Chapter 5: Noodles on the Balcony

The heavy man with the gold pen stopped in front of Yeo-reum and looked her up and down.

"You are the cartoonist," he said.

"I'm the author of Blue Hour."

"Gong tells me you have been getting close to my nephew's hands."

He smiled when he said it, and his two men in black suits smiled with him.

Yeo-reum's face went hot.

Through the glass, Jin-woo had stood up.

He walked to the door of his office, and he stopped at the threshold with his eyes on the old man's mouth.

"Uncle," he said, loud and flat. "You are early."

"I am family," Ryu Dong-hwan said. "Family is never early."

He walked past Yeo-reum into the glass office, and Hye-jin shut the door behind him.

Soo-ah grabbed Yeo-reum's sleeve.

"Who was that?" she whispered.

"Trouble," Yeo-reum said.

Her hands were still shaking in her pocket, and she did not know whether it was from the uncle or the nod.

On Friday night the noodles came through the gap in the panel.

She was on her side of the balcony in her pajamas, drawing nothing, when a bowl landed on the railing beside her elbow.

It was a steaming plastic bowl, and half of it was black.

"I made dinner," Jin-woo said.

He stood on his side of the panel with another bowl in his hand and a worried look on his flat face.

"It's ramyeon," she said.

"It is burnt ramyeon. I put it on the stove, and then I read your chapter."

"Which chapter?"

"Fifty-one. When Haeun finds the letter. I read it four times."

She looked into the bowl.

The noodles were stuck together in a single brown mass, and one end had gone to charcoal.

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