Autumn 1812 came in quiet, like someone drawing a fresh sheet over a table already cleared.
The fields above Haesong lay shorn and pale, lines of stubble catching the last thin light of the day. Out beyond the harbour, the sea looked flatter, colder, its usual quarrel with the sky replaced by a sort of truce. The air smelled of cut straw, smoke, and the faint sour tang of kimchi jars being buried deeper for winter.
Down by the stream-house, the school day was ending.
“Read the last line again,” Ah-Rin said, tapping the edge of a reader with the back of her brush. “Slowly. Let the word finish arriving before you chase it away.”
Mi-Ran’s lips moved carefully. The syllables came in order this time, not stumbling over one another in their hurry to be done.
“Good,” Ah-Rin said. “See? You don’t have to shout at the page. It listens, if you do.”
On the bench beside Mi-Ran, a younger girl yawned so wide her hairpin wobbled. Across the room, Beong-i sat with her slate on her knees, copying a line of characters with steady, deliberate strokes. A faint crease showed between her brows; her tongue pressed against her teeth in concentration.
“Enough for today,” Ah-Rin announced. “Your brains are cooked. If I add any more words, they’ll slide out of your ears on the way home.”
That earned a small ripple of laughter. Even Beong-i’s shoulders relaxed.
“Pack your slates. Wipe them properly. If I see yesterday’s crumbs of sums on tomorrow’s work, I will make you write your own name fifty times.”
Groans, shuffling, the scratch of chalk being rubbed away filled the room. Girls found their shoes, their small cloth bags, their sisters. The usual tangle at the door formed, then unravelled into smaller knots.
As always, Han-Byeol and Beong-i were among the last to leave. Han-Byeol had made it her unofficial duty to ensure Beong-i’s books went into her bag in the correct order, not “math hiding under reading again”.
“Are you ready?” she asked, louder than necessary, standing in front of her friend so her lips were easy to read.
Beong-i looked up, nodded once, and tapped Han-Byeol’s wrist three times: their little code for go.
“Imo, we’ll go ahead,” Han-Byeol called. “Appa said he would meet us by the top of the lane.”
“Don’t push each other into the ditch,” Ah-Rin replied.
“Only if she deserves it,” Han-Byeol shot back, already grinning.
She linked her arm through Beong-i’s and they headed out, the door opening on a slice of evening light before thudding shut behind them.
The room felt suddenly bigger, and then smaller, as it always did when the last of the chatter left.
Dan-Mi was stacking slates, fingers moving automatically. She glanced up as Ah-Rin began to tidy the low table.
“You should let the dust sit overnight for once,” she said. “It might enjoy the rest.”
“If I start making exceptions for dust, next it will be ledgers,” Ah-Rin answered. “Then children. Then what would we be?”
“Rested,” Dan-Mi suggested.
Ah-Rin shook her head, but she was smiling.
“Go rest, Dan-Mi-yah,” she said. “If you work any later, I’ll have to pay you in more than paper and worry.”
“I’ll just put these away,” Dan-Mi replied. “You go first, Imo. If I finish after you, I can tell anyone who asks that the teacher herself went home before the ink dried.”
“Liar,” Ah-Rin said gently. “But a useful one.”
She wrapped a cloth over the inkstones, checked once more that the brazier was safe, and then picked up her outer jacket.
Outside, the air bit more sharply than it had at midday. The sky had slipped from gold to that clear, thin blue that meant frost would come by morning. The mulberry branches rattled overhead, almost bare now. One stubborn leaf hung on near the highest fork, shivering.
At the top of the lane, two small figures were visible against the pale stubble of the field path. Han-Byeol’s walk was all bounce and angles; Beong-i’s was more careful, but she kept up.
Beside them, a taller figure waited, hands in his sleeves against the chill.
In-Su looked up as the girls approached, his face softening in the way it only did for them and, lately, for one other person.
“Slow down,” he called. “You’ll wear out your shoes before winter.”
“They’re fine,” Han-Byeol said, breath puffing. “You’re old; that’s why you think everything is worn out.”
“You’re nine,” he replied. “Everything is new to you, including your rudeness.”
Beong-i huffed a soundless laugh, shoulders shaking.
“Come,” he said, reaching to ruffle both their hair in turn. “Walk your friend as far as the turn, then you, little commander, come back. We’ll all go together.”
Han-Byeol rolled her eyes, but she obeyed. She and Beong-i trotted ahead, turning right at the small stone marker that pointed the way towards Beong-i’s aunt’s house. Their figures grew smaller against the grey, then disappeared over a slight rise.
By the time Ah-Rin caught up, In-Su was still watching the bend where they had vanished, as if his eyes could follow them the rest of the way.
“They know the path,” she said.
He blinked, refocused on her, and smiled.
“I know,” he said. “But the ground likes to pretend it has surprises.”
They fell into step together without needing to think about it, their boots crunching lightly on the frosted dirt.
For a while, they walked in a not-uncomfortable silence. The field on one side showed neat lines where stalks had been cut; on the other, the ground sloped down towards the town and the distant glimmer of the harbour.
“Harvest was lighter this year,” Ah-Rin said eventually.
“Mm,” he agreed. “But the fish were generous. Haesong tilts between the two and somehow ends up not starving.”
“The school tilts as well,” she said. “Between ink and appetite.”
He glanced sideways.
“Too many mouths?” he asked.
“Too many for this room,” she replied. “Not too many for my heart. Or for Dan-Mi’s, though she pretends to grumble.”
He made a thoughtful sound.
“Word is the magistrate hasn’t stopped talking about that hall since you and Hye-Won-ssi visited it,” he said. “He passed the bakery twice last week on his way to ‘think’ and managed to buy something both times.”
“I hope you charged him double,” she said.
“I considered it,” he replied. “But Eomma said we shouldn’t anger the man who signs letters to Hanyang when roofs are at stake.”
Ah-Rin exhaled.
“So, he is still… considering,” she said.
“Yes,” In-Su said. “Which, for him, is progress. There are men who never move from ‘no’ at all.”
They walked a few more paces.
“You’ve stirred the town,” he added. “Even those who grumble send their daughters to watch from the road.”
“I’ve noticed,” she said. “They pretend to be carrying water home, but somehow their buckets are always empty until after lessons end.”
He smiled.
“Your girls read prices now,” he said. “Mi-Young told me she had a customer try to argue about the cost of a loaf, and his daughter corrected him using your sums.”
“Good,” Ah-Rin said. “Let the girls learn how to keep their fathers honest.”
“Some of us need less help than others,” he said, then added, quieter, “and some of us have had too much practice being… alone with our accounts.”
She looked at him properly then.
The lines around his eyes were deeper than when she had left for Hanyang, but they were mostly from squinting into ovens and laughing, not only from worry. His shoulders had broadened, softened slightly with the comfort of bread always near. He still walked as if aware of the ground underfoot in three directions at once.
“I remember you,” she said softly, “standing by your father’s counter, trying to look taller than the shelves.”
“And I remember you,” he answered, “telling me the world could be written differently if someone just gave you enough ink.”
He hesitated.
“I didn’t understand then,” he said. “What it meant to be the one who left. Or the one who stayed.”
“And now?” she asked.
“Now,” he said slowly, “I know that neither of us had easy paths. You walked into a city that thinks commoner girls should be scenery. I walked into a house that suddenly had one less voice and far too much silence.”
He did not say “when my wife died” aloud. He didn’t need to.
“I told myself,” he went on, “that I was done with wanting anything that wasn’t already under my roof. That it was safer to count loaves than to count possibilities.”
“And how did that work for you?” she asked, gentle but not unkind.
“Badly,” he said. “I spent years baking, raising a girl, and pretending my heart was just another oven: something that needed stoking, nothing more.”
They had reached the turn towards Beong-i’s lane. In the distance, Han-Byeol and her friend were visible again, smaller now, walking hand in hand. At the sight of them, In-Su’s face softened once more, the way it always did when looking at his daughter.
“She’s grown up too fast,” Ah-Rin murmured.
“She had to,” he said. “I did my best, but grief is a poor tutor, and loneliness worse. She learnt to read our house like other children learn letters. Where I left the bread knife, what days I spoke too little, when the oven was hotter than it needed to be.”
He swallowed.
“I don’t want her to have to read emptiness anymore,” he said quietly.
A small wind lifted the loose hairs at Ah-Rin’s temples. She pulled her jacket closer, more for something to do with her hands than from cold.
“You think… I would fill that emptiness?” she asked, not quite keeping the tremor from her voice.
“I think you already do,” he said simply. “For her. For me. For half the town, if they’d admit it.”
She laughed once, shaky.
“For you, I can’t speak,” she said. “For your daughter… I’ve grown fond of her bossy little heart.”
He smiled.
“And for you?” she added, trying for lightness and failing a little. “Who fills your emptiness?”
He looked at her. Truly looked, the way a man does when he has run out of safe places to lay his attention.
“When you left,” he said, “I told myself it was right. That a girl who could spin words like you should not stay where only four streets would ever hear them. I was proud. I was… devastated. I packed both things away together and sat on the box.”
She made a small, involuntary sound.
“I married because it was expected,” he went on. “I learnt to love the woman who shared my house. We had a child, and I thought: this is enough. Then death came in, helped itself to a chair, and refused to leave.”
He let out a breath.
“I decided not to want anything new,” he said. “Wanting seemed dangerous. Then fifteen years passed, and you came back through my door as if you had only gone to fetch paper.”
She took a step closer without quite meaning to.
“Your arrival made my careful, cramped life feel… ill-sized,” he said. “The walls didn’t fit any more. I thought it would pass. It hasn’t.”
He met her eyes, and for the first time since she had returned, there was no joke, no sideways glance to deflect the weight of what he was saying.
“I don’t know the right words, Ah-Rin-ah,” he said. “But I know this: I loved you in the rough, foolish way of a boy before you left. I have come to love you again, in the tired, stubborn way of a man who knows what it costs to lose things. And I am very, very afraid of what the town will say if I let that show.”
The truth of it hung between them, turning the thin autumn air dense.
Ah-Rin found that her hands had curled into fists inside her sleeves. She forced them to relax.
“When I left,” she said, “I told myself I was being brave. That I was stepping into a larger story. That the small ache of leaving you would be swallowed by the importance of what I went to learn.”
She gave a short, self-mocking huff.
“I was foolish, too,” she said. “Not for going—I would go again—but for thinking the heart is impressed by distance and titles. It isn’t. It remembers terrible, unnecessary details instead.”
“Like what?” he asked, almost hoarse.
She looked up at him, a smile ghosting around her mouth.
“Like you breaking three plates in a row when you heard I’d been offered a place in the capital,” she said. “And the way you pretended they’d slipped, as if you weren’t shaking.”
He winced.
“My father nearly made me eat the shards,” he muttered.
“Like the stamp you carved for me,” she continued, not letting him retreat. “The one with a tiny fish no one else noticed. I carried it through every workshop and library until the lines wore thin.”
“You kept it?” he asked, stunned.
“I still do,” she said. “Along with the bone folder and the notebook and all the other things that made leaving bearable.”
She drew a breath, steadying herself.
“I came back because Hanyang made it clear I could not do there what needed doing,” she said. “They wanted my hands, not my ideas. I stayed because this place—this stream, this town, these girls—felt like they had been saving a space for me.”
She swallowed hard.
“And because,” she added, voice dropping, “every time you walked past the school with that stupid basket, pretending you had forgotten something, I remembered being seventeen and wondering if you would ever say my name as if it were more than a word.”
The last of the light caught in the corner of his eye. He blinked, but the shine remained.
“I say it differently now,” he murmured. “In here.”
He lifted one hand, touched his chest lightly.
Her own heart thudded so loudly she was half-convinced he could hear it.
“I thought I had lost the right to this,” she said. “To you. You had a wife. You have a child. I came back older, with ink on my fingers and a reputation that makes old men frown. I told myself I would be content with work and… borrowed family.”
She thought of Eun-Sook snoring gently in the next room. Of Hye-Won’s hand on her arm whenever she looked more tired than she admitted. Of Eun-Jae’s quiet nod when she’d said “school” aloud for the first time.
“I am content,” she said. “But I am also… greedy, it seems.”
He let out a sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t cracked in the middle.
“Good,” he said. “Greedy suits you more than resigned.”
She shook her head, smiling helplessly now.
“We are not young,” she pointed out. “We have children to think of. Work. A school that attracts enough gossip without its teacher marrying the baker she once mooned over.”
“Moons are good for rising dough,” he said. “And for lighting people home.”
She swatted his arm, more to break her own rising tears than because the joke deserved it.
“Is there any part of you,” she asked, more serious, “that wants to keep pretending this is only friendship?”
“No,” he said at once.
The firmness of it startled them both.
“I am tired of pretending,” he said. “I am tired of arranging my life so that my heart is always in the back room, counted last after receipts and flour sacks.”
He took a breath.
“I want—” He stopped, tried again. “I want you in my house, not just on my road. I want my daughter to have a mother who understands why she loves ink more than dolls. I want to grow old grumbling with someone who tells me when I am being a coward and when I am just being careful.”
She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again. The world did not look very different, but it felt as if someone had shifted the weight of it slightly.
“I want that, too,” she said. “All of it. And I am afraid. Not of you. Of losing what we have if the town’s tongue grows sharper than my own.”
He nodded slowly.
“Then we are afraid together,” he said. “Which is, I think, better than being afraid alone.”
Ahead, at the bend of the path, Han-Byeol’s voice carried faintly on the wind, calling something loud enough that even Beong-i would hear. A moment later, a higher, rougher sound answered—Beong-i’s approximation of a shout, more air than word, but no less delighted.
Ah-Rin’s gaze softened.
“She loves you,” she said. “And she loves this school. If we do this badly, we could hurt both.”
“Then we won’t do it badly,” he said. “We will go slowly. We will give them time to grow used to the idea, the way we did. We will not spring a wedding on them like a tax notice.”
“Romantic,” she said, tying hard not to laugh.
“My romance has always come with ledgers,” he replied. “You knew this when you liked me the first time.”
They had reached the branching of paths: one way towards Beong-i’s aunt’s house, one towards the bakery, one down towards the stream and the school. The light was thinner now; the first pale star pricked the sky.
He stopped, turned fully towards her.
“So,” he said quietly. “We agree?”
“That we are fools?” she asked.
“That we are… no longer pretending,” he said.
She held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded once.
“No more pretending,” she said. “We will be careful. We will be kind. But we will not step back into the old shapes.”
His shoulders dropped, as if she had removed a weight, he hadn’t realised he was carrying.
Without quite thinking, he held out his arm, crooked at the elbow in the polite offer any man might make any woman home along a rough road.
She looked at it, then at him, and placed her hand there, fingers settling into the crease as if they had been waiting for the place.
The contact was nothing more than fabric on fabric, but her pulse leapt all the same. If his did too, he had the grace not to mention it.
They walked on in that new formation: two adults, not hiding, not announcing, simply sharing the path.
From the rise ahead, Han-Byeol turned and saw them. She nudged Beong-i, pointed. The girls exchanged a look, then identical grins.
“Happy,” Han-Byeol tapped against her own wrist, then tapped the same pattern on Beong-i’s.
Beong-i nodded, eyes bright, and traced one of their shared symbols on her slate with a quick, sure stroke.
Hope.
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By the time the first real frost held overnight, the fields had stopped pretending they were anything but bare.
The days shortened into thin slices of light between long stretches of grey, and the stream-house learnt a new song: the scrape of boots at its threshold earlier in the afternoon, the rustle of girls’ coats as they hurried away before the dark sank properly.
One evening, after the last of the pupils had gone and the brazier had settled into its low, steady glow, Ah-Rin stood in the doorway, looking at the empty benches.
It was the same room. The same beams, the same uneven floorboard near the right wall, the same stubborn draught under the sill. But it felt… too full of ghosts. The day’s laughter still hung between the rafters; the air remembered names recently spoken. She could almost see outlines where the girls had sat.
“You’re staring as if it’s offended you,” a familiar voice said behind her.
She turned.
Hye-Won stepped in, tugging off her gloves. Her cheeks were reddened by the wind, her hair pinned up hastily with a chopstick that didn’t quite match the rest. Behind her, Eun-Jae followed, carrying a small bundle that smelled unmistakably of roasted chestnuts.
“We come bearing tribute,” he said, holding it up.
“If that is from the batch that nearly burned, I decline,” Ah-Rin said.
“Then you’d better take it,” Hye-Won replied, relieving her husband of the bundle. “It’s from the batch he saved. Which he will remind you about until spring if you don’t praise it.”
They shrugged off their outer layers. Ah-Rin drew them towards the low table near the brazier. Dan-Mi, sensing the arrival of family, set down the slate she had been marking and murmured, “I’ll make tea,” before vanishing into the little back room.
“How is the mill?” Ah-Rin asked, accepting a chestnut and almost burning her fingers on it.
“Demanding,” Hye-Won said. “Like a child who has just discovered questions. Every merchant in three villages wants better paper and more of it.”
“And our son has discovered he can say ‘Hanji from Haesong’ in three different proud tones,” Eun-Jae added. “He’s begun to stand like a man who knows his work holds ink that will outlive him. It’s… uncomfortable.”
“Why?” Ah-Rin asked, amused.
“Because I remember when he tripped over his own feet carrying a single screen,” Eun-Jae said. “Time is rude.”
“Time is honest,” Hye-Won said quietly.
Her gaze drifted around the schoolroom, taking in the scuffed benches, the patched windows, the neat stack of readers in the corner.
“And here?” she asked. “How is your unruly child?”
“Loud,” Ah-Rin said. “Growing out of its clothes. Refusing to stop.”
She hesitated, fingers worrying the hot chestnut shell.
Hye-Won and Eun-Jae exchanged a brief look. Both shifted slightly closer without making a ceremony of it.
“What is it?” Hye-Won asked.
Ah-Rin let out a long breath.
“I told him,” she said.
No need to name “him.” They all knew.
“Told him what?” Eun-Jae asked, gently, as if they were easing a splinter from skin.
“That I never stopped loving him,” she said. “That I am tired of pretending we are only… childhood stories walking around in older bodies.”
Hye-Won’s face lit first with pure relief, then with something softer.
“Good,” she said. “Now I can stop biting my tongue every time I see you two standing three finger-widths too far apart.”
“And he?” Eun-Jae asked.
“Spoke like a man who has buried a wife and raised a daughter and still somehow found room left to be frightened,” Ah-Rin said. “But he was clear. He wants this. He does not want to hide it inside bread ovens and late deliveries anymore.”
The words came more easily now she had said them once already, out on the lane under that thin autumn sky. Speaking them again here, in this warm, crowded little room, felt like pressing them into paper: making them part of the record.
Hye-Won reached over and took her hand.
“I am glad,” she said simply. “I like the way he looks at you now. It’s less… haunted. More stubborn. That’s safer.”
“I am also glad,” Eun-Jae said, after a moment. “He has always walked as if he was listening for something more than footsteps. Perhaps now he knows what it was.”
Ah-Rin made a small, choked sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sob.
“I was afraid,” she admitted. “That you’d think it foolish. That after all the work of the last years, after the letters and the girls… I was behaving like a girl again.”
Hye-Won squeezed her fingers.
“You are behaving like a human being with a heart that refuses to retire,” she said. “We have no use for martyrs here. Only for people who can keep loving and still show up to stir pulp and correct sums.”
“And,” Eun-Jae added, “if anyone in this town has earned the right to choose happiness twice, it is you.”
Dan-Mi reappeared with the tea, placing the kettle and cups with more care than usual. Her eyes flicked between the three older faces and read precisely enough to know not to ask for details.
“Tea,” she said. “Because if we have chestnuts and no tea, Halmeoni will appear out of thin air to scold us.”
“Careful,” Ah-Rin replied. “If you call her by name, she may be listening.”
Dan-Mi snorted, then poured.
They spoke, then, of more practical things: the magistrate’s latest mutterings about the old hall, the number of girls expected in the next term, the price of charcoal, which had crept up rudely now that the weather remembered its duties.
But beneath it all ran the steady, new certainty that the three at the table carried: this was no longer a matter of guesswork and careful glances. The line between Ah-Rin and In-Su had been drawn, and while they might choose to thicken it slowly, they were no longer pretending it did not exist.
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Later that week, Mi-Young and Eun-Sook found themselves sharing the same bench outside the bakery while dough rose inside and children’s voices drifted faintly from the stream.
The winter sun had given up trying to warm them and contented itself with drawing sharp shadows.
“You’ve been here more often,” Mi-Young observed, handing Eun-Sook a small cup of barley tea.
“Your son keeps giving my daughter bread,” Eun-Sook replied. “I have to make sure he’s not trying to fatten her for some nefarious purpose.”
Mi-Young couldn’t suppress a grin.
“If anyone in this town is nefarious, it is not my boy,” she said. “He’s too soft.”
“Soft is not the same as weak,” Eun-Sook said. “You know that.”
Mi-Young’s hands stilled on the edge of her apron.
“I do now,” she said quietly. “I didn’t, when he first came back here with a baby and eyes like cracked porcelain.”
Eun-Sook’s gaze softened.
“He did well,” she said.
“He survived,” Mi-Young corrected. “There is a difference. Survival is eating and working and sleeping. Doing well is… laughing again. Wanting again.”
“And now?”
“And now,” Mi-Young said slowly, “I see him look at your daughter and remember he has a heart that can hold two griefs and still find space left.”
They sat in silence awhile, the only sound the occasional thump from inside as someone moved a tray or a wooden spoon was dropped.
“Do you mind?” Mi-Young asked. “If your daughter fills this space?”
Eun-Sook shook her head.
“I mind only if he hurts her,” she said. “But I don’t think he will. He is too afraid of losing what he has just admitted he wants.”
“And she?” Mi-Young asked.
“She has lived fifteen years in a city that treated her mind as a curiosity and her gender as a footnote,” Eun-Sook said. “If she chooses him now, it is not because she is starved for options. It is because she is full of herself at last, and wants someone who will not ask her to shrink.”
They looked at each other then, two women who had both raised children and watched those children hand their hearts to the world in different ways.
“We might end up related after all,” Mi-Young said.
“We already are,” Eun-Sook replied. “Have you seen how your granddaughter and my daughter’s students run? They’re all going to break the town’s ankles eventually.”
Mi-Young smiled.
“Then we’d better make sure they have solid roofs over their heads when they’re done,” she said.
“I think that part,” Eun-Sook said, “is happening already.”
It was, in fact, being plotted out in careful lines of chalk and ink the very next afternoon.
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The old magistrate’s hall stood near the centre of town, a little apart from the bustle of the harbour and the market. Once, its doors had swung wide for tax days and edicts and the occasional public scolding. Now it sat mostly quiet, its paper windows patched with whatever the town could spare, its wide main room hosting nothing more serious than the odd dispute over nets.
Magistrate Jo Seung-Gyu, thin and fussy, stood outside with his hands tucked into his sleeves as Ah-Rin, Dan-Mi, and Seol-Ha approached.
“I am merely showing you the building,” he said for the third time. “This is not agreement. It is… inspection.”
“Of course, Magistrate-nim,” Ah-Rin said, bowing. “We would never mistake your kindness for commitment.”
He looked faintly alarmed, as if she might at any moment produce a contract and a witness.
Dan-Mi hid a smile as she slipped past him to the doors. She pushed them open. They creaked like old men complaining, but they moved.
Inside, the hall was bigger than any room the school had ever dreamt of. The main space stretched from one end to the other with no dividing wall, the ceiling high enough that even Eun-Jae would not have to duck here. Dust motes danced in the angled light that sliced through gaps in the patched windows.
Seol-Ha stepped in and clapped once, sharply.
The sound bounced back, softer, rounded by the empty space. She clapped again, a different rhythm. The echo answered.
“Good for music,” she murmured.
“Good for everything,” Dan-Mi muttered. “I could fit three classes in here and still have room to stack the magistrate’s doubts in the corner.”
Ah-Rin walked slowly down the length of the hall, fingers brushing the air as if she were feeling where walls might one day stand. Here a row of low desks. There a corner for the younger ones to learn letters without being elbowed by older girls reciting history. By the far wall, perhaps, a space for Seol-Ha’s instrument, where sound could thread through reading without drowning it.
“The roof?” she asked, looking up.
The magistrate craned his neck.
“It does not leak in places that matter,” he said. “Only near the edges.”
“That is true of many institutions,” Ah-Rin said mildly.
Dan-Mi snorted, then coughed to disguise it.
“The town uses this hall so little these days,” Seol-Ha said, running her hand along a bench that had once supported many reluctant backs. “It seems a shame to let it sit empty, while the stream-house spills over.”
The magistrate shifted from foot to foot.
“It is not so simple,” he said. “There are… letters. Permissions. The hall belongs to the province, not just to Haesong. The magistrate cannot simply decide—”
“No,” Ah-Rin agreed. “But the magistrate can… suggest. Ask. Present to those above him a story that makes sense.”
He frowned.
“A story,” he repeated.
“A record,” she said. “Girls who can read the weights on fish deliveries. Girls who can tally accounts so their fathers do not cheat themselves. Girls who will, one day, teach other children so the province does not have to import every clerk and teacher from somewhere else.”
Dan-Mi moved to one of the papered windows and pulled aside a loose edge. Through it, she could see the road, the curve of the well, a slice of the sky.
“If you give this hall to dust,” she said, “it will reward you with rot. If you give it to girls, it will reward you with ledgers that balance and letters that reach their destination.”
Seol-Ha turned a slow circle in the middle of the room.
“We could hang lanterns from these beams,” she said. “Play music here when they graduate. Let the town come and see what their daughters have learnt.”
The magistrate pressed his lips together, trying very hard not to imagine it. The problem was, he could.
“I will… consider,” he said at last. “There are forms.”
“There are always forms,” Ah-Rin said gently. “But there are also people. And stories. Think of which you want this hall to be full of in ten years.”
He made a strangled sound that might have been agreement if one were generous.
“You will hear from me,” he said, backing towards the door. “In due course. Possibly.”
When he had gone, the three women were left alone in the wide, dusty space.
Dan-Mi spread her arms wide.
“Listen,” she said.
They stood still.
The hall breathed: faint drafts along the floor, the creak of beams shifting their weight, the far-off murmur of the town bleeding in through walls that had never truly learnt to be silent.
“It’s waiting,” Seol-Ha said quietly.
“For what?” Ah-Rin asked.
“For us,” Dan-Mi replied. “For benches and chalk and girls who refuse to sit the way someone told them to.”
Ah-Rin looked around again, seeing not just the dust and the age, but what could be: two classes working at once, older girls helping younger ones, Beong-i standing near the front where she could see every mouth and feel every vibration in the floorboards. Han-Byeol running from one end to the other and back again until someone made her sit long enough to write her name properly.
“And for shoes,” she said, half to herself. “All the shoes that will cross this threshold.”
On that thought, without meaning to, her mind flicked to a very different doorway, and shoes she had not yet seen but could almost imagine: placed neatly side by side by someone who baked bread for a living and had started, lately, to allow himself to hope for more.
She smiled.
“This hall,” she said, “will need a lot of sweeping.”
“We have girls who are very good at sweeping,” Dan-Mi said. “Especially when they’re meant to be doing arithmetic.”
Seol-Ha laughed, the sound ringing gently against the beams. She clapped once more, just to hear the echo answer, and thought, with a little thrill, of how it would sound when the room was full of voices instead of dust.
Outside, the town went on with its late-autumn business: nets to mend, jars to seal, roofs to check before snow. Inside, three women stood in an old government hall and measured it not by its past, but by the weight of futures it might hold.
And somewhere between the stream-house, the mill, and the bakery, small conspiracies were already underway: grandmothers adjusting their language from “if” to “when,” children drawing new family names in the margins of their slates, a magistrate pacing in his office, wondering how to write a letter to Hanyang that would make it sound as if he had thought of all this himself.
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Haesong’s winter stopped pretending to be polite. Snow came in one clean sweep overnight, laying a white sheet over Haesong so neatly that even the mule at Nam Seung-Mo’s yard seemed impressed. The stream narrowed to a dark, moving seam between banks of white. Roofs hunched under their new weight; chimneys wrote soft grey lines into the sky.
By midmorning, Ah-Rin’s schoolroom was full of pink noses and damp hems. Girls arrived with snow in their hair, shook it off in the yard, then tracked little melting ghosts of it across the floor.
“Sit,” she said, laughing as Han-Byeol tried to stomp her boots dry in a way that sprayed everyone within reach. “If you fall over, I will not write a note to your father saying the snow attacked you.”
Lessons that day were half as long and twice as noisy. Chalk squeaked. Breath smoked in the cold patches between brazier warmth and draughts. Beong-i’s cheeks were flushed from the chill; her fingers moved more slowly, but her letters stayed firm.
At the far end of the room, Dan-Mi kept an eye on the door as much as on sums.
“You’re waiting for something,” Ah-Rin said quietly, as they let the girls go early with warnings about icy stones and promises of hot soup waiting at home.
“I’m waiting for someone,” Dan-Mi replied. “Clerks do not like climbing hills in snow. They delay bad news when they can.”
“Optimist,” Ah-Rin said. “You assume it will be bad.”
“A man who enjoys his own power too much is rarely in a hurry to share it,” Dan-Mi said. “Censor’s offices and magistrate’s chairs breed the same sort of mould.”
“Fair,” Ah-Rin conceded.
The girls spilled out. Han-Byeol and Beong-i left together as always, bundled into scarves that made them look like walking bundles of wool. Their small footprints rapidly filled with white.
The knock came not long after the room had fallen quiet. It was brisk, official, and carried badly concealed reluctance. Dan-Mi visibly squared her shoulders.
“Stay,” Ah-Rin murmured. “His quarrel is with me. You can laugh later if I lose my temper.”
Dan-Mi snorted, but she stepped back to the side of the room.
The magistrate’s clerk entered with exaggerated care, as if wary of offending the floor. He had the look of a man who felt very important and very cold.
“Kim Ah-Rin Seonsaeng-nim,” he said. “The magistrate requests your presence.”
“Does he?” she said calmly. “Am I being scolded, or inspected?”
His mouth twitched.
“I am not authorised to say,” he replied. “Only to shiver.”
She wrapped her outer coat around herself, cast a quick glance at Dan-Mi.
“Don’t burn the school down while I’m gone,” she said.
“I’ll wait to set fire to anything until you return,” Dan-Mi replied. “Then we can do it together.”
The clerk pretended not to hear that.
The office of the magistrate felt smaller in winter.
The brazier did its best, but the heat seemed to die halfway across the floor. On the low table between them lay a scroll Ah-Rin knew by sight now: the decree Dan-Mi had carried from Hanyang the year before, its edges softened by many readings.
Magistrate Jo Seung-Gyu smoothed the paper with the side of his hand, as if still hoping the ink might arrange itself into something less demanding.
“Kim Ah-Rin-ssi,” he began, not looking up, “I have been… reconsidering.”
“That sounds serious, Magistrate-nim,” she said lightly, taking her seat. “Should I be worried?”
“Possibly,” he muttered. “I am.”
He tapped a finger on the middle of the scroll and read aloud, more to order his thoughts than to inform her:
“In light of its usefulness to poor households and its limited scope, this study is, for the present, permitted to continue as a trial. Local authorities are enjoined to observe and support it within due bounds. Any future questions shall be referred to this office before judgement is rendered.”
He let the words sit between them, then spoke again, quieter.
“‘Observe and support,’” he repeated. “When this first arrived, I told myself the important words were trial and future questions. That I should do nothing unless someone complained loudly enough to wake Hanyang.”
He looked up at her at last.
“But when a king’s ink says ‘support’…” He exhaled. “It is difficult to pretend that doing nothing counts.”
Outside, a gust of wind rattled the window paper. The brazier ticked softly.
“I have observed,” he went on. “Your school has not produced riots, cults, or girls climbing my roof. It has produced… fewer quarrels over weights, fewer drunk signatures on foolish contracts, and far too many small faces peering through my office door, counting the ledgers on my shelf.”
“Good,” Ah-Rin said softly. “I was hoping they would be nosy.”
His mouth twitched, despite himself.
“I told those who grumbled that my hands were tied,” he admitted. “That Hanyang had allowed your stream-house school, but not required me to do anything more expensive than tolerate it.”
He tapped the scroll again.
“But local authorities are enjoined to support it within due bounds. If I refuse to lift so much as a finger when there is an empty hall doing nothing but collecting dust, am I not—” he grimaced “—arguing with this seal?”
He nodded at the vermilion stamp.
“Only a little,” Ah-Rin said. “Very quietly.”
He gave her a look that said he recognised impertinence when he heard it.
“There is a risk,” he said. “If some fool writes to Hanyang and claims I have turned a ‘small study’ into some grand temple of rebellion, the Office of Censors might decide to take an interest again. They might say I should have asked permission.”
“Will they be wrong?” she asked.
He hesitated, then shook his head.
“No,” he said. “But they will be… late. And very far away.”
He sat back, squaring his shoulders in a way that made him look more like a man and less like a nervous piece of furniture.
“So, I intend to take a small gamble,” he said. “I will treat moving your school from this house by the stream into the old hall as a relocation, not a change in nature. The decree already permits the thing itself; I am merely giving it a roof that does not leak quite so badly.”
He looked almost surprised at his own boldness.
“If anyone in Hanyang complains later,” he went on, “I will point to their own words: support within due bounds. I will say that I observed, I supported, and I judged no ‘future question’ serious enough to bother them with.”
A short silence fell. The brazier sighed.
Ah-Rin felt the corners of her mouth lift, slow and genuine.
“You are braver than you look, Magistrate Jo,” she said.
“Please do not say that where anyone can hear you,” he replied sharply. “I have a reputation to maintain.”
She bowed, deeper this time.
“Then I will say only that you read carefully,” she said. “And that the girls of Haesong will be very grateful for dusty floors and high beams.”
He made a choking sound that might have been embarrassment or modesty.
“I will have a notice posted,” he said brusquely. “Something dull. ‘By the authority of the magistrate, in accordance with the royal decree, the eastern hall shall be employed for approved instruction.’”
“That will do very well,” she replied. “We will supply the non-dull part.”
As she stood to go, he added, almost grudgingly:
“Bring me a list of what you need before the snow melts. If the town is to have a school in its hall, it should not look like a warehouse.”
She paused at the doorway, the decree’s words still ringing softly in her head.
“Thank you, Magistrate-nim,” she said.
He waved a hand.
“Thank the king,” he muttered. “And try not to make me regret interpreting him generously.”
As she left his office the cold outside barely seemed to touch her. The snow had begun to fall again, small flakes drifting lazily down. They landed on her hair, her coat, the rolled paper in her hand. She did not brush them off.
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At the stream-house, Dan-Mi opened the door before she could knock.
“Well?” she demanded.
Ah-Rin held up the scroll.
“We have a hall,” she said simply.
Dan-Mi’s whoop startled a bird out of the mulberry tree.
“Halmeoni will say she knew it,” she crowed. “Hye-Won-imo will pretend not to be surprised. Jin-Ho-yah will start calculating how much more paper he has to make.”
“And you?” Ah-Rin asked, laughing.
“I,” Dan-Mi said, “will lie awake half the night planning where to put the tables.”
“And I,” Ah-Rin said softly, “will go and tell him.”
“You always call him ‘him’ now,” Dan-Mi observed, dry.
“There is only one ‘him’ in this matter,” Ah-Rin replied.
Dan-Mi shook her head, but her eyes were fond.
“Go,” she said. “Before the snow decides you belong to the floor.”
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The bakery was warmer than the magistrate’s office had been, than the school, than almost any place in town. Heat rolled from the ovens, carrying with it the smell of crust and yeast and sugar.
Cho Mi-Young glanced up as Ah-Rin entered, shook flour from her hands, and waved her towards the back.
“He’s there,” she said. “Pretending not to stare at the door.”
“I am cutting dough,” In-Su protested from the inner room.
“While facing the door,” Mi-Young said. “Off with you, girl. If you keep him waiting any longer, he’ll knead his own fingers by mistake.”
In-Su wiped his hands, tugged at his sleeves, then gave up and came towards her as he was: dusted with flour, cheeks flushed from the oven.
“You’re early, Ah-Rin-ah” he said.
“Magistrate Jo wanted to share his anxieties,” she replied.
His eyes widened.
“Regarding the empty hall?” he asked.
“Reconsidering the decree,” she said. “And… giving him courage to stop hiding behind ‘maybe’.”
She told him, briefly, of the magistrate’s words. Of “trial basis”. Of “small study” and “support within due bounds”.
“So,” she finished, “we have a hall.”
He let out a slow breath, as if he had been holding it for three years.
“Then they did not waste your work in the capital,” he said. “Or in this town.”
“I don’t know about ‘they’,” she said. “But we didn’t.”
He reached out, almost without thought, and brushed a snowflake from her hair where it had melted and refrozen.
“You’re cold,” he said.
“I walked quickly,” she answered. “I wanted to tell you before anyone else told the town, In-Su-yah.”
His face did something complicated at that.
“I am glad,” he said.
Their eyes held. The bakery air felt suddenly hotter than the ovens.
Behind them, Mi-Young cleared her throat ostentatiously.
“If you two are going to stand there making eyes and steaming up my dough,” she said, “at least move away from the cooling racks.”
Ah-Rin flushed.
“We were discussing official matters,” she protested.
“Mm,” Mi-Young said. “The king will be pleased to know his decree doubles as romance.”
“Eomma,” In-Su groaned.
She waved a hand.
“Go on,” she said. “Our Ah-Rin looks like she’s about to float off the floor. Take her for a walk before she hits her head on the beams.”
They did walk, briefly, once the worst of the afternoon rush had been seen to. Just down to the harbour and back, their breath hanging white in the air. They spoke of practical things: desks, benches, carpets to keep small feet from freezing against wide, draughty boards.
They did not speak of the future of their own roofs. That, too, was understood, but it waited, like the hall itself, for the right moment.
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The moment chose itself a few weeks later, on a night when snow came and stayed this time, not just a dusting that melted by midday, but a soft, firm layer along the paths, edging the stream and clinging to the stone steps. The stream-house windows glowed earlier each afternoon; breath fogged in the schoolroom even with the brazier burning low.
The last lesson of the term ended in a muddle of wool and chatter.
“Take your readers,” Ah-Rin called over the noise. “Do not leave them under your pillows. Letters don’t like being smothered.”
Groans, laughter, rustle of paper. Han-Byeol tried to balance her slate on her head and nearly took out Soo-Yeon’s braid. Beong-i watched them with a small, shy curve to her mouth, then carefully wrapped her own reader in cloth before slipping it into her bag.
“Remember,” Dan-Mi added, “if the snow is higher than your knees, you write its description for extra practice.”
“That’s cruel,” someone protested.
“That’s composition,” Dan-Mi said. “Cruelty would be asking you to count the flakes.”
They spilled out in twos and threes, scattering down the lane, voices thinning as they turned towards their own roofs. Plans already threaded their talk: how the new hall would be, where they might sit when the school moved in spring, how high the beams were and whether anyone would be mad enough to climb them.
When the last girl had gone, the room felt suddenly too large. The echo of their footsteps lingered like steam.
Eun-Sook shrugged into her outer coat with a small, satisfied sigh.
“I’m going up to the mill,” she said. “Hye-Won and I have a baduk game to settle. She thinks she can beat me just because she has more ledgers. We’ll see.”
“Don’t gamble the family on it,” Ah-Rin said.
“Ha,” Eun-Sook snorted. “If she loses, I’ll make her pay in paper.”
She leaned over, kissed the top of her daughter’s head, and pinched Dan-Mi’s cheek on her way to the door.
“Don’t stay up too late over lists,” she warned. “Ink doesn’t like bloodshot eyes.”
The door slid shut behind her, letting in a brief slice of cold before settling again.
Soon after, Dan-Mi climbed the stairs with a stack of papers under her arm.
“I’ll sort these by candlelight,” she said. “If I stay down here, I’ll only distract you.”
“You are the distraction,” Ah-Rin replied.
“Imo,” Dan-Mi said serenely. “That’s one of my better qualities.”
Then she disappeared onto the upper floor, her footsteps creaking along the narrow boards.
For a few minutes, the only sounds were the soft hiss of the brazier and the faint murmur of the stream outside. The schoolroom looked smaller without the girls, but fuller in a different way: shelves with extra readers stacked in anticipation, a rolled drawing of the magistrate’s hall propped against the wall, the royal decree lying where Ah-Rin had left it, weighted by an inkstone.
She rose, went to the door, and slid it open. The cold met her at once, clear and clean, making her eyes smart.
Out in the yard, the mulberry branches carried small, perfect caps of snow. She stepped out, pulling her coat tighter, and reached up to shake the lower limbs gently. Snow slid off in soft clumps, thudding to the ground and leaving the branches dark and bare against the pale sky.
“Sleep,” she told the tree quietly. “You’ve earned it.”
As she turned back towards the house, movement at the foot of the steps caught her eye.
In-Su stood there, coat dusted with snow, hands tucked into his sleeves. His breath smoked in the air. He looked as if he had been standing just long enough to grow a light frosting on his shoulders.
“At this hour?” she asked, startled into a smile. “Have the ovens thrown you out?”
“My mother says,” he replied, “that a woman who walks between mill, school and bakery deserves better soles than the ones she’s abusing.”
He nodded towards the threshold. Only then did she see them properly.
On the stone just in front of the door, placed side by side with the kind of care that made something as simple as footwear look ceremonial, lay a pair of new sandals.
Not festival-fancy, but good, strong ones: thick soles for rough ground, straps neatly finished. They were her size. She knew without trying. The leather had a faint sheen, the sort that came from being rubbed with oil by someone who hated waste and loved comfort.
On the outer strap of one sandal, almost hidden, a tiny fish had been stamped into the leather.
Her throat went tight.
“You know,” she said lightly, because her heart was suddenly behaving like a drum in a parade, “shoes won’t keep me off difficult paths.”
“I’d be disappointed if they did,” he answered.
He said it simply, as if stating a fact about the weather. But his eyes were very steady on hers, and the snow settling in his hair didn’t seem to bother him at all.
She glanced from him to the sandals and back again.
“Your mother sent you to deliver these?” she asked. “So dutiful.”
He hesitated, then gave up the pretence.
“She… suggested it,” he said. “I chose them. I thought… if we are to walk more roads together, it would be better if yours didn’t fall apart on the first hill.”
The words slipped into the quiet like small stones into water, making ripples that went much further than the surface.
A gust of wind blew a spray of fine flakes between them. She shivered, more from feeling than cold.
“Wait,” she said abruptly, and vanished back inside.
He stayed where he was, on the bottom step, as if rooted there. Snow settled on his shoulders, his hat, the tops of his boots. He didn’t brush it off.
Inside, Ah-Rin put her hand briefly against the wall to steady herself. Her pulse was ridiculous. It had not behaved like this even in Hanyang when she had been called to present a finished piece to a noble household.
She took off her damp house socks, found the thicker pair Eun-Sook insisted she wear when the floors turned to ice, and slipped them on. Then she lifted the sandals, one in each hand, and carried them back to the doorway.
He hadn’t moved.
She sat down on the threshold, half inside, half out, the wood cold under her thighs. Carefully, she placed one sandal on the stone, slid her foot into it. Then the other.
The fit was perfect. Of course it was. He had watched her walk these roads for more than a year now.
She rose, the frame of the doorway at her back, the yard and him in front of her. Snowflakes drifted between them like slow, indecisive thoughts.
“They fit,” she said softly.
He swallowed.
“Good,” he replied. “It would have been awkward to explain to my mother if they didn’t.”
A small laugh escaped her, white in the cold air.
She took one step forward, until she stood with the edge of the threshold just behind her heels.
“Let’s see,” she said, her voice steadying around the words, “how far they go.”
For a heartbeat, nothing moved. Then his shoulders dropped, just a little, as if some held breath had finally been released.
He didn’t reach for her. Not yet. The night, the snow, the closeness of windows made that gesture something for later. But the look he gave her held everything his hands did not do.
“Wherever they go,” he said quietly, “I will walk until the soles wear out.”
They stood there for a few moments, sharing the thin border between house and yard, winter and what came after. The snow thickened; the world beyond the stream-house blurred into white and shadow.
At last, she cleared her throat.
“Go home,” she said. “If you freeze on my steps, your mother will blame me.”
“She already blames you,” he said. “For me baking twice as much as we can sell whenever you come near the shop.”
“She eats the extra bread,” she pointed out.
“Exactly,” he replied. “Her complaints are… complicated.”
She smiled, helpless and full.
“Good night, In-Su-yah,” she said.
His eyes lit briefly at the familiar address on her tongue.
“Good night, Ah-Rin-ah,” he said.
He bowed once; as men do when the person in front of them matters more, than who might be watching. Then he turned and walked back into the snow, his footsteps already filling in behind him.
She watched until he was only a darker smudge against the white, then gone.
Snow clung to the new sandals, beading on the leather. She stepped back inside, shook her feet gently, and shut the door on the cold.
For a moment she simply leaned against it, eyes closed.
“Imo?” Dan-Mi’s voice floated down from upstairs, half cautious, half unable to resist. “Should I pretend I didn’t hear any of that?”
Ah-Rin let out a breath that turned into a laugh halfway through.
“You’ll hurt yourself if you pretend too hard,” she called back. “Come down before your curiosity bursts.”
Dan-Mi’s footsteps thumped along the boards. She appeared at the top of the stairs wrapped in a blanket, hair mussed, eyes bright.
She stopped halfway down when she saw the sandals on Ah-Rin’s feet.
“Oh,” she said softly. “So that’s decided.”
“Nothing is decided,” Ah-Rin said automatically, then shook her head. “Everything is… beginning to decide itself.”
Dan-Mi descended the rest of the way, dropped onto the floor beside her and drew her blanket tighter around her knees.
“They suit you,” she said. “Sturdy. Stubborn. Slightly more graceful than strictly necessary.”
“There’s a fish,” Ah-Rin said, lifting the hem of her skirt to show the tiny stamped mark.
Dan-Mi squinted.
“Of course there is,” she murmured. “He never did know how to leave a piece of wood or leather entirely plain.”
They sat in silence for a moment, listening to the snow mutter against the eaves.
“You’ll move,” Dan-Mi said eventually. Not accusing. Just stating the fact that sat between them.
“Yes,” Ah-Rin said. “Not tomorrow. Not next week. But… when we’ve spoken to everyone who needs speaking to. When the hall is ready. When the town has had a little time to get used to the idea of its baker and its troublesome teacher living under one roof.”
“And Halmeoni?” Dan-Mi asked quietly.
“I’m stealing her with me,” Ah-Rin replied. “She may grumble about the harbour wind, but she won’t let me go without someone to scold.”
Dan-Mi nodded, jaw working.
“And Beong-i?” she asked.
The question landed in the space they had both been avoiding.
Ah-Rin’s face gentled.
“We don’t know yet,” she said. “We can’t promise her anything until we speak to her aunt. It would be… cruel to give her a future she might not be allowed to keep.”
Dan-Mi made a small, frustrated sound.
“Her aunt barely watches her now,” she muttered. “She remembers her when there’s work to be done and forgets her when there’s laughter.”
“I know,” Ah-Rin said. “Han-Byeol knows. In-Su knows. Beong-i knows most of all.”
She looked down at the sandals.
“We want her,” she said simply. “He and I. We want her in our house, at our table, with our noise. But wanting and taking are not the same. Not yet.”
“Han-Byeol is already planning which blanket she’ll share,” Dan-Mi said, a brief smile flickering. “She doesn’t believe in ‘not yet’.”
“She believes in her father,” Ah-Rin said. “Which is not a bad thing to believe in.”
They sat with that for a while: the messy, human tangle of law, custom, and love. Outside, the snow kept laying its quiet argument over the old tracks.
“And you?” Ah-Rin asked at last, turning the topic gently. “What will you do when the girls move to the hall and this place stops being a school?”
Dan-Mi lifted one shoulder.
“Complain about the silence,” she said. “Then fill it with paper.”
“You already have,” Ah-Rin replied. “Half the upstairs is scrolls and drafts and stolen offcuts. This house is more yours than mine now.”
“I don’t like empty rooms,” Dan-Mi said. “I like rooms that forget where the walls are because the shelves are in the way.”
“Good,” Ah-Rin said. “Then when I move my shoes to the harbour, I won’t worry about this roof being lonely.”
She nudged Dan-Mi’s knee gently with her own.
“Make it into what you like,” she went on. “Workshop. Library. Place where people come to borrow stories and never quite leave on time.”
“Jin-Ho-yah will be pleased,” Dan-Mi said dryly. “More excuses to ‘deliver paper’ up here, when he could just hand it to me at the hall.”
“Mm,” Ah-Rin said, the sound full of more meaning than words. “I suspect this house will see more than one set of shoes left at its door in the years to come.”
Dan-Mi’s ears went pink. She buried her chin in her blanket.
“One couple at a time,” she muttered. “Your sandals first.”
Ah-Rin laughed, soft and low.
They sat there a little longer on the threshold, the new sandals drying slowly, the old floor creaking under familiar weight. Above them, the rafters held the sound of their voices the way they had once held sawdust and plans.
“Sleep, Imo,” Dan-Mi said eventually, rising. “Tomorrow, you have to face Halmeoni, Mi-Young-eomeoni, Hye-Won-imo and Seol-Ha-yah at the same time. You’ll need all your courage.”
“I’ve walked harder roads,” Ah-Rin said.
She wiggled her toes inside the sandals, feeling the firm, reassuring shape of the soles.
“But these,” she added, “might make the next one easier.”
Later, when the lamp was out and the house lay in the deep, breathing quiet of falling snow, the sandals sat just inside the door, side by side. Outside, the stream kept speaking its low, endless sentence. Inside, futures rearranged themselves, not neatly, but with stubborn, hopeful intent.
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