Ken Mok spent the following week in a state of indignation and embarrassment. He wanted to share the burden of his victimization with other people—his father, his co-workers, the woman who no longer wanted to speak to him—but decided against it. His father would see this incident as further proof of his son’s stupidity and incompetence. How can a person not know that a stranger is living in their house? For a year! His co-workers would no doubt see this as a ripe opportunity for ridicule. The day after the arrest, short articles had appeared in several newspapers, identifying the young man as “A 33-year old I.T. professional. The old woman was identified as Ng Shui Lin, 64 years old. The woman appeared to be of normal mental health. When police asked her why she had lived in secrecy at the man’s home for a year, she replied, ‘I had nowhere to live.’”

A few days later, a colleague emailed him an article about the incident, which someone else had sent him from a news website. The subject line read, How Dumb Is This Guy? Mr. Mok assured himself that this wasn’t directed at him personally. It would be impossible for anyone to know the true details of the incident; there must be hundreds of thirty-three-year-old I.T. professionals living in the area. He searched the story online and found that brief articles had appeared in some sixty-seven news outlets, comprised largely of websites from China. To his relief, he found that in all of these, he remained anonymous.

After some time, and he thought, an unusual amount of persuasion from the police officers handling the case, Mr. Mok decided to drop the charges against the old woman. The officers managed to convince him that she posed no real danger to him, and that they would make sure she was returned to the care of her son and daughter-in-law. Immediately after agreeing to drop the charges, Mr. Mok installed a more advanced security system in his home. Any instance of the alarm going off would send an alert straight to his cell phone, so that even at work he could feel reassured.

Mr. Mok tried to return to his old routines with the same normalcy and thoughtlessness as before, but found that a new, nagging feeling had replaced the old one. This new feeling manifested itself as a dense weight in his lungs, like a cloud of stone, and seemed to appear at odd, inexplicable moments: when he set foot in the house after work; when he stepped out of the steam of the bathroom; when he dropped a cake of ramen noodles into a pan of boiling water. This gradually affected his posture, and he developed a slight stoop.