Chapter 4: The Inconvenience of Mencius

She was not going to think about it.

This was the decision she made the morning after the Analects conversation, lying in the pre-dawn quiet of her room with the ink-dark sky beginning to soften outside her window. She was going to be sensible. She was going to be practical. She was going to be a thirty-eight year old widow of sound mind and considerable experience who understood perfectly well what happened to women who let their guard down for charming young scholars with patient eyes and the specific devastating habit of saying you are right like it cost them nothing.

She was going to think about something else entirely.

She thought about him for six days straight.

It was the conversation. That was what she told herself. It was simply the pleasure of genuine intellectual exchange after years of — nothing. Of embroidering in silence and reading alone and having thoughts that went nowhere because there was no one to receive them. It was intellectual hunger, finally fed, responding with the enthusiasm of a thing too long starved. It had nothing to do with the way he leaned forward when she made a point he found interesting. Nothing to do with his hands, which were — she was not thinking about his hands. Scholar’s hands. Ink-stained at the fingers, she had noticed, the same as hers, which meant nothing. Many scholars had ink-stained fingers. It was an occupational condition and not in any way significant.

She thought about his hands on the seventh day and decided she needed more embroidery to do.

Go-eun arrived on the eighth day.

“He sent something,” she said, and produced a small wrapped package with the energy of a person delivering explosive ordinance.

Seo-yeon set down her brush with great deliberateness. “Who did.”

“The man you haven’t been thinking about for eight days.”

“I have been perfectly—”

“You have re-embroidered the same plum blossom three times,” Go-eun said, glancing at the frame beside the window. “The first two were better.”

Seo-yeon looked at the plum blossom. This was unfortunately accurate.

She looked at the package.

It was small. Wrapped in plain paper, tied with the kind of careful knot that suggested the person tying it had been paying attention. Her name on the outside in — she picked it up before she meant to — in a hand that was extraordinary. Clean and controlled and individual, the brushwork of someone who had been taught by the best and then developed beyond the teaching into something entirely his own.

She was a calligrapher. She knew what she was looking at.

“Are you going to open it,” Go-eun said, “or simply hold it and feel things?”

Seo-yeon opened it.

Inside — a single sheet of paper, folded once. And beneath it, a small book. Old. Carefully kept. A private copy of the Mencius, the kind a scholar carried for personal study rather than display, the margins filled with handwritten annotations in that same extraordinary hand.

She unfolded the sheet.

Four lines. No preamble. No elaborate formal greeting.

The third book of Mencius has been on my mind.

I have marked the passages I find most problematic.

I would be interested to know if you find them problematic for the same reasons.

Or different ones.

That was all.

No declaration. No performance. Just — an invitation from one mind to another, wrapped in a book he had clearly carried for years and was now placing in her hands with the casual trust of someone who had already decided she was worth trusting.

Go-eun was reading over her shoulder.

“Four lines,” she said reverently. “That man wrote four lines and I need to sit down.”