As for Yujun—or even Kim Jihye—I don’t know what to do about either of them. The one brings me anxiety and the other brings me joy, and it gets mixed up in my head and my heart until the dampness on my skin isn’t from the sun but from something inside me.

I turn my phone off and get to my feet. Doing something is better than sitting here and turning into a roasted potato in the shade. I follow the meandering trail up the hill, focusing on the immense skyline of Seoul below. It’s an intimidating sight. I laugh a little at thinking that Seoul was small. Up here, it feels like even the mountains are dwarfed by the massive number of buildings squished together. In this great big city with its ten million people, do I even have a chance of finding my family?

A lump develops in my throat—the small, wiry kind that scratches whenever I try to swallow. I rub a hand across my forehead. What exactly am I trying to prove here? Was I trying to find my mother or something else? I hate this uncertainty. I hate having all these emotions. It is messy and unsettling and I wish for a hot minute I was back in Iowa where there is nothing but flat land, cornfields, and serenity.

“Ha!” The bark of laughter escapes me. As if. If my Iowa self was so happy, why’d I come here?

That thought tumbles through my head as I walk, taking a turn here, branching off there. The sun beats down on my head, my legs grow tired, and my mind empties out as I navigate the trail. I walk by a driving range, through a large parking lot filled with more luxury cars than the country club back home, past giant rocks with etchings on them set in a garden of sand. The path leads me down, down, down until I emerge at an intersection eight lanes wide. My eyes skip from the asphalt roadway to the lights hanging over the center of the crosswalks to the large banner arching over the entrance to yet another steep incline.

Namsan Park.

I pluck the dress away from my chest, read the letters again, and shake my head.

If your plans fall through, the view of Seoul from Namsan Tower is amazing.

If I believed in signs, this would be a big one.

• • •

I REMEMBER WATCHING The Hunt for Red October with my dad. Pat loved spy movies—the Bond movies, Jason Bourne, John le Carré adaptations. The plots of the movies all sort of run together for me. Men with guns chasing more men with guns. Sometimes there are airplanes involved. Most of the time there are explosions. I don’t have any specific recollection of exactly what The Hunt was about, but I remember a bearded actor with a low-pitched voice spending the whole movie looking for someone inside the submarine. That’s all these spy movies were about—the search for someone.