the tangle. He had never given it a name. It was just that piece: the one for when the world was too loud and needed a better rhythm.
Now it came back to him changed.
Lighter, a little faster, one turn smoothed where he had left a deliberate hitch. The falls still landed where his hands had taught them to, but the space between them had more air. It sounded like someone had opened the shutters of a room he’d once sat in and let the light in properly.
He stopped beside the wall and leaned his shoulder against it, staying out of sight. Inside, he could hear Ah-Rin’s voice from time to time, naming books, laughing at something; Seol-Ha’s voice humming, then breaking into actual notes as she tested a phrase.
He could picture it without looking: his daughter standing at the table, brush in hand, brow furrowed in that particular concentration that meant she had forgotten herself and the room entirely; Ah-Rin somewhere nearby, encouraging and teasing in the same breath.
The tune turned a corner that had not been in his original version. It fit so well that for a moment he wondered if he had simply forgotten it. Then he realised it wasn’t his at all. It was hers now.
He let the thought settle. No jealousy came with it, only a curious, deep quiet. This, he realised, was what he wanted: for the things he loved to go on without needing him to stand over them.
He pushed gently away from the wall and walked on, feet finding the path to the mill-house again.
That night, after the house had tucked its occupants into their respective corners and the only sounds were the tick of cooling wood and the breathing of people who trusted the roof above them, Eun-Jae sat for a moment at the low table with a scrap of decent offcut and a brush.
He hadn’t written much for himself in a long time. Ledgers had taken his hand; notes for orders, diagrams for repairs. The private urge to put a thought down where it could not wriggle away had gone quiet. Now it stirred.
He dipped the brush, let the excess ink breathe out on the rim of the stone, and wrote, in his small, precise hand:
She doesn’t even know she’s playing my song.
He looked at the line; at the way the ink had settled into the fibres. Then, underneath, as if answering himself, he added:
Good. It means it’s hers.
He set the scrap aside to dry and banked the lamp.
Outside, the stream went on writing its old, unending story. Inside, bits of newer ones sat on shelves and hooks and display boards: a crooked 엄마 (“mother”), a scrap that said Another mistake. Not final one., a little strip of notation with 길 (“road”) written under it.The room listened. The pages waited. The people inside them—grown and growing—slept.
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.