Page 28 of The Way Back Home

“Thank you,” I manage to get out.

“Hey. Try not to think the worst, okay?”

I make a noncommittal sound and we hang up.

The phone drops from my hand onto the bedspread. The silence of the room rushes in, deafening. I press the heels of my hands into my eyes, but the images are already there. Ryowoon, grinning, with dirt on his face. Ryowoon, furious, with his fists clenched. Ryowoon, asleep, his face peaceful for once.

And now, a new image. A cold, sterile room. A sheet. A tag on a toe.

I push myself off the bed and walk to the window, pulling back the musty curtain. The lights are spread out below, a city full of people living their lives, completely unaware of the boy from a forgotten seaside town who might be lying nameless in a morgue drawer somewhere.

I’m not praying for a miracle anymore. I’m not praying to find him in some greasy auto shop, wiping his hands on a rag with that same crooked smirk.

Now, I’m just praying for nothing.

I’m begging every god that might be listening that Taesung’s next call is just like the last one. That his brother-in-law finds no match. That Cha Ryowoon, my Ryowoon, doesn’t exist in that database.

Because if he does, I don’t know what I’ll do. If he’s a ghost, I can keep looking. But if he’s a body, then the search is over.

And I’m not ready for it to be over.

I can’t just sit in a motel room waiting for Taesung to call back. The idea of doing nothing while some detective flips through paperwork on his own time makes my skin crawl, makes my hands itch for anything to do that isn’t staring at the ceiling and imagining the worst.

So I start driving myself the next morning, back the way I came, back down the coast toward Haemok before cutting inland to the county office. The drive takes longer than I remember, the roads narrower, twisting through hills green with early summer growth. I park in front of a squat concrete building that hasn’t changed in twenty years, the same faded government seal bolted above the door, the same dusty ficus plant wilting in the corner of the lobby.

The clerk behind the counter can’t be more than twenty-five, her nails painted a soft coral color that seems out of place against the beige walls and fluorescent lighting. I tell her what I need. Death certificates. Unidentified remains. Anything filed in the last ten years.

She blinks at me like I’ve asked her something out of a crime drama. “Sir, that’s … that’s not really something we keep on hand for public request. You’d need to go through the police department for something like that.”

“I already have someone looking through police records,” I say, keeping my voice level even though my pulse is hammering. “I want to check the civil registry too. Death certificates filed without a name. John Does, if you have that here.”

She frowns, chewing on her bottom lip, then disappears into the back to find someone more senior. I wait, standing at the counter, tapping my knuckles against the laminate top until an older man comes out, reading glasses pushed up into thinning hair, and asks me the same question in a more patient tone.

I explain again. I’m looking for a friend. He might be a name in a file marked with a blank space. I don’t know how else to put it that doesn’t sound insane.

The older man’s face softens and he tells me to have a seat while he checks what they have on file for unidentified deceased persons in the county over the past decade. I sit in one of the plastic chairs against the wall, my knee bouncing, until he brings back a thin folder with maybe six or seven entries. I go through it page by page, reading each entry, checking ages, dates, any physical description listed. None of them are him. Wrong age. Wrong height. One entry describes a woman. I hand the folder back and thank him, my throat tight, and drive to the next county office.

I do it over and over.

I dot between every coastal county from Haemok up through Yeosu and back down toward Tongyeong, marking them off one by one. Some days I get through two offices before the buildings close for lunch and don’t reopen until I’m already three towns away. Some clerks are helpful, sympathetic even, once I explain I’m looking for someone from my hometown who’s been missing for years. Others look at me like I’m wasting their time, tell me this isn’t information they hand out to the public, that I need a police report number or a family relation on record. I don’t have either. I’m not family. I’m nothing, legally speaking, just a man from a town an hour away with a scar burned into his memory and no paper trail to prove why it matters.

At night I go back to any motel I’ve found for the evening and pull my laptop onto the bed, propping myself against the headboard with a pillow that smells storngly of bleach. I search public ledgers for every county along the coast, scroll through digitized newspaper archives for anything involving unidentified remains, drowning victims, hikers found in the mountains months after they went missing. My eyes burn by midnight every night, the blue light of the screen the only thing lighting the room. I read obituaries. I read police blotters translated into the flat, procedural language of local news. Sometimes I find an article about a body pulled from the water near a fishing pier, description vague, and my stomach drops through the floor before I click through and see the estimated age is wrong, or the clothing described doesn’t match anything Ryowoon would wear even now, ten years removed from the boy I knew.

Every single day feels like holding my breath underwater, waiting for the moment I break the surface and gasp in air that tastes like relief or grief. I eat because I have to, not because I’m hungry. I sleep in short, restless stretches, waking every few hours convinced I’ve missed a call, that Taesung’s tried to reach me and I slept through it. I haven’t. My phone sits on the nightstand every night, screen dark, notifications empty.

A week passes like this. Seven days of county offices and digital archives and exhaustion from grief you’re not allowed to have yet because you don’t know if you have reason to.

Then, on the eighth day, my phone rings while I’m sitting in the parking lot of a gas station outside Tongyeong, a paper cup of coffee cold in the cupholder beside me. I see Taesung’s name on the screen and my hand freezes on the gear shift.

I let it ring twice before I answer, some superstitious part of me convinced that if I wait, if I don’t rush toward the answer, it’ll be kinder.

“Hey,” I say, sounding gravelly from disuse, from too many nights of silence.

“Seyeon. Hey, sorry it took a while. My brother-in-law had to pull some strings to get access to that database, took some convincing.”

“It’s fine,” I say quickly. “What did he find?”

There’s a pause on the line, brief but long enough for my heart to climb into my throat.