Chapter 2: Suspicion

"Don’t move. If you move now, you’ll really die."

I had no idea how many times I heard those words again. While I burned with fever, I returned to the same scene over and over; each time, powdery snow scattered over my face buried in the snowfield, and a cool hand touched my cheek. Then darkness without anything in it would descend again.

Then, at some point, the darkness became a ceiling.

It was a low ceiling crossed by dark wooden beams. Soot lay thick and long between the beams, and a pale light filtering in from somewhere illuminated it. For a long while, I could not tell whether it was morning or evening.

My body felt heavy. So many blankets had been piled over me that my chest felt weighed down by stone, while my feet felt less like feet and more like bundles wrapped round and round in cloth. Yet the faint throbbing sensation rising from the ends of those bundles was oddly welcome.

The fever had broken. It was strange that I could only realize my mind had cleared after it had cleared, but in any case, I was awake now. And being awake meant it had not ended in that snowfield.

I did not know how many days had passed. I tried to judge by how much beard had grown in, touching my chin, but it took quite a while for my hand to reach it, and what my fingertips found was more than one or two days’ worth.

When I turned my head, I saw a narrow room. The walls and floor were all wood. In one corner stood a stove made from piled stones, a low fire burning inside it, and from a pot atop the stove came faint steam and the smell of thin soup, filling the room.

There was only one window. Its lower half was clouded over with frost, so all I could see outside was white. I could only barely tell that the whiteness was morning light from the way it spread across the frost.

Several nails had been driven into the wall, holding a thick coat and a scarf. On the shelf beneath them, bottles of all sizes stood in a row, each with a scrap of paper pasted to it. I could not read what was written on them from the bed.

That was all there was that could be called household belongings. One bed, one chair, and one small table. A half-burned candle stood on the table, and everything bore the marks of long use.

It was not a hospital. Only after confirming it was not a hospital did I realize I had opened my eyes hoping it would be one.

This room, like a cabin deep in the mountains, had neither the scent of disinfectant nor the sound of machines. Which naturally led to the conclusion that the snowfield had not been a dream, either.

I looked at the ceiling again. I had fallen asleep in my studio apartment in Seoul, awakened in a snowfield, nearly died in that snowfield, then awakened in this room.

That was what it came to when I listed only the facts. Yet there was still no explanation to connect them, and with no explanation at all, I lay in someone’s house, in someone’s bed, beneath someone’s blankets.

By now, the company would know I had been absent without leave for days. The department head would see it as an extension of the report incident, and the section chief might have tried calling once or twice. But the phone that could receive those calls was somewhere in my studio apartment in Seoul.

An old chair stood beside the bed, with a haphazard stack of papers piled on it.

It took quite a while to reach for them. My arm moved as slowly as if it did not belong to me, but I managed to pull over the top sheet and bring it before my eyes.

There was writing on it. It had been written rather carefully, the lines kept straight by hand, but not a single character had a shape I recognized.

It was not Hangul. It was not the alphabet, Japanese, or Chinese. I wondered whether it looked like Russian, but even after looking again, it was not that either. Holding the paper, I was unable to think for quite a long time.

The same shapes repeated here and there. Some lines were short, others long, and similar characters seemed to recur at the ends of lines, so perhaps it was song lyrics.

I was in a country whose writing I did not know at all.

The moment that thought came to me, the sky with far too many stars came back to mind as well. I tried to set those two things side by side, then stopped. I had a vague sense of where I would arrive if I followed that thought to its end, but I did not yet have the strength to reach that destination.

Instead, I thought of things closer at hand. Who had wrapped my feet in cloth, how many blankets they had piled over me, and who had fed wood into this stove during the three or four days I could not account for. It was not difficult to conclude that the answer to all those questions was probably one person.

The door opened.

Cold air came in first, followed by a woman carrying firewood. She kicked the door shut, glanced toward the bed, and froze in place.

"Oh, you’re awake."

The firewood clattered to the floor.

"You’re awake! You’re really awake. Wait a second. No, there’s nothing to wait for. Do you know how long you’ve been asleep? Three days, three whole days. Your fever wouldn’t go down—I really thought something terrible was going to happen."

Leaving the firewood where it fell, she strode over and placed a hand on my forehead. That hand was just as cool as it had been in the snowfield, cooler than a human hand ought to be, and now that my fever was gone, its coolness felt pleasant against my forehead.

"It’s down, it’s down. What about your feet? Can you feel them? Try moving your toes."

I moved my toes as instructed. Something twitched ever so slightly inside the bundles of cloth, and after confirming the movement through the blankets, she let out a long breath.

"Good. Thank goodness. I thought you might lose the use of your toes."

I could not find an answer.

"Your eyes? Can you see properly? How many fingers am I holding up?"

She held up three fingers. I answered three, and she exhaled deeply once more.

Only then did I see her face clearly.

They were the pale blue eyes I had seen in the snowfield. The pupils within them were a deeper blue, and her skin was whiter than frost.

She had thick cloth wrapped around her head and ears. Beneath it, dark teal hair flowed in waves past her waist and even farther down.

The color was too deep to be dye, yet if it was not dyed, I had never known anyone with hair that color.

I could not estimate her age. At times she looked around twenty, but the look in her eyes when she spoke made her seem as though she had lived far longer than that. I did not know where to place that mismatch, so I simply left it alone.

"Excuse me."

My voice came out cracked. A throat that had not spoken a word for three days sounded like crumpling paper, and the moment she heard it, she went to the stove and came back with a cup of something.

"Drink first. Talk afterward."

As lukewarm water went down my throat, I properly registered the language she was speaking for the first time. It was Korean, with not a single awkward inflection.

There was not a single thing written in Korean anywhere in this room, yet she spoke like a Seoul native. Only belatedly did I remember that the first words I had heard in the snowfield had been the same.

In the snowfield, she had spoken formally. Now she was speaking casually.

Perhaps carrying someone home and keeping them alive for three days earned a person the right to drop formalities. In any case, I was in no position to argue over something like that.

"Where... am I?"

"You’re at my house. It’s a little ways out from the city. You saw the lake, right? You just come up one slope from there. You were lying facedown in the snowfield. At first, I thought that black thing sprawled there was an animal."

I wanted to ask what city she meant. I wanted to ask what country this was, too. But the instant I asked either question, I would surely become a very strange person, and I was currently entrusting far too much to this woman to become one.

I decided to count the things I could know without asking. This house was in the mountains, or somewhere similar, and it was winter.

There was a city nearby, and this woman was the sort of person who came to the lakeside alone to practice singing. Everything beyond that was something I could only learn by asking.

So I asked something else.

"...How did I get here?"

"I carried you here on my back. You were heavy as hell. Have you ever tried climbing a slope through ankle-deep snow with a whole person on your back? I came out to practice singing and ended up dealing with that."

She said it with a laugh. I tried to laugh along, then stopped, because the thought of a woman with her build carrying me up a snow-covered slope caught somewhere in my mind like a small stone.

And it was not the only small stone. That she had cared alone for a man delirious with fever for three days; where she could have slept during that time; even the sensation of that cool hand I had first felt in the snowfield—all of it was becoming a pile of small stones. I decided not to count them yet.

"I’m Vodianitsa. What about you?"

"...Kim Sang-hyeon."

"Sang-hyeon, where are you from?"

"...Somewhere far away."

"How far away?"

"...Very far away."

She looked at me briefly, then shrugged.

"Fine, don’t tell me if you don’t want to. First, let’s eat. You’ve only managed water for three days, so you need to get something in you."

She pushed aside the scattered firewood with her foot, went to the stove, and lifted the pot’s lid. Meanwhile, I quietly set the paper I had still been holding down on the blanket.

The soup was thin and hot. She raised the bowl to my lips and spooned it into my mouth one bite at a time. I had not known being fed by someone at thirty-one could be so embarrassing, and I was somewhat glad that I had enough strength to feel embarrassed.

"Eat slowly. If you eat too fast, it’ll come right back up. There, you’re eating well."

She spoke as though soothing a child, and I ate like one.

We could communicate. I could not read a single character.

I did not yet want to think about what it meant for those two things to exist together in the same room. So until the bowl of thin soup came before me, I merely counted the streaks of soot on the ceiling.

Vodianitsa talked a lot.

Even that was not enough to describe it. From the moment she opened her eyes to the moment she shut them, she was always talking. Whether I answered or not, another sentence followed, and even after two days, I had not found where she managed to fit in a breath between all those words.

Her voice was high and clear. I only barely realized on the second day that it was the same voice I had heard singing in the snowfield. It was hard to believe that such a voice, when not singing, could transform into this ceaseless chatter.

"Want more soup? No, actually. You shouldn’t eat too much at once. Little and often is better. How are your feet? They itch, right? Itching is good. It means you’re alive. Don’t scratch them. You mustn’t scratch them."

"...Yes."

"Try saying something besides yes. I’ve talked to myself for three days, and it feels like I’ve been talking to the walls."

"...I’m sorry."

"Not that, either."

Laughing, she unwrapped the cloth around my feet.

My feet were in better shape than I expected. Several toe tips had turned dusky black, but whenever she pressed each spot and asked whether it hurt, I could answer that it did.

I had never known that saying something hurt could be so reassuring.

"That’s a relief. When I first found you, I thought two or three of them were really going to fall off. Still, Sang-hyeon, you’re lucky. If you’d lain there just a little longer, it wouldn’t have been only your feet you lost."

She said that as she wrapped fresh cloth around them. I did not know what I should say in response, so I stayed silent, but she moved on as though she had never expected an answer in the first place.

Her hands were swift and precise as she wrapped them. The sequence—circling my ankle once, crossing the instep, threading the cloth between my toes, then bringing it back out—seemed ingrained in her body. Watching her hands, I again thought this was not the first time she had done something like this.

"Oh, right."

She rose, went to the shelf, and returned with a small pouch. It was an old cloth pouch. When she untied its opening, I saw several small pellets wrapped in paper inside—five or six at most.

"You need something sweet after a fever breaks. It gives you strength. I really treasure these, but I’ll give you one as a special exception. Just one."

She took one out and placed it in my palm.

I knew it was candy even without unwrapping it. A faint amber color showed through the paper, and I stared at it in my palm for quite a while.

It looked similar to candy I had eaten as a child, but the wrapper was different, and so was the size. More than anything, the hand she offered it with looked like she was just a little reluctant to part with it. Seeing that hand made it harder to accept.

"You’re not eating it?"

"...I’ll have it later. My mouth tastes bitter right now."

"Okay. Save it for later, then."

As though it were nothing, she tied the pouch and put it back on the shelf before going out again to fetch firewood. Only after she had closed the door behind her did I slide the candy beneath my pillow.

It was true that my mouth tasted bitter, but that was not the whole reason I had not eaten it.

I was the kind of person who did not immediately eat things someone gave me.

I had picked up the habit in the military. Snacks from the PX that a senior bought for no reason always came with extra work the next day. After experiencing that around three times, whenever anyone gave me something, I began calculating what it was an advance payment for.

The habit had been useful at work. If a client offered to buy me dinner, I could predict which clause in the contract would change that evening. More often than not, I was right, and even when I was wrong, there was nothing to lose, so I never corrected the habit.

So if I calculated the current situation according to that habit, it came out like this.

A secluded house, an unfamiliar woman, and care given without compensation.

I lined those three things up in my mind. No matter how I rearranged them, they all pointed in the same direction—not toward someone saving a person, but toward someone handing a person over somewhere.

Stories from the news came to mind. Stories of people taken to islands and made to work for years, people found in secluded houses overseas, an article in which figures for the price of a kidney had circulated. They surfaced in no particular order, and I seriously weighed which one most resembled my current situation.

Both my kidneys were intact. My liver was intact, my eyes were intact, and for a thirty-one-year-old man, there was nothing particularly damaged about me.

That fact was no comfort at all right now.

There was a worse possibility. Perhaps she was not alone. I even imagined someone else opening the door on the day I could walk again.

The person in that image had no face, and the lack of a face made it more frightening.

It was ridiculous. Here I was, calculating the market value of my own organs in front of someone who had saved me. If the person who wrote that comment knew, they would probably write another long post about what kind of person I was. Even so, I could not stop calculating.

The reason I could not stop was simple. I could not run.

I tried to sit up. I could push my upper body up on my elbows, but if I went any farther, the room tilted. My feet did not even consider bearing weight, and even if I could stand, there was nothing but snow outside the door.

Not knowing where I was, not knowing where I should go, and unable to make even a hundred steps over the snow before collapsing again—I could do nothing but lie there and watch whatever this woman intended to do.

I remembered the steps I had counted when I first walked across the snowfield. My feet went numb after ten steps, and I could not count after that. With my legs as they were now, I probably could not even manage those ten steps.

Being able to suspect someone but unable to run was worse than not suspecting them at all.

The door opened, and she returned carrying firewood.

"What are you doing? Why do you look like that? Are you in pain?"

"No."

"If you’re hurting, don’t just endure it. People who hold it in are the biggest headache."

She said that while stacking the wood beside the stove. As she did, her sleeve slipped down. She hurriedly tugged it back, and in that brief instant, something along the inside of her wrist caught the firelight and glimmered pale blue.

It gleamed like fish scales. But scales could not be on a person’s wrist, so I dismissed it as a bracelet or similar accessory catching the light.

What caught my attention more was the cloth around her head. She never took it off.

Inside the house, in front of the stove, she always kept her ears wrapped up. On the rare occasions it slipped, she would interrupt herself mid-sentence to reach up and fix it. The gesture was so practiced it was nearly like blinking.

At first, I assumed she did it because she was cold. But after seeing her wipe sweat away in front of the stove without taking off the cloth, I realized it had nothing to do with the cold. And if it had nothing to do with the cold, it was better not to ask.

I did not ask. Someone lying in another person’s house beneath another person’s blankets had no right to ask about the homeowner’s headscarf.

The following day, I was able to sit upright.

She was delighted as though it were her own achievement. She folded blankets behind my back for support, then placed the soup bowl directly in my hands. When she saw the bowl trembling in my grip, she silently cupped its bottom with her hand.

"I put a little more in the soup today, so it should be more filling. I broke the ice and caught it in the lake. That’s all there is in winter. Things get better in spring, but spring is still far away. Still, it tastes okay, right? I added salt."

The soup held chunks resembling potatoes and a few pieces of dried fish. It was slightly richer than yesterday’s, and I noticed she had served herself almost nothing but broth.

It took only a day to know she did not have much. More than half the bottles on the shelf were empty. She fetched wood from outside twice a day. And at night, she slept on a single thin mat laid on the floor beneath my bed.

For someone in those circumstances to make soup for an unfamiliar man for three days was strange from every angle.

The cost was too high to call it kindness, and the return too small to call it an investment. Not knowing where between those two I should place her, I kept starting my calculations over from the beginning.

She had given me the bed and slept on the floor in front of the stove.

I added that fact to the pile of things I could not understand. By the logic of the world I knew, I could not explain the motive of someone who gave up her bed to a feverish stranger for three days while sleeping on the floor.

When I opened my eyes at night, I could see that mat in the stove’s glow. She always slept with her back toward the stove and her face toward my bed. Every night, I could not decide whether it was the posture of someone guarding me or watching me.

"There isn’t anyone else... in this house?"

"It’s just me."

"...I see."

"Why? Are you scared?"

She asked with a laugh, but I could not laugh. I could not fit the story of a woman living alone in a secluded house taking in and nursing an unidentified man for three days into any narrative I knew. Faced with a story that did not fit, my mind always reached for the worst template first.

I could not answer yes when she asked whether I was scared, not out of politeness, but because I did not know how she would react. Staying silent before the unknown was another old habit.

Everything this woman did must have a price. That price would be collected on the day I could walk again, and as I swallowed my soup, I thought that the bill might not list money.

She did not stop talking through any of it. She told me the lake had frozen early this year, that no place echoed as well as that cave for practicing songs, that the firewood was running out faster than expected. Nowhere in any of it did she say what she wanted from me.

There were things I learned simply by listening. She was someone who sang, someone trying to do something with that singing, and someone who did not often go into the city.

Most of all, not once in any of her stories did another person’s name come up. The absence was stranger.

"Excuse me."

"Yeah?"

"Why did you save me?"

Her hand stopped. It was the hand supporting the bottom of my bowl. When it stopped, the bowl tilted slightly and soup ran down my fingers, but she did not seem to notice.

"...What do you mean?"

"There must be compensation. I need to know what you want so I know what I have to repay. If it’s money, I do not have any right now, but I will repay you even if I have to work for it."

"Compensation?"

She rolled the word around in her mouth once, and when she spoke again, her voice was slightly lower.

"What compensation is there for picking up someone who collapsed on the road?"

"...Usually, there is."

"What does ‘usually’ mean?"

I could not answer. Usually meant the logic of the world I had lived in. To explain it to her, I would have to bring up PX snacks, client dinners, news articles, and even the classroom when I was seventeen. It was not a story I could tell while holding a bowl of soup.

She said nothing for a moment.

Something passed across her face in that brief moment. It was neither anger nor confusion. If I had to say, it was closer to the expression of someone who had heard those words before.

I did not recognize what it was. Without recognizing it, I took the silence to mean I had guessed something correctly.

"...Okay. If that’s what you think, then I suppose it is."

After saying that, she returned to her usual expression and supported the bowl again.

"Finish eating first. Think about repaying me after you can walk. Right now, the only thing you can repay is by emptying that bowl."

"...Yes."

I finished the soup. It was the only payment I could make that day. She took the empty bowl and resumed chattering as usual, but her chatter seemed somehow a little faster than before.

At night, she lay down on the floor in front of the stove and tossed about for a long time before eventually falling asleep. I could tell from her breathing. I could not sleep either, so I counted the soot on the ceiling. We both knew the other was awake, yet neither of us spoke.

That night, I decided to try walking.

I was not trying to run away. No one knew better than I did that I had nowhere to run, and even if I did, someone who had nearly died in a snowfield once would be an idiot to go out into the same snowfield again. Still, I needed to know whether my feet could touch the floor or not.

During the day, while she went out to get firewood, I had gripped the edge of the bed several times. Each time, I barely raised my upper body before lying back down. Those brief attempts led me to this nighttime attempt.

I wanted to escape the state of being able to suspect her but unable to run as soon as possible. Even if I did not run, knowing I could was different from not knowing.

When the fire in the stove had died down to red embers, I pushed back the blankets.

She was asleep on the floor beneath the bed. Curled on a single mat, with a thin blanket pulled up to her shoulders. Even in sleep, the cloth around her head remained in place, and the long hair that flowed from beneath it spread darkly over the floor.

I spent some time confirming that her breathing was even. I could not claim to know how to distinguish someone pretending to sleep from someone truly sleeping, but at least this breathing was long and slow, breaking faintly now and then as though she were dreaming.

Trying not to make a sound, I lowered my legs from the bed.

My feet touched the floor. Through the cloth wrapped around their soles, the sensation of cold wood faintly rose up. The mere fact that I could feel it meant my feet were still mine. I gripped the bedframe with both hands and slowly stood.

My knees shook. They shook not like the legs of a thirty-one-year-old man, but a ninety-one-year-old’s. Still, I was standing, and being briefly elated at that fact was my mistake.

I took one step.

As though they had forgotten what it meant to bear weight, my feet supported no strength at all. I pitched forward, tried to grab the chair beside the bed, and toppled with the chair. The stack of papers on it scattered in every direction.

One chair leg struck a bottle beneath the shelf, and the sound of it falling and shattering burst through the small room.

While I fell, there was only one thought in my head. I was going to get caught. It came before the thought that I was hurt, which was strange even in retrospect.

"Sang-hyeon!"

She sprang up. In rising, she kicked off the blanket, and the cloth around her head slipped down with it. Without even time to realize it, she practically threw herself toward me and grabbed hold of me where I lay sprawled on the floor.

"What are you doing? Are you hurt anywhere? Did you step on glass? Let me see your feet. Give me your foot."

She checked my feet first. I lay there with my cheek against the floor, catching my breath. Once my breathing steadied and I lifted my head, her profile was right before my eyes in the red glow of the embers.

I could see her ear.

What stood where a human ear should have been was not a human ear. A thin membrane fanned out between several delicate bones, and the membrane was translucent to its core in the ember-light.

Its edges faded from pale blue into gray, then vanished into transparency at the ends. It looked exactly like a fish’s fin.

The ear moved. Whenever she breathed, the membrane trembled almost imperceptibly. That trembling resembled the trembling ears of a frightened animal.

There were things at her nape, too. Where her fallen hair exposed the side of her neck, little scales were embedded in a scatter. They were the same things that had glimmered on her wrist yesterday. A few along the edge of her cheek also shone faintly in the ember-light.

Only then did I understand that the glimmer on her wrist yesterday had not been jewelry, and what the cloth had been concealing. Once I understood, the gesture she made several times a day—raising her hand to adjust that cloth—took on an entirely different meaning.

She noticed where I was looking.

Her hand stopped. The hand gripping my ankle froze in place. Very slowly, she turned to look at me, then raised her other hand toward her ear before stopping it halfway.

It was the hand of someone who knew it was already too late.

She lowered her hand. Then she looked at me.

Her eyes did not resemble any expression I knew. If I had to find something close, they were the eyes of someone standing there, knowing they were about to be struck. Those eyes were waiting for me to speak.

I could tell she was waiting. She looked as if she already knew what I would say, as if she had prepared herself to accept it no matter what it was. She was holding her breath.

In that silence, I realized it was the first time this woman had not spoken. The words that had never ceased for three days did not come out at all now. There was only the sound of her holding her breath in their place.

"...You saw it, didn’t you?"

I looked up at her face from the floor.

She was not human. The thought passed through my mind. And as it did, I realized this situation did not fit into any of the scenarios I had spent two whole days imagining. I had diligently considered whether the unfamiliar woman in a secluded house might be a human trafficker, but I had never once considered the possibility that she might not be human.

I had not considered it because such things did not exist in the world. Yet now one of them was gripping my ankle and holding her breath.

The sky with far too many stars, the paper covered in writing I could not recognize, and the ears of a woman who spoke Korean like a Seoul native lined up in a single row inside my head. Once again, I did not follow where that line led all the way to the end.

Instead, I thought of something very ordinary.

I thought about what the bottle I had just broken might have contained, how important it might have been in this not-so-well-off household, and whether the papers scattered over the floor might have been the song lyrics she had written so carefully. Those thoughts came to me far more clearly than the thought that she was not human.

Maybe it was cowardly. The habit of counting small things to avoid looking at the big thing right in front of me was something I had always done at work. Right now, that habit was saving me, just a little.

"...I’m sorry."

Her eyes wavered.

"I think I broke a bottle. Was it something important?"

"...What?"

"The papers are scattered too. I would like to pick them up for you, but the floor is cold, so it is a little difficult right now. I’m sorry, but could you help me up first?"

For a long time, she said nothing.

Then, very slowly, she slid her arms beneath my armpits and lifted me. Her arms were trembling a little more than yesterday. I could not tell whether that trembling was because of my weight or something else.

Even after putting me back in bed, she remained seated on the floor, looking up at me. The cloth from her head still lay where it had fallen, and she made no move to pick it up.

It was strange to see the cloth lying on the floor. For three days, it had never once come off. Now that it had, she could not even think to pick it up. I wanted to pick it up for her, but my hand could not reach.

"...Aren’t you scared?"

"I am scared."

Her shoulders curled inward ever so slightly.

"I have been scared since the day I woke up. But it is not because of your ears."

"...Then what is it because of?"

I thought for a moment. I considered how much I should say. In the end, I decided not to say everything, because she had such a strange look on her face right now.

"It scares me when a stranger is kind to me for reasons I do not know. I have always been that sort of person. Your ears... your ears are just ears. It is not for me to say anything about them."

"Just ears?"

"Yes."

She rolled those words around in her mouth once more. She did it the same way she had rolled around the word compensation yesterday, but unlike yesterday, she seemed to take much longer to swallow them.

"...You’re the first person to call them just ears."

"Is that so?"

"Yeah. The first."

I did not know how to respond.

"...I’m called a water nymph. Have you ever heard of that?"

"No."

"Never?"

"...There is no such thing where I come from."

She stared at me quietly. Her eyes were searching my face for something. I could at least tell they were eyes looking for traces of a lie. In the end, unable to find any, she slowly lowered her gaze.

It was not a lie. There were no water nymphs where I came from, no people with fin-like ears, and probably no one who would nurse an unfamiliar man who had collapsed in a snowfield for three days.

"...Yeah, I suppose that could be true. You said you came from somewhere very far away."

"Yes."

"You really aren’t scared of my ears?"

It was the same question. She asked again what she had just asked. The second question was quieter than the first, and only then did I vaguely understand it was not a question she was asking me.

She was listening for other people’s answers through me.

She had been holding her breath, waiting for an answer she must have heard countless times, and when that answer did not come, she sat on the floor like someone who did not know where to stand. Seeing her like that, I felt that she had been wounded by something for a long time.

I thought I knew what that answer was. What people said upon seeing ears that were not human ears was probably always the same. She was waiting to hear those words from me as well, curling her back slightly as she waited.

I knew nothing beyond that feeling. I did not know what had hurt her, why she hid her ears, or why she lived alone in a place like this. Nor did I think I had the right to ask such things in my current state.

But my suspicion remained.

That this woman was not human, and that she might want something from me, were two separate matters. The revelation of the former did not erase the latter. I kept the two apart in my mind.

Yet which of those two weighed more had changed from yesterday. Until yesterday, there had only been the latter. Now the former lay beside it, and I did not have the strength tonight to carry both at once.

"Your ears do not scare me."

I said it once more. This time, she did not lift her head.

"...Okay."

She picked up the cloth from the floor. After staring at it for a long time, she did not wrap it around her head again. Instead, she laid it over her knees and began gathering the scattered papers one by one. I watched her back from the bed.

Each time she picked up a sheet, she examined it, apparently putting them back in order. She gathered the shards of the broken bottle one by one with her hands and wrapped them in a scrap of cloth. She did all of it with her back turned.

Her back said nothing. It was the first time since I had awakened that she had been silent for so long, and that silence sounded louder than the embers dying out.

When I woke in the morning, she had the cloth wrapped around her head.

As she fed wood into the stove, the cloth slipped a little. Her hand rose to fix it, pausing for a brief moment beside her ear before falling again. Though she knew I was awake, she did not take it off, and I did not say anything about it either.

Her face was that of someone who had tossed and turned on the floor all night. There were dark circles beneath her eyes, and more hair than usual spilled out from the cloth. Even so, the order in which she lit the stove, put on water, and changed the wrappings on my feet was not different from yesterday in the slightest.

Habits did not disappear overnight. And I had no right to tell her to get rid of them.

"The thing you broke last night."

She spoke first.

"It was salt. It’s fine. There wasn’t much left anyway."

I knew well enough that saying there was not much left did not mean it was fine. In a house where more than half the bottles on the shelf were empty, a bottle of salt was probably far more important than I imagined. I made another note of that bottle in my mind.

"I’m sorry."

"Stop saying that. It’s the thing you’ve said most in three days."

She said it with a smile, but the smile was shorter than her smiles of yesterday, and she spoke less than usual. I had learned in two days how strange it was for this woman to speak little.

Even as she cooked the soup, ladled it into a bowl, and placed it in my hands, she said only what was necessary. The only thing filling the silences between was the sound of firewood crackling in the stove.

I could tell that silence was because of last night. I could not tell which of my words had made her like this, but if someone who had talked nonstop until then became this way overnight, there was only one thing that could have happened in between.

It was awkward.

I was someone who could not stand awkwardness. Even at work, after meetings, I could not endure the few seconds waiting for the elevator, so I would say things that did not need to be said. Those things were generally useless, but they were better than silence.

But now I had nothing to say. Outside the window had been nothing but white for three days, so the weather was not much of a topic. And I could not bring up last night when even I had not sorted out what exactly there was to say. So rather than words, I searched for something to do.

I slipped my hand beneath the pillow.

The candy was still there. It had taken on my body heat beneath the pillow for two days, leaving the wrapper a little damp. I took it out and unwrapped it in front of her.

An amber pellet emerged. It was very small, unevenly shaped, candy made somehow and somewhere I could not know. I put it in my mouth.

Her hand stopped again.

"...You kept that instead of eating it?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"...Because it was from a stranger."

Rather than roll that answer around in her mouth as she had yesterday, she simply looked at me.

"Then why eat it now?"

I thought for a moment. As the candy melted on my tongue, sweetness spread through my mouth. It was deeper than I expected, spreading through a mouth that had swallowed nothing but thin soup for three days until it almost hurt.

There was a second reason, too. After seeing those eyes last night, calculations over whether or not she was the kind of person who would poison me no longer seemed to work properly. But I had no intention of saying that aloud.

"If it was poisoned, you would have put it in three days ago. There would be no reason to use this."

She stared at me.

Then she burst out laughing. It was different from her laughter before yesterday and from the brief laugh she had given that morning. It broke off once in the middle before continuing, and by the end, I could no longer tell whether it was laughter or something else.

"You really are a strange person."

"...I hear that often."

"‘If it was poisoned, you would have put it in three days ago.’ Is that really what a person thinks while eating candy?"

"It is for me."

She laughed for a while longer, wiped at the corner of her eye once with the back of her hand, then went to the shelf and brought back the old pouch.

"I’ll give you one more."

"No, you said you treasured them."

"I’m giving it to you because I treasure them. And you can count this as payment for last night’s salt. You keep saying you need to repay things, after all."

She placed another candy in my palm. This time, I did not put it beneath my pillow; I simply held it in my hand.

I could not calculate what it meant to receive candy as the price of salt. I did not know whether I now had one more thing to repay or one less. Maybe this woman’s way of accounting had been fundamentally different from the accounting of the world I knew from the beginning.

But I could tell how much she treasured these little candies. The hand tying the pouch moved a little more slowly than before, and when she set it back on the shelf, she looked at it once more. Even so, she turned back to me and smiled.

My suspicion had not vanished.

The secluded house, the unfamiliar woman, and care without compensation remained. Added to that was the fact that she was not human, so the calculation made even less sense than yesterday. Yet I did not spit out the candy in my mouth.

I could not name only one reason I did not spit it out. The sweetness was good. I was not such a bad person that I would spit out something treasured by someone who had slept on the floor for three days. And perhaps it was because of the way she had curled her back last night.

"So how are your feet? You fell like that yesterday—did you twist anything? Don’t walk today. Don’t walk tomorrow either. When you can walk, I’ll tell you, so stay still until then. Okay? And don’t worry about the salt, either. I’ll go buy some. I had to go get some anyway. Oh, and I put those papers back in order, so don’t scatter them again by falling over. It took me half the night to sort them out."

The words came back.

They were a little faster and a little more numerous than yesterday, continuing without even leaving room for answers in between. I did not interrupt. I rolled the candy around in my mouth and listened until she had finished.

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