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.

From time to time, he opened the closet door and peered inside. It still seemed unbelievable to him that a person could have stowed herself away there for all that time. The inhumanity of it both saddened and repulsed him. There was no longer any trace of a stranger having lived there, and this unnerved him more than if he’d found some scrap of evidence—a hair pin, say, or a stray button.

He had trouble sleeping. He would wake in the middle of the night and feverishly check the closet, then the doors and windows, even the cupboards. After a few weeks, the house had fallen into its former state of subtle disarray. His habit of looking for things and expecting to find them in their right places was gradually undermined by his tendency to distractedly throw things in any available cupboard or drawer space. One day, upon arriving home, he noticed a brief moment of disappointment when he saw there was no Post-it note on the fridge, and realized that he’d hoped this act of care and attention had somehow magically transferred to Mrs. Lee.

Eventually Mr. Mok acknowledged how much the old woman had been taking care of things, and how little Mrs. Lee had been doing all these years. He fired her and placed an advert for her replacement in the local classifieds. The next day, he called the newspaper to withdraw the advert, deciding he would rather not have another stranger in his house. The house fell into further disarray. That dense, weighted feeling grew stronger, and the stoop of his back grew a little deeper, so that he had the air of someone perpetually cold.