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# Chapter 4: The Twelve-Minute Drive
The road to her grandfather’s farm was the one place in Jeju where Sohyun allowed herself to think about Seoul.
Not much. Not the way she sometimes thought about it at night, when the wind shifted and brought with it some smell — exhaust, or rain on concrete, or the synthetic sweetness of convenience store coffee — that unlocked something she preferred to keep locked. Just small, manageable thoughts, the kind you could hold between your fingers and then let go of before you arrived somewhere. The twelve-minute drive was exactly the right length for this. Long enough to let something surface. Short enough that she couldn’t drown in it.
She had left Healing Haven at noon on the dot, the doenjang jjigae in the insulated bag on the passenger seat, the cartoon polar bears staring up at her with their mild, indifferent faces. The café was in the hands of Park Jungah, who was twenty-two and studying tourism management at the university in Jeju City and who worked three afternoons a week with the focused competence of someone who had decided that a job was a job and would be done properly regardless of enthusiasm. Sohyun valued this in her. She valued it the way she valued the wire rack: not glamorous, but necessary.
The road climbed slightly as it moved inland, leaving the salt smell of the sea behind and picking up the mineral green smell of the hills. This time of year — early March, the very beginning of spring — the fields were still mostly brown, the grasses flat and rust-colored from winter, but if you knew where to look you could see the pale suggestion of green beginning at the edges of things. The haenyeo had told her this was the most important time: the moment just before. When the island was preparing itself but hadn’t yet committed.
She’s talking about the sea, not the fields, Sohyun had thought when old Grandma Hyun said this, watching the February ocean from the dock in Hwasun. But she had written it down in the small notebook she kept behind the counter anyway, because things that sound like they’re about one thing are usually about another.
Today the sky was the particular white of Jeju in early spring — not gray, not quite blue, but something in between that photographers hated and Sohyun had come to love for its honesty. No performance. Just the sky being what it was.
She turned off the main road onto the narrower lane that ran along the stone wall of her grandfather’s property, the tires finding the familiar ruts in the asphalt, and felt something in her chest settle the way it always did on this approach. The sensation was so consistent that she had stopped questioning it. Whatever it was — relief, or the particular comfort of a place that had known you for longer than you had known yourself — it arrived every Wednesday like a third passenger in the car, reliable and without explanation.
The farm gates were open.
Han Youngjul was not in the stone house.
This was not unusual. What was unusual was that he was not in the greenhouse either, not among the rows of Hallabong trees with their heavy fruit and their particular smell of something between flower and candy, not in the equipment shed where he sometimes sat on the old wooden stool and sharpened tools with the meditative focus of a man who had made peace with the fact that most problems could be solved by making the blade sharper.
Sohyun stood in the center of the farmyard with the insulated bag in her hand and listened.
The wind moved through the mandarin trees at the edge of the property, that dry rattling sound the branches made when they were full of fruit. A black-naped oriole called once from somewhere in the persimmon tree near the wall, then went silent. The dog — an old mixed breed named Geomdong, brown and slow-moving, who had been named for the color of his coat and who had grown so accustomed to Sohyun’s Wednesday arrivals that he no longer even raised his head from the stone step — raised his head.
He’s in the field, she thought.
The upper field. The one her grandfather had been considering replanting for the last three years, debating whether to put in the new Redhyang variety or stay with the Hallabong that had been the backbone of the farm since her grandmother’s time. She had heard both sides of this argument many times. It was, she had come to understand, not really an argument about mandarin varieties.
She found him at the far edge of the field, standing very still near the low stone wall that separated his land from the neighboring property. He was wearing his old work jacket — the one with the tear at the left elbow that she had offered to mend four times and that he had declined four times with the single word gwaenchanh-a, which in his usage meant simultaneously fine, don’t worry, and I don’t want to talk about it — and he was looking at something on the other side of the wall.
She walked through the dry grass toward him, the insulated bag bumping lightly against her leg.
“Harabeoji.”
He turned. His face was the same face it always was — deeply weathered, the lines running deep as irrigation channels, the eyes still sharp and dark under the white brows — but there was something in his expression she couldn’t immediately name. Not alarm. Not confusion. Something more like a man returning from a great distance, adjusting his eyes to the closer world.
“Sohyun-ah.” He said her name the way he always said it: without inflection, which in his case was not indifference but the deepest form of familiarity. Names didn’t need decoration. They just needed to be said correctly.
“Lunch,” she said, holding up the bag.
“Mm.” He looked back at the wall.
She came to stand beside him. On the other side of the stone wall was the field that had belonged to the Kim family for two generations — empty now, the grass long, the old stone outbuilding at its edge with its roof caved inward like a sigh. The Kim family had left four years ago, she knew. Gone to the mainland for the grandchildren’s schooling, the way so many had gone.
“Someone was here,” her grandfather said.
She looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“This morning. A car.” He lifted his chin toward the field. “Parked there. Two men. They walked around with papers.”
Sohyun felt something in her chest that was not the comfortable settling of arrival. “What kind of papers?”
“The kind men carry when they want to seem official.” He said this with the dry precision of a man who had spent seventy-eight years observing the difference between authority and its performance. “Blueprints, maybe. I couldn’t see well from here.” A pause. “Nice car.”
She stood very still. The wind moved through the mandarin trees again, that dry rattling sound, and she listened to it without hearing it.
“Did they come to the farm?”
“No.” He turned away from the wall. “Not yet.” He said this as though not yet were simply a factual description of time, neither threatening nor reassuring, just accurate. This was one of the things she had loved about him for as long as she could remember and which also, sometimes, made her want to scream. “Is that doenjang jjigae?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’m hungry.”
He turned toward the stone house, and she followed him, and neither of them said anything more about the men with the blueprints, and the oriole called again from the persimmon tree, and the fruit-heavy branches of the Hallabong trees clicked together in the wind like something counting down.
The stone house was exactly as it had always been.
This was a thing Sohyun noticed every time she entered it: the absolute consistency of the place. The same ceramic bowls on the same wooden shelf. The same faded calendar from 2019 that her grandfather refused to take down because the photograph — Hallasan in winter, the crater lake frozen to white — was, in his words, good enough to last longer than a year. The same small television that received four channels. The same smell of the house: old wood, sesame oil, dried mandarin peel, something mineral that she had decided must be the stone itself, breathing.
Her grandmother had died in this house, in the back room, twelve years ago. Her mother — her grandmother and grandfather’s only daughter — had never come back after the funeral. Sohyun did not think about this often. She thought about it now, standing in the kitchen, unpacking the doenjang jjigae into the pot on the range to warm it.
“Did you eat breakfast?” she called.
“Rice,” he called back from the other room, which was not an answer to her question.
She found a small container of kimchi in the refrigerator — old kimchi, the kind that had been fermenting long enough to be deeply sour, almost effervescent, the kind she had hated as a child and now associated with comfort the way adults sometimes come to associate things they once hated. She set it on the table. Found the wooden chopsticks in the drawer, the ceramic spoons. Cut a scallion from the bunch in the refrigerator door and arranged it on top of the jjigae because her grandfather didn’t notice things like this but she did it anyway, the way she sifted the flour twice: because stopping would mean something.
He came in from the other room and sat down at the table with the particular economy of movement of a man who had sat at this table every day for fifty years and knew exactly how much energy it required.
He looked at the scallion on top of the jjigae. He said nothing.
They ate.
The doenjang jjigae was good — she had added a small piece of dried anchovy to the stock, the way Mi-young’s older sister had told her to, and the flavor was deeper than usual, with that faint oceanic base note that made it taste like something from a long time ago. Her grandfather ate without comment, which was the highest compliment he gave. When the bowl was half-empty, he refilled it from the pot without being asked, and she took this as a sign that she had done it correctly.
Outside, the wind pressed against the kitchen window. The persimmon tree scratched the glass.
“Harabeoji,” she said.
“Mm.”
“The men this morning. Do you know which company?”
He looked up from his bowl. His expression was the one he reserved for questions that deserved more than a casual answer — not stern, but gathered, the way his face gathered itself when something required the full attention of a man who had learned not to spend attention carelessly.
“I heard something at the market last week,” he said. “Gu-ssi said someone bought the old Kim field. Development company from Seoul.” He returned his eyes to his bowl. “I didn’t think much of it.”
“And now?”
He picked up a piece of kimchi with his chopsticks and looked at it for a moment, as though consulting it. “Now I think about it a little more.”
She wanted to ask: And does it worry you? She wanted to ask: Do you know that your land might be in the boundary they’re drawing? Do you know that a man named Kim Minsoo is coming here with blueprints and nice cars and the kind of language that sounds like benefit but means cost?
She asked none of these things. She refilled his water glass from the pitcher on the table and said, “I’ll ask around.”
He made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite dismissal — the sound of a man who had watched many things come and go and had decided to continue watching rather than run toward or away from any of them.
“The Redhyang seedlings came,” he said, changing the subject in the way that he changed subjects: without announcement, as though the conversation had simply arrived somewhere new on its own. “They’re in the greenhouse.”
“Are you going to plant them?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
She looked at him across the table — his weathered face, his careful hands around the spoon, the 2019 calendar on the wall behind him with Hallasan frozen and white — and felt, with a sudden and uncomfortable clarity, that thinking about it was what you said when you were not sure you would be here long enough to see the thing you planted grow to bearing.
She said nothing.
She ate her jjigae. She listened to the wind.
She was washing the bowls at the stone sink when she heard his voice from the other room, low and conversational, as though he were continuing a discussion that had been interrupted.
“—planted the Hallabong the same year Yeong-mi was born. Thirty years ago. Maybe more.”
She stood very still with her hands in the soapy water.
Yeong-mi. Her mother’s name.
“Harabeoji?”
“Still bearing fruit, that tree,” he continued, in the same tone. “The one near the east wall. You remember? You always wanted to eat from that one first.”
She dried her hands on the dish cloth. Walked to the doorway of the other room.
He was sitting in his chair by the window — his chair, the one with the armrests worn smooth by decades of his elbows — and he was looking out at the yard, not at her, speaking in the unhurried voice of a man having a perfectly ordinary conversation. His posture was relaxed. His hands were folded in his lap.
“Harabeoji,” she said.
He turned and looked at her, and for a moment — a moment she would replay many times later, trying to determine exactly how long it lasted — he looked at her with the gentle distance of someone who is seeing a stranger in a familiar face, someone who is almost placing her but hasn’t quite.
Then it passed.
“Ah,” he said. “You’re still here. Did you eat enough?”
“Yes.” Her voice was level. She was proud of this. “I ate enough.”
“Good.” He picked up his newspaper from the side table. “Don’t forget the container. Your bag. The bears.”
She went back to the kitchen and finished the dishes, and she worked slowly, methodically, scrubbing the inside of the doenjang jjigae pot with the brush even though it didn’t need the extra attention, because her hands needed something to do and her face needed a moment without witness.
The one near the east wall. You always wanted to eat from that one first.
That was not something Sohyun had ever done.
Her mother had.
She drove back to Seogwipo in the particular silence that follows a thing that has not yet been named.
The road descended from the inland fields back toward the coast, the sea reappearing in pieces between the hills — blue-gray today, the small whitecaps visible even from this height, the wind doing what it did out here on the exposed stretches of the south coast, pressing against the car with a steady, insistent weight. She drove slowly, more slowly than usual. The insulated bag sat empty on the passenger seat. The cartoon polar bears faced forward, unconcerned.
He thought you were her, the thought said, and she let it sit there without touching it.
She had known, in the abstract, that this was a possibility. She had read the articles her mother had sent — her mother who wouldn’t come to Jeju but would send articles, long detailed pieces from medical journals translated into Korean, about early-onset memory loss, about the difference between forgetting and losing, about what to watch for. Sohyun had read them all and filed them in a folder on her laptop labeled simply hal and had not opened the folder since December.
She had known in the abstract.
This was different from knowing in the kitchen doorway with the dish cloth in her hands.
She parked behind the café at one forty-five. Jungah’s bicycle was chained to the stone wall; inside, she could hear the low murmur of the afternoon crowd, the sound of the milk steamer, the particular acoustic warmth of the café in the afternoon when the sunlight came through the west-facing window and turned everything golden. She sat in the car for a moment with her hands on the wheel.
He’ll have good days and bad days, the articles had said. This is not linear. It will not always look like what it looked like today.
She got out of the car. She straightened her apron — the lavender sprig still tucked in the front pocket, slightly wilted now from the morning but still fragrant when she pressed her fingers to it — and she went in through the side door.
“Oh, you’re back early,” Jungah said from behind the counter, with the mild surprise of someone who was neither particularly concerned nor particularly curious.
“The roads were clear,” Sohyun said.
This was not quite true. But it was easier than the true thing, which she was not yet ready to say out loud, because saying it out loud would make it real in a different way than it was real right now, sitting quietly in her chest like the stone that falls through water before it hits the bottom.
She hung the insulated bag on its hook. Washed her hands at the kitchen sink. Began checking the afternoon prep: the stock of Hallabong syrup, the level of the cold brew, whether the afternoon’s scones had been pulled from the freezer in time.
Everything was in order. Jungah had done well.
“There was a man earlier,” Jungah said, appearing in the kitchen doorway with a cup that needed rinsing. “While you were gone. He asked if the owner was in.”
Sohyun looked up from the scone tray. “Who?”
“I don’t know. He was — ” Jungah seemed to search for the word with the specific effort of someone choosing precision over speed. “— expensive-looking. Suit. Not a hiker.” She paused. “He had one of the Hallabong tarts. He said it was very good.”
“Did he leave a name?”
Jungah set the cup in the sink. “No. He said he’d come back.”
Sohyun held the scone tray for a moment, feeling its cold metal weight, looking at the rows of perfectly triangular shapes, frozen and waiting.
“Okay,” she said. “Thank you, Jungah-ssi.”
Jungah nodded and went back to the counter, already reaching for the next thing, and Sohyun stood in the kitchen for a moment longer, the tray in her hands, and outside the window the afternoon wind moved through the old mandarin trees that lined the alley — the ones that had been here since before the café, since before the building that became the café, trees that were older than the wall they grew beside, old enough to have been planted by someone who had not known they were planting something that would outlast them.
Nice car, her grandfather had said. The kind men carry when they want to seem official.
She slid the scones into the warming oven and set the timer — twelve minutes, the same as the drive — and went back out to the café, where the afternoon light was doing its golden thing, and the tables were mostly full, and the milk steamer was hissing, and everything looked, from the outside, exactly like a place where nothing was about to change.
Mi-young arrived at four-thirty, which was not her usual time.
This was notable. Mi-young’s schedule was as consistent as tide charts: morning market, morning café, home for lunch, nap, market again in late afternoon, dinner at seven. Four-thirty was neither one thing nor another, and Mi-young did not occupy the spaces between things without reason.
She was carrying a paper bag from the market and she set it on the counter with the air of someone delivering evidence.
“I heard something,” she said.
“Tell me,” Sohyun said, and came out from behind the counter to stand at the smaller table near the window — the one where they had their real conversations, the ones that weren’t suitable for the counter where other people could hear.
Mi-young sat down. She was a wide-shouldered woman in her mid-fifties with a voice built for outdoor markets and a face that had spent decades in all weather, the sun and salt wind having done to it what decades of sun and salt wind do — made it look like a face that had earned itself. She pulled a rice cake from the paper bag, broke it in half without asking, and set one half in front of Sohyun.
“Jung-ssi came by the market this morning,” she said. “From the hardware store. You know him?”
“Tall one. Bad knee.”
“That one. He said — ” She paused, chewing, and Sohyun recognized this pause as the one Mi-young used when she was deciding how much alarm to convey in her delivery. “He said a man came to his property yesterday. From a company called Haneul Construction.”
The name sat on the table between them.
“Seoul company?” Sohyun asked.
“Seoul company. He said they were very polite. Very — ” Mi-young made a gesture with her hand, a particular gesture, fingers splayed slightly, that meant the kind of polite that makes you nervous. “They said they were doing preliminary surveys. That it was just information gathering.”
“What kind of surveys?”
“The kind you do before you build something.” Mi-young said this flatly, without inflection, the way her grandfather had said not yet. “Jung-ssi said his property is right at the edge of where the old Kim field is. You know the Kim field? Abandoned, near your grandfather’s farm?”
Sohyun did not say: I know. My grandfather saw them this morning, standing in that field with blueprints. She did not say it because saying it would make the circle complete — the empty field, the nice car, the man who had come to her café in a suit and eaten her Hallabong tart and said he’d come back — and she wasn’t ready for the circle to close quite yet.
Instead she said: “Do you know how big the survey area is?”
Mi-young broke off another piece of rice cake and looked at it. “Jung-ssi said they had a map. He saw it when one of them was folding it back up.” She paused. “He said it looked like it went all the way to the old ollegilroad. Maybe past it.”
Past the ollegal road meant the café. It meant the stone alley. It meant the mandarin trees outside the window that were older than the wall they grew beside.
“Ajeomma,” Sohyun said.
“I know.”
They sat for a moment in the particular silence of two people who are holding the same piece of knowledge and haven’t yet decided what to do with it. Outside, the late afternoon light had gone from golden to something softer and more ambiguous, the shadows lengthening across the café floor in the way that shadows here did differently from Seoul — slower, more deliberate, as though the light were reluctant to leave.
“My grandfather’s farm,” Sohyun said. It was not a question.
Mi-young looked at her. Her eyes, which were usually in motion — taking stock, assessing, cataloguing — were very still. “I don’t know for certain,” she said, which was the truest thing she had said in the conversation. “But if the map goes to the ollegal road—” She did not finish the sentence.
She didn’t need to.
“Okay,” Sohyun said. She straightened the saltcellar on the table. A habit, a small ordering of the immediate world. “Thank you for telling me.”
“Yah.” Mi-young stood, gathering herself with the efficient movements of a woman who had delivered her news and would now return to the practical world of the market. She tucked the remaining rice cakes back into the paper bag. “Don’t sit on this, Sohyun-ah. You sit on things too long.”
“I know.”
“You say I know and then you sit on them anyway.”
“Ajeomma—”
“I’m just saying.” She picked up her bag. Paused at the door, looking back at Sohyun with an expression that was affection wearing the costume of exasperation. “The Hallabong tart. Did you make it today?”
“Yesterday’s batch. They hold for two days.”
“Wrap two for me. I’ll take them home for Hyun-ssi.”
Sohyun wrapped the tarts in the brown paper she used for takeaway — folding the edges with the precise triangular folds she had invented herself, which had become, without her intending it, something people associated with the café, something that customers took photographs of before they opened them. She tied the package with the thin orange twine. Handed it to Mi-young.
Mi-young tucked it under her arm and went out the side door without looking back.
Sohyun stood at the counter as the last of the afternoon customers finished and left, and she listened to the café empty itself — chairs scraping, voices dropping, the bell above the front door marking each departure with its small, clean sound — and she did not think about what she was thinking about.
She wiped down the counter. She washed the espresso portafilters. She emptied the grounds into the compost bucket. She did all of this with the complete, focused attention that she brought to closing tasks, the ritual of it, the satisfaction of returning things to their correct state.
He thought you were her.
She was rinsing the milk pitchers when she heard the front door bell.
She looked up.
The man who entered the café at five fifty-two in the evening was not a hiker. He was not one of the haenyeo grandmothers, not a market regular, not a student from the university. He was perhaps thirty-five, in a charcoal suit that was clearly not off-the-rack, a tie the color of dark water, shoes that had not been made for walking on stone alleys. He had the kind of face that was handsome in a careful, considered way — not naturally, but through maintenance, the kind of face that made regular appointments.
He looked around the café with the expression of a man who is noting things: the old wooden floors, the stone walls, the dol hareubang figures on the shelf, the remaining Hallabong tarts under the glass dome, the handwritten menu board in both Korean and English. The expression was not rude. It was, she thought, the expression of someone accustomed to assessing value.
Then he looked at her.
“I came back,” he said. His voice was Seoul — calibrated, smooth, the vowels rounded by education and professional practice. “I was here this afternoon. Your colleague said the owner would be in later.”
“I’m the owner,” Sohyun said. She set down the milk pitcher. She did not move toward the counter flap, did not move toward him. She stood where she was, on her side of the counter, and she looked at him with the pleasant expression she had learned to keep on her face when she needed to buy herself time. “We close at six. But you have a few minutes.”
“I won’t take long.” He came forward, stopping at the counter, and she noticed that he moved through the space with a kind of careful respect — not touching things, not crowding, observing the proportions of the room with what she now recognized as the specific attention of someone who works in space and dimension. “I had the Hallabong tart this afternoon. It was exceptional.”
She waited.
He smiled — a real smile, she noted, not the professional kind, something that briefly animated his face into something younger and less composed. “I mean that genuinely. I wasn’t expecting—” He glanced at the glass dome. “It tasted like the actual fruit. Not like a flavor that’s supposed to represent the fruit.”
“We use the fruit from my grandfather’s farm,” she said. “Twelve minutes up the road.”
Something shifted in his expression — the word grandfather doing something small and complicated to his face before he smoothed it back. “That’s — yes. That makes sense.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a business card, setting it on the counter between them with the gesture of a man who had done this ten thousand times. “My name is Kim Minsoo. I’m the regional director for Haneul Construction. We’re doing some development work in the area and I thought — ”
“I know who you are,” Sohyun said.
A pause. His hand, which had been about to retract the business card, went still.
“I see,” he said.
Outside the window, the last of the daylight was leaving in the way it left in March — quickly, without ceremony, the sky going from pale to dark in the space of minutes. The old mandarin trees in the alley were dark shapes now, their branches moving in the evening wind. The café lights were warm and enclosed against the outside dark.
She looked at the business card on the counter. Kim Minsoo. Regional Director. Haneul Construction. The card was heavy stock, cream-colored, the letters embossed. The kind of card that was meant to convey solidity, permanence, the weight of institutional backing.
She looked back up at him.
“The café closes in four minutes,” she said. “If you want to tell me what you’re here to tell me, you should probably start.”
He looked at her for a moment — and she saw, in his face, a recalibration happening, the kind that happened when someone had walked into a room expecting one version of a conversation and found that the room had different ideas — and then he pulled out the stool on his side of the counter and sat down.
“I’ll have a coffee,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”
She pulled a cup. Set it under the portafilter. The grinder ran. The machine built pressure. She worked with the focused efficiency of closing time, and she was aware, in the back of her hands, of her grandfather standing in the field this morning looking at the Kim property with the expression of a man returning from a great distance, and of the Redhyang seedlings in the greenhouse that he was thinking about planting, and of the moment in the kitchen doorway when he had looked at her and not quite seen her.
She set the espresso in front of Kim Minsoo.
He looked at it, then at her. “This is a beautiful place,” he said. And his voice, when he said it, had something in it she hadn’t expected: something that sounded, very briefly, like it might be true.
Which was, she understood, the most dangerous kind of thing for him to say.