Once this mystery is solved, Kisa leaves. And who knows if he’ll be able to find her again.

After thirty-three years, has he found her only to let her go?

Fate’s cruel streak never fails to wound him.

His thoughts must seep into her mind, for Kisa blinks rapidly. “Good night,” she whispers, and before Seokga can reach for her, she hurries away. The door clicks shut behind her.

Seokga stares at the fire and holds the child close to his chest.

Chapter Fourteen

Kisa

Curled up in her bed in the tiny, windowless cabin she shares with a dozing Hajun, Kisa uses a weak flashlight to write in the notebook she filched from the security room. Her writing is a mess of scribbled words. There is, of course, the suspect list. But so far, only Hwanung’s name is written in the blue ink.

She’s not working on that right now. Instead, on a different page, Kisa is fervently writing in English: her first language, the one she spoke in England as a child, after her mother’s death and her father’s grief. He mourned her loss by staying in her London hometown until the memory of her had faded enough for him to return to his birthplace of New Sinsi with his daughter, but without feeling a crushing guilt. His new wife helped with that, too.

Kisa wonders if they miss her—or if her father has dulled her loss by spoiling the children he shares with her stepmother. If he’s replaced her, just as he did her mother.

No matter how hard Kisa worked, no matter how much greatness she accomplished, her stepmother never spared her a passing glance. Kisa had wanted very badly to love her, tried to like her, and eventually settled for tolerating the hawk-nose woman. It wasn’t that Eunjeong disliked her, exactly—only that she wasn’t interested at all in her husband’s daughter.

Kisa wonders, not for the first time, what was said at her funeral. Did her father cry? Did her half-sisters mourn the sibling that was always tucked away in an academy or hospital? In a morose sort of way, she wishes she could have been there to see.

She takes a shallow breath. She’s gotten distracted.

In English, Kisa writes notes. Notes on the red thread, how it behaves. Observations regarding cerebration transference. The red thread, at times, even seems to have some form of consciousness. She details how it twisted into little hearts between herself and Seokga. How it will shake, sometimes, in what seems like it could be laughter.