The price of the afternoon came due at ten minutes past midnight, and Seon-ho paid it sitting on the floor of his room with his back against the bed and a stolen page across his knees.

He knew the feeling by now. It was not pain. It was the absence of the thing that was supposed to follow a day like this: the slow sinking, the heavy-limbed argument with the pillow that ends in a loss for the pillow. His body was tired in the way a phone is at one per cent, and nothing in it would agree to switch off. Three years of experiments had taught him the exchange rate. One line in the hand, one night of sleep, gone for good. It did not come back on Sunday. It did not come back if he slept twice as long next night. The tiredness simply stayed, a small debt on a loan he had not known he could take out, and he had so far written nine lines in his life.

The room was the attic of a three-storey building on Gaeul Lane, which Dil owned and called a hotel when she was feeling confident and a lease when she was not. It had a sloping ceiling, a window onto a laundry line, and a desk he had made from a door. Through the floor came the sound of her dispatch radio, a woman's voice reciting street names in a cheerful monotone, and under it, Dil herself, arguing with a football match in two languages.

He put the lamp on the page, angled the light across the grain, and made himself look properly.

The line was in the margin beside the stain, no thicker than a hair, so cramped that it could be mistaken for the paper's own fibre. He could read it as easily as his own name, because that was exactly what it was. His father had taught it to him before he could hold a spoon, the way other fathers sang the alphabet, and it had never occurred to Seon-ho that it was a secret until he was six and a teacher asked why he had written his homework in squiggles. He had learned that day to hide it. He had not learned why.

The line said, in his mother tongue, which was also nobody's:

*Ko did not leave the ship. Ask Hwang. Do not sign for the tide.*

He read it four times. Then he did what a restorer does when he does not trust his own eyes: he stopped reading and began to examine.

The ink first. He put the corner of the sheet under the loupe and pressed a clean strip of blotting paper to the stroke, and the blotter came away with the faintest brown flush. That told him what he needed. Oak gall, yes, and the other ingredient, the one his father had never named, a thing that smelled very slightly of iron and cut grass. He had never found it in any shop or recipe. He had worked out the proportions by trial, by ruining expensive paper. The blot came away the same colour as the ink in his own jar, to the shade.

Second, the age. Gall ink darkens over months, from pale to black, as it oxidises. Here it was still brown. Fresh. A week or a month old, not eleven years.

He sat very still.

Someone had put this line on a document in the last few weeks. Someone who wrote the hand, who knew the pause on the fifth stroke, who made the ink the way he did. There were only two such people, and the second was in the room.

"He's alive," Seon-ho said aloud, and the room, being a room, did not respond.

He had expected a larger feeling. Eleven years of carrying a funeral, he'd thought, ought to collapse more spectacularly. What he got was something closer to an accountant's relief: the sense of a column finally balancing, followed at once by a second column, which did not. *Alive* and *where*. *Alive* and *eleven years*. *Alive*, and *he wrote to me in the margin of a missing ship, in a hand he knew only I could read, and did not come home.*

A knock at the door, followed by a head.

"You're up," said Dilnoza Kim.

She was thirty, small and square-shouldered, with a black ponytail, a quilted vest over a pyjama top, and a headset hanging round her neck like a stethoscope. She had a plate in one hand and a phone in the other, the phone displaying a betting app in which a team he had never heard of was losing by a goal. "I heard you walking. You don't walk, usually. You *drift*, like a ghost with an invoice."

"I wasn't walking. I was sitting."

"Same thing at your age." She came in without being asked, which was how she came into everything, and put the plate on the desk. Dumplings, cold, from her mother's recipe, which she had never taught him because she said he would improve it. "Did the surveyor come? The Indian one? She asked me which shop on Dolsan was honest and I said none of them, but yours was lazy, which is nearly the same."

"She came."

"And?"

"And she wants certified copies."

"*And?*"

"And that's all there is, Dil. You've set me up with a customer."

"I set you up with *work*," she said, and sat on the edge of the bed with her feet drawn under her. She looked at his face for longer than he liked. She was the only person in the city who looked at his face for any length of time without needing something, and it made her dangerous. "You haven't slept."

"I'm fine."

"You've got the look. The one you get after you do a little favour for a shopkeeper and don't tell me." She jabbed a finger at the page. "That's from the ship?"

"It's confidential."

"It's a piece of paper."

"That's what confidential means."

She snorted. Then, with great care, as if turning down a radio, she said, "Pyo from the Hall was in my cab this evening. Went to the Registry office on Nam Pier. Didn't say a word the whole ride, just kept running his tongue over his teeth, like he'd forgotten how to swallow." She watched him. "I'm going to assume that's a coincidence and not tell anyone I assumed it."

This was the reason he loved her. Dilnoza Kim could not hold her tongue about anything that was not his. She had once spent an entire evening with a woman who had come asking about him and said not one word, and had then cooked the woman rice and sent her away with no information but the impression that Seon-ho was dull. It was the best character reference he had ever received.

"Thank you," he said.

"For what? I didn't do anything. I just came for the charger." She stood, tugged at her vest, and pointed at the dumplings. "Eat. Whatever it is, you do it better on a stomach."

When she had gone, he did not eat. He looked at the clock, which said ten to two, and then at the last two words on the page, the ones he had been walking round for an hour.

*Ask Hwang.*

There was only one Hwang he knew who answered to that, and he was seventy-one and ran a noodle shop at the bottom of Cheongpa Hill that opened at five and had a sign reading NO CREDIT, NO ADVICE, NO REFUNDS. The old man had been serving Seon-ho free soup since the week his father vanished. He had never once explained why. Seon-ho had assumed it was kindness. Kindness, in his experience, was a thing people did with their receipts hidden.

He spent the next three hours doing what a man does when sleep is a place that has closed. He wrote the certified copy of pages one and two in his best public hand, stamped them, wrote the third in a faithful tracing that left out the line. He did not mean to deceive Priya. He meant to give himself until ten. And when he had finished, at ten to five, he put the original page inside his jacket, against his chest, where he could feel the stiff paper, and walked out into the grey.

On the way out he stopped on the second-floor landing, as he did every morning, and looked at the photo Dil kept taped beside her door: two girls in school uniforms, one of them with Dil's chin, squinting into a Tashkent summer. Underneath, in marker, she had written the cost of a plane ticket and crossed it out and written a larger one. He had never asked about it. She had never asked about the hospital invoices he kept folded in his wallet, the ones from the long-term care ward on the hill, with the figure circled in red by a clerk who had given up being polite. They had an arrangement. Each of them looked at the other's debt, nodded at it like a neighbour's dog, and walked on.

Gwangryeong did not so much wake as unclench. Cats on the harbour wall. A fishmonger hosing a pavement. Ferries idling, one with its lights still on. The cold smelled of diesel and kelp and the first bread. He walked down through the lanes under the hill with his hands in his pockets, ignoring the part of him that kept turning the corner of his father's face into a shape and trying to put it in a window.

The shutter of Hwang's was up. The sign was lit. Inside, among the metal tables, a single old man sat on a stool with his back to the door and a pot of broth steaming at his elbow, arranging two bowls on the counter with the care of a man setting a trap.

"You're late," said Hwang Mu-gyeom, without turning round. "Your father said you'd come at dawn. Confucius, I think, said that dawn is for fools and fathers." He waved at the stool beside him. "Sit. It's the soup or the truth, and I only have energy for one of them."