Chapter 7

Ji Yeon knocked on Soo Yee’s door on a Saturday morning, which was unusual. In this family people did not knock on doors to have conversations. They found each other in the kitchen, at the table, in the natural gathering places of the apartment. A knock meant something deliberate. Something that had been decided before the hand was raised.

“Come in,” Soo Yee said.

Ji Yeon was twenty years old and looked like their mother in the bone structure and like their father in the way she held herself — contained, upright, giving nothing away in the posture that she wasn’t prepared to give away in words. She had her mother’s hands and her father’s patience and a particular quality of stillness that Soo Yee had spent her whole life observing and had never been able to fully replicate in herself. Soo Yee’s stillness was the stillness of concentration. Ji Yeon’s was something older. Something that had been tested.

She sat on the edge of Soo Yee’s bed and looked at the desk — the laptop, the notebook, the stack of printed documents that had diminished over the past weeks as their contents migrated into the organized structure of the site. She looked at all of it for a moment without speaking.

Soo Yee turned her chair to face her and waited.

“Sung Min told me about the lawyers,” Ji Yeon said.

“Percy Givens and Maya Reinholt. They filed last week.”

“I saw the news coverage.”

Everyone had seen the news coverage. The filing had produced a second wave considerably larger than the first — the initial site had been a data story, the kind that spread through academic and legal circles and then into the general press. The federal filing was a different category of event. It had been on the front page of three national newspapers and had generated the kind of coverage that brought cameras to the street outside their building, which their father had dealt with by going downstairs and informing the assembled journalists in precise and courteous terms that his family had nothing to add to what was already in the public record and that they were welcome to read the site.

Ji Yeon had not gone downstairs during any of that. She had stayed in her room the way she had been staying in her room since October, emerging for meals and for the routines of the household and retreating again, carrying whatever she was carrying in the manner of someone who had decided that the correct way to handle a weight was to bear it privately until it became manageable.

Soo Yee had watched this and had said nothing and had waited, because she had understood instinctively that Ji Yeon needed to come to this conversation on her own terms and in her own time and that pushing it would only cause her to retreat further.

“I want to ask you something,” Ji Yeon said.

“Okay.”

“When you started. When you first pulled my file.” She paused. “What did you feel when you saw it?”

Soo Yee considered this carefully. She did not answer questions about her feelings carelessly. Not because she didn’t have them but because she had learned early that imprecise language about internal states produced misunderstanding and misunderstanding in emotional conversations produced damage that was difficult to repair.

“Angry,” she said. “Not the way people usually mean it. Not hot. More like — a kind of cold clarity. The number was sitting there in its column and I understood immediately what it was doing and I understood that the person who assigned it had never met you and I understood that it had been doing this to people like you for years and nobody had been angry enough or patient enough or — “ She stopped. “Positioned correctly to do anything about it.”