Chapter 6: The Terrace

The terrace of the restaurant looked out over Gangnam's lights, glass towers going up in rows into the autumn dark.

Seung-hwan stood at the rail with one hand in his pocket.

I stopped two paces behind him, the way I had been taught to stand near an elder.

"Close the door," he said.

I closed it.

"How did you know?"

"Know what, sunbae?"

"Do not call me that." He did not turn around.

"You knew my mother would give you that bracelet. You knew what she meant to do."

"You had my grandmother at the door before you had unclasped it."

"I read faces for a living," I said. "An interpreter watches the speaker before she hears a word."

"That is not an answer."

"It's the one I have."

He turned.

The lights lay on one side of his face and left the other in shadow.

"My mother has never done anything like that," he said.

"She sits on the Foundation board. She sends rice cakes to the staff at New Year."

"I'm sure she does," I said.

"Then why?"

I weighed it.

I could not tell him that his mother would, in eleven months, put a stolen deal sheet in my bag.

I could not tell him she would let the country say I had sold his family to Osaka.

He would not have believed me.

I would not have believed me, either.

"Because I'm a stranger with a debt, and she's afraid of what I could cost her," I said.

"A girl like me is easy to shame. A girl in the house is a risk."

"A risk to what?" he asked.

"I don't know yet."

It was a half-truth, and he could tell.

His mouth went thin.

"You are not what I expected," he said.

"What did you expect?"

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