Sunrise Care Hospital had been named by someone who had never seen it at that hour. It squatted halfway up Cheongpa Hill, five storeys of cream tile and fatigue, and its car park was full of the small white cars of nurses who had worked a night shift and would work another.

Priya parked across two spaces and did not apologise. Seon-ho was out before the handbrake. He took the stairs to the fourth floor two at a time, which cost him his breath and most of his dignity, and came through the doors of Ward 4 to find the long corridor lit like an aquarium and the scene exactly as described.

Lourdes Bautista was standing in the door of room 412 with her arms crossed.

She was thirty-three, five foot one, with a nurse's tunic printed with cartoon clouds, and a wide, mild face that gave nothing away until you looked at her forearms, which were the size of other people's calves. She had been on the ward for four years. She was the only carer in the building who could lift a hundred-and-ten-kilo patient from a bed without a hoist, and she did it every night as if it were nothing, because for her it was. A Cebuana from a family of fishermen, she had once told Seon-ho, in the course of discussing the weather, that her village's way of tempering the body began at five years old and involved a great deal of rope.

In front of her stood a man in a grey suit. He was forty, narrow, with a briefcase held in front of him like a tray and cotton gloves, the type archivists wear for old books. His lanyard said *TAK SUNG-JIN, RECORDS, HAEDONG REGISTRY.* He had the look of a man who had been standing at a door for twenty minutes, being gently refused, and who intended to be reasonable until the building burned down.

"Bautista-ssi," he was saying, "I have the authority to access any patient file under the Cultivator Health Records Act."

"And I have the authority to be tired and not move," said Lourdes. "Which one of us do you think is more powerful?"

"Mr. Tak," said Seon-ho, and both of them turned.

Lourdes's face did something fast and complicated, like a card trick, and settled into relief. "Ah. Finally. Sir, this is the son I said she didn't have."

"You said she had no son," said Tak.

"I said it to see what you'd do." She stepped aside and, as she did, tipped her head toward Seon-ho and murmured, in a voice that didn't carry, "He didn't flinch when I leaned on him. That's three layers of Breath at least. Careful."

The room was small and warm. There was a window onto the hill, a vase of plastic freesias, a bed with its head raised, and in it, under a blue blanket, a woman of fifty-two with her hair in two grey braids that Lourdes plaited every morning. Ryu Mal-sun slept. She had been sleeping, as the discharge summary put it, for ten years and eight months, with vitals in the normal range and a brain scan that doctors called *non-specific.* She looked younger than the photograph in his wallet. She always did. It was the stillness.

Seon-ho crossed the floor and put the back of his hand against her cheek. It was warm. He did that every time, to make sure, and he always hated that he needed to.

He had found her on a Tuesday in February, when he was thirteen and a half, at the kitchen table in the flat in Hanul-dong with a cup of barley tea going cold at her elbow. She had been looking at the wall as though somebody had just said something remarkable. He had said, *Mum?* three times, then called the ambulance and, while waiting, gone through her handbag for her insurance card. In the hospital corridor a doctor had asked him what she had eaten, what she had taken, who had visited. He had answered every question accurately. It was the first time he understood that being precise could be a way of not crying. Nobody had thought to ask if she had been writing anything. In the weeks before, she had been up at night with a pencil, drafting a letter she never finished, and he had assumed it was to the electricity company.

"Mr. Ryu," said Tak. His manner was impeccable. "First, my apologies. I would have preferred to write. The Director has asked me to see your mother on an urgent matter of record. Her Writ is the only one on the southern coast classified as *erased.* It is not merely unreadable. It is absent. That is a major anomaly, and in light of the review of old clinic results we are conducting, he would like to offer her a transfer." He drew a document from the briefcase and laid it on the foot of the bed. "The Registry's own medical facility at Nam Pier. A private room. Full specialist care. The cost of her stay here, I understand, is considerable."

There was a silence in which Lourdes made a noise like a kettle.

"The cost," said Seon-ho, "is nine hundred and twelve thousand won a day."

"We would waive it entirely."

He looked at the form. A dozen lines of print, a signature box, a tick-box for next of kin. It was the kind of document that ought to make a person feel weak with gratitude: someone offering to take the thing he could not carry. He knew that feeling. He had been trained to distrust it.

"May I read it?"

"Please."

He took a long time. Tak watched him, with the patience of a man who had watched many people take a long time and sign anyway. The first clause was ordinary. The second was a standard medical consent. The third said: *The undersigned authorises the Registry to take custody of all personal Writ records relating to the patient, and to those persons of the patient's blood or household, whether presently known or later identified, for purposes of continuity of care and public safety.*

He read it again, in case he had misread. He had not.

"'Later identified,'" said Seon-ho.

"A standard term."

"It's not in your other forms. I've seen your other forms. I do copies for the harbour pilots' union." He kept his voice mild. "'Persons of blood or household.' That's me. And whoever else has slept under her roof. You're not asking for her. You're asking for the family."

Tak's smile did not alter. "The clause is simply protective."

"Then you won't mind if I strike it."

"It cannot be struck. The Registry's forms are fixed."

"Then I'll sign nothing," said Seon-ho. "And I'd like it noted, for your records, that I read it. And that I'm a restorer of documents, and I have never in my life signed anything I didn't understand, which makes me a boring person to have as a customer."

Lourdes's mouth moved very slightly at one corner. The movement spread to her whole face and she made no attempt to stop it.

Tak withdrew the form. He did it gently, folding it into thirds, and for a moment Seon-ho caught sight of what lay behind the manners: a flat, tired intelligence, the face of a clerk who had watched many people refuse and was recording the date. "The Director anticipated that you might need time," he said. "He is a patient man. He will see you Thursday, and he will raise the matter himself. I would only say that the Registry's offer expires when its reasons do."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that your mother is a very expensive bed, Mr. Ryu, and the day is coming when this hospital can no longer afford to hold it." He bowed, precisely, and withdrew. At the door he turned, and said to Priya, who had been standing in the corridor for the last ten minutes, very still, like a heron: "Ms. Venkataraman. Your inquiry resumes on Monday. I hope you will find it fruitful." And then he was gone, a grey back and a briefcase.

Priya came in. She looked at the bed, at Seon-ho's hand on the blanket, and, for a person who had a list for everything, found she did not have one for this. She walked over to the window and pretended to look at the hill.

"Right," said Lourdes, and shut the door. She went to the corner, picked up a spiral notebook from the chair, flipped it to a page and uncapped a pen. "Tak Sung-jin, grey suit, gloves. Nine seventeen. Sniffed at my tunic." She wrote it down. "That's going in the book."

"The book?" said Priya.

"Grudges. I have eleven pages." She did not look up. "Seon-ho knows. There is an entry for the man who parked on the ambulance bay. Fourteen months and I am still *thinking.*" She underlined something twice and glanced at him. Her face changed. It was not an easy change to describe; it was like watching someone put down a heavy bag. "I wanted to tell you before you left. I wasn't going to say, with that man here."

"Say what?"

Lourdes lowered her voice. She was looking at the bed, at Mal-sun's hands lying open on the blanket.

"Every morning at three," she said, "your mother's right hand moves. Not a spasm. I've seen spasms. It lifts, the first finger, off the cover. And it writes. In the air, above her stomach. For about a minute. Then it goes back down." She looked at Seon-ho with an expression he had never seen on her. "Always the same shape, boss. Always the same number of strokes. I counted, because I wanted to be sure. Fourteen."