The Read-Through
The apartment was dark when Jung Jae opened her eyes, but she had not needed an alarm in years. Four-forty in the morning arrived in her body like a tide, patient and unfailing, and she rose from the bed without disturbing the sheets more than necessary, already folding the blanket into its precise triangle before her feet touched the floor.
She stood for a moment in the gray hush of the bedroom, listening. The building held its breath around her — no traffic yet, no neighbors stirring, only the low electrical murmur of the refrigerator down the hall and, somewhere beneath that, the small creak of the radiator warming itself awake. She liked this hour because it belonged to no one else. It was hers the way nothing else in her life was entirely hers anymore.
In the bathroom she washed her face with water that ran too cold at first, then bearable, then good. She did not look at herself for long in the mirror. There were faint lines starting at the corners of her eyes now, ten years of them, and she had made a kind of peace with that the way she made peace with most things — quietly, without ceremony, filing it away with everything else she chose not to examine too closely.
The…