Emily didn’t sleep.
I knew because I didn’t sleep either.
I lay in the guest room and listened to the apartment — the small sounds of her moving through the kitchen at two in the morning, the tap running, the kettle clicking on.
At half past two I got up and went to find her.
She was sitting at the kitchen table with both hands wrapped around a mug.
The documents were spread out in front of her.
She’d been reading them again.
I sat down across from her without saying anything.
“I keep looking for the part where I should have known,” she said.
“There isn’t one,” I said.
“He was so careful, Mum.
He never raised his voice.
He never made me feel small.
He was kind.” She shook her head.
“That’s what I can’t get past.
He was genuinely kind to me.”
“He may have been,” I said.
“And it still doesn’t make what he did acceptable.”
She looked at the documents.
“What if I’m liable?
What if they come after me for the full amount?”
“That’s why we need a lawyer.
First thing tomorrow.”
“It’s already tomorrow,” she said.
I reached across the table and covered her hand with mine.
She didn’t pull away.
She turned her hand over and held on.
We sat like that for a while.
The kettle had long gone cold.
Outside, Seoul was quiet in the way cities are only quiet at three in the morning — not silent, just briefly still.
“He said it changed,” Emily said.
“That he came to love me.”
“I heard him.”
“Do you believe him?”
I thought about it honestly.
“I think it’s possible,” I said.
“I also think it doesn’t change what he did.
Both things can be true.”
She nodded slowly.
“I think I believe him too.
And I think that makes it worse, somehow.
If he’d never cared at all, it would be simpler.”
“Yes,” I said.
“It would.”
She gathered the documents and slid them back into the envelope.
She set it aside.
Then she looked at me with the particular expression she’d had since she was a child — the one that meant she was about to say something she’d been working up to.
“Why didn’t you tell me you spoke Korean?” she said.
“I wanted to surprise you,” I said.
“I was going to tell you this visit.”
A sound came out of her.
Not quite a laugh, not quite a sob.
Something in between.
“Of all the ways for that to come out,” she said.
“I know.”
She almost smiled.
Then it faded.
“I have to call my office,” she said.
“If there’s any chance this affects my professional contracts — if Joon used my work connections as part of whatever arrangement he made — I need to get ahead of it.”
“Yes,” I said.
“But not at three in the morning.”
“No,” she agreed.
“Not at three in the morning.”
She stood up and took her mug to the sink.
She rinsed it and set it on the rack.
“Mum,” she said, with her back to me.
“I’m glad you were here.”
“Me too,” I said.
She went back to bed.
I stayed at the table a little longer.
On the kitchen counter, Joon’s spare keys were sitting in the bowl where he always left them.
He hadn’t taken them when he left.
I didn’t know if that was an oversight or a kind of hope.
My phone lit up on the table.
A message.
From a number I didn’t recognize.
In Korean.
*Tell Emily to drop this.
There are things she doesn’t know yet.
Things that are worse than a debt.*
