Chapter One
The Letter With One Line
The letter had been four pages of her grandmother's usual iron cheerfulness, the vegetable garden, the ferry schedule's crimes, Auntie Boknam's new knee, and then, between a recipe and the signing off, one line, laid in without ceremony, the way her grandmother set every hook:
This season is my last. Come and learn what I cannot leave in writing.
Jiwoo read it on a Tuesday in her city apartment, over a desk dinner, and was on the Friday ferry, which her grandmother, meeting her at the harbour with a handcart for the case, treated as entirely unremarkable, the tide coming in on schedule.
You took the fast ferry, was all she said. Waste of money. The slow one gives you time to arrive properly. Come. Soup.
Soran had not changed, which was the thing about islands, and had changed entirely, which was the other thing. The harbour village: the same. The terraced fields, the stone walls, the wind with its salt authority: the same. But the school at the cove road's turn stood shuttered, its sign board blank where DIVING SCHOOL had been painted all her childhood, and the cooperative's drying frames, which had once filled the whole harbour front with the sea's laundry, occupied one corner now, tidily, the way a big family's table settings shrink as the chairs empty.
And the diving house held five.
