Chapter 6: The Distance Between Words

She told herself she was not going early.

She arrived twenty minutes early.

Lord Bak’s outer study was empty when she got there — the servant had left tea, the table was arranged, the afternoon light was doing the same unreasonable thing it always did at this hour in this room, as though it had been specifically positioned to make everything feel more significant than it had any right to feel.

She sat down.

She opened the Zhuangzi to the passage they had not finished.

She read the same three lines four times without absorbing any of them.

She was aware, with the clarity of a woman who had stopped lying to herself sometime between the last Tuesday and this one, that she had put on the blue robe without deliberating about it at all. It had simply been — the blue robe. Obviously. As though her hands had made the decision independently of any rational process and her mind had arrived after the fact and decided not to argue.

She was also aware that she had thought about his hand.

Not — anything beyond that. Simply his hand. The way it looked turning pages. The ink at the second finger, the same place she carried ink, which meant nothing and which she had thought about with unreasonable frequency for eleven days.

She heard him in the corridor.

She looked at the Zhuangzi with great concentration.

He saw her the moment he came through the door.

He always saw her immediately — this was something he had stopped questioning, the way his attention oriented toward her the way a compass needle oriented toward north, automatic and absolute and not subject to argument.

She was wearing the blue robe.

She had worn the blue robe every time.

He was fairly certain she didn’t know she was doing it, which was one of the things about her that made it very difficult to maintain the patient, measured approach Dosan had given him. She was simultaneously the most composed woman he had ever met and entirely unaware of herself in certain specific ways that made him want to —

He sat down.

“Lady Im.”

“Master Hwang.” She looked up from the text. Something in her face that she had not quite finished arranging. “Joon-seo,” she corrected herself, quietly.

His name in her mouth.

He had thought about that for eleven days also.

“You found the passage,” he said, nodding toward the Zhuangzi.

“Where we left off.” She turned the book slightly toward him. “You marked it.”

“I marked several things after Tuesday.”

“I noticed.” A pause. “You argue in your sleep, based on the marginalia. Some of these annotations were written at an unreasonable hour.”

“How do you know what hour—”

“The ink pressure changes when you’re tired,” she said simply. “The brushwork gets slightly heavier. It’s very late in that annotation. The one about the cook and the ox.”

He looked at her.

She looked at the book with complete composure.

“You read brushwork,” he said.

“My father taught me calligraphy before anything else. You learn to read the hand behind the characters eventually.” She turned a page. “You were frustrated when you wrote the cook passage. And then you stopped and came back to it. The second half is calmer.”

“I couldn’t work out the argument.”

“And did you? Eventually?”

“No,” he said. “I was hoping you would.”

The almost-smile. There and gone.

He was keeping a private count of those. He was up to eleven.

They read for a while in the comfortable way they had developed — not quite parallel, not quite collaborative, something in between. She would read a passage and make a small sound that meant she disagreed. He would look up. They would argue. One of them would concede or they would agree to disagree and move forward, and the forward motion had a quality that was nothing like any scholarly discussion he had engaged in before, with anyone, in five years at Dosan or two years at the Hongmungwan.