The Bar Is Not the Answer

I keep asking myself whether the cut means the chest was opened in the cave or whether someone wanted us to believe that. The angle is evidence, but evidence still needs a mouth attached to it. I can make Mrs. Han listen, and I can make the room stop belonging to Jin, but I cannot make certainty look less like ambition.

The workers calling me the cave girl should sting more than it did. Their laughter felt clean because it dismissed me before understanding anything. I wanted to hate that, but mostly I wanted them to see me later with the truth in my hands.

Jin worries me. Not because he is strong enough to overpower me, but because he is comfortable deciding which facts other people are allowed to reach. His power is not brute force; it is the careful arrangement of doors, names, and loyalties. I refuse to give him another entrance.

I ate between photographs and maps, and I hated how quickly fear sharpened into procedure. Photograph the cut. Draw the wall marks. Fold the map around the one turn he controls. Small acts, almost respectable. I keep pretending I am building a case when part of me is building a trap with myself inside it.

The silk against my damp skin felt absurdly soft after the cave. In the photos I looked composed, lazy, untouchable. The lie steadied me. I needed one minute in which no one could ask me what I had risked or whether my grandfather's gold was worth more to me than being thought of carefully.