“We open at four.”

The voice came from behind the glass before Jia had even touched the door. She checked her phone out of habit, the way she used to check it before stand-ups: 3:58. Two minutes. Her thumb hovered over the screen as if there were an email to answer, and there was not, and there had not been for seven days.

The alley behind the pharmacy in Mangwon was the kind of narrow that made delivery scooters honk at nobody. Tonight even the scooters were asleep. The only light came from a hand-painted sign above the door, white letters on green, REPAIR, with the R slightly larger than the rest, as though whoever painted it had started confident and lost nerve.

She had walked here without deciding to. That was the part she would not tell anyone.

At 4:00 exactly, the lock turned.

The man who opened it wore a faded green apron with a pocket torn at one corner and mended in a darker thread. He looked about thirty, maybe a little older, but the hair at his temples had gone gray, the clean gray of steel wool. He held the door with his left hand. Along the thumb ran a thin pale line, a burn healed long ago.

He looked at her face, then at her coat pocket, where the blue lanyard of her old employee badge hung out like a tongue.

“Come in.”

Inside smelled of machine oil and coffee. Shelves rose to the ceiling, crowded with radios, a child's rain boot, three umbrellas with their ribs splayed, a teddy bear tagged with a paper slip that read FRI. A workbench ran under the single window. On it sat two mugs.

One was white and plain. The other was cream-colored with a chip out of the rim, a small bite-shaped gap near the handle.

He poured without asking, then slid the chipped one across the bench toward her. Not the other one. That one he kept.

Jia wrapped both hands around it because it was cold out and because she did not know what else to do with them. She drank.

Oat milk. Half a sugar, not a whole. Hot enough that it hurt for one swallow and then didn't.

She set it down too fast. Coffee lipped over the chip and ran down the side onto the wood, and she watched it go and did not wipe it.

He handed her a rag. He didn't say anything about the coffee, and that was worse.

“I have a watch.”

She heard her own voice come out flat, the way it did after eleven-hour days, and she dug in the other coat pocket. The watch was steel, secondhand even when her father bought it, the face split by a crack as fine as a hair. Both hands had stopped at 4:07.

“It was my dad's. He used to wind it twice. Every morning, twice, even though once was enough. I asked him why and he said the second one was for luck.”

She had not meant to say all that. The man turned the watch over once in his needle-scarred fingers and did not look at the back.

“It's not that old. I just never got it fixed. After.”

“Leave it.”

He set it on a square of felt beside his own mug. The second hand did not move. Somewhere behind the shelves a clock she couldn't see had been ticking since she walked in, steady as a pulse.

It stopped.

Jia looked at the chipped mug, still warm under her fingers, and at the man who had made it exactly right for a stranger, and her knees told her to leave before her mouth could catch up.

“How did you know?”

She made herself keep looking at him. It was the same trick she had used in performance reviews, fixing on the bridge of someone's nose so her eyes wouldn't slide away first.

He was wiping the coffee she had spilled, slow strokes along the grain, and he finished the stroke before he answered.

“Know what.”

“Oat milk. Half a sugar. I didn't tell you.”

“Most people at four in the morning want it sweet.”

“That's not half.”

“Then I guessed well.”

His voice did not change at all. His right hand, though, had closed around the white mug, and he did not lift it to drink, and he did not let it go. The knuckles had gone the color of the rim.

Jia waited. In the office she had learned that if you stayed quiet long enough, people filled the gap with the truth just to end the discomfort. He did not fill it. Behind the shelves the hidden clock was still silent, and she found she was listening for it the way you listen for a fridge that has stopped humming.

“Do I know you?”

She hadn't planned that one either.

He set the rag down, folded once, corners matched. Then he pulled a paper slip from a spool under the bench and wrote on it with a stub of pencil, small block letters she couldn't read upside down, and tied it to the watch strap with a loop of red thread.

“Come back Thursday. Four.”

“That's not an answer.”

“It's a ticket.”

She almost laughed, which annoyed her. She pushed the chipped mug an inch back toward him, a small refusal, and he left it exactly where she'd put it.

Outside the window the sky over Mangwon had not started to lighten. A taxi idled somewhere on the main road, its turn signal ticking against the quiet, and that was the only clock left.

She zipped her coat. The lanyard caught in the zipper and she yanked it free harder than she needed to, and the plastic badge smacked against her hip. She had meant to throw it out on the first day. It was the eighth.

“How much will it be?”

“We'll see when it's done.”

“That's a terrible way to run a business.”

“Yes.”

She had her hand on the door when she heard the felt rustle. He had picked the watch up again. In the window's reflection she watched him turn it over, finally, and tilt the back toward the lamp, and his thumb with its pale burn passed across the engraving like someone reading braille.

“A.H. and J.”

She turned around. Her father's name was Lee Dongsu. Those weren't his initials, and she had owned that watch for three years without ever once asking herself whose they were.

That was the gap. It sat right behind her ribs, the size of a year, and it always seemed to open wider whenever she stood too long in this alley.

He didn't look up from the watch.

“You mended this before, Jia.”

She had not told him her name. The badge on her lanyard was face-down against her coat. She looked at it to be sure, and it was.

Behind the shelves, the clock started ticking again.