death in prison, strangled, or poisoned for refusing to apostatize. A part of me hoped that she had fled her mansion to the mountains and was hiding somewhere safely.
But I knew she was gone. She was no coward.
* * *
I decided to write to Aejung one day, asking about how her life fared in the police bureau, and if she’d learned anything new about Inspector Han after his passing. Every day afterward I took to the habit of sliding open the screen door, peering past the brushwood gate surrounding our hut and out at the road. I waited to see dust rise into the air. I waited to see a messenger approaching with a letter addressed to me. But whenever the dust rose, only a farmer with his oxcart passed by, or a group of middle-aged women came to gossip with Older Sister. Soon, dried leaves blew into the yard, and no matter how often I’d sweep them out, they would return in piles.
Mid-autumn, five months after I’d written to Aejung, I paced around the veranda, my socks quieting my steps as I piggybacked my sleeping nephew in a wraparound blanket. I’d promised to watch him while Sister and her husband went to sell vegetables in the village. Then I heard hoofbeats pounding on the hard road. A sound rare to hear in the province, for only nobles could afford horses, and there were not too many nobles in these parts.
I shaded my eyes and saw a young man garbed in a white tunic and trousers, strands of his black hair flying over his sunburnt face. The horse came to a prancing halt a few feet away from me, startling me to take a few steps back. My nephew awoke, his piercing cry sharp in my ears, and yet I was too stunned at the sight of Ryun to notice.
“It’s been a long time,” Ryun said, leaping down from his horse. “You look the same.”
I observed the young man before me, and as he swept his hair aside, I noticed his drawn cheeks and the shadows beneath his eyes. “You look beat up.”
“Heh.” He walked past me, and as he tethered the reins to a nearby tree, I told him I would return shortly.
Hurrying off to the kitchen, my nephew still bawling in my ears, I pulled down an earthenware jar from the shelf, then poured rice wine into a bowl. I brought it out on a tray to find Ryun pacing the yard, kicking the ground now and then. He stopped when he saw me.
“Thank you,” he said, and gulped down the drink in two swallows.
I waited for him to pull out a letter.
“What have you been up to?” he asked instead, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve.
“I help around the home and take care of my nephew.”
“That is all you have been doing these past months?”
“I help in other ways.”
Ryun placed his hands on either side of his waist as he looked around, his gaze taking in the mountain burnished gold, the blue sky above. “A very tranquil life you seem to be living here.”
“Tranquil enough.”
“Dull?”
I kept quiet.
“Do you have a sweetheart?”
I scrunched my face, confused and wary. “No.”
“Your sister has her husband, and now a son, too. You have no sweetheart. You’re not much needed here, it seems. There’s nothing holding you down. Commander Yi wishes you to return to work at the police bureau. He came and asked me specifically, as he knows we are acquainted.”
“Me? He wishes for my return?”
“Well, he cannot demand it of you. His respect for Inspector Han is too deep to do so. He is aware of your blood ties to the inspector.”
“But why does he want me back?”
“He has lost most of the capable damos. Hyeyeon and a few others passed the medical exam and have become palace nurses again.”
I bit my lower lip as I rocked my nephew back and forth on my back. To say that I had not thought of returning to the capital would have been a lie, and now the idea of chasing after another mystery skipped in my pulse. But that skipping beat slowed and turned into a heavy weight, remembering that Inspector Han was gone.
“It will be different. A new inspector, a new case,” Ryun said. “Inspector Han told the commander that detectives are born, not made. A good detective is one who is inquisitive and full of fight, which you are—he said so, these precise words. This is the