At 2:17 in the afternoon, the light reached the second grout line on the floor.

I had not started out trying to measure time. After spending long enough in a room without a clock, I began noticing where the light fell. Sunlight through the bars made a long vertical rectangle on the floor. In winter it reached close to the bed; in summer it stayed briefly beneath the window. On clear days its edges were sharp. On cloudy days it looked like milk spilled on the floor and only half wiped away.

I had made small pencil marks on the table beside my bed.

When the light touched the crack in the second tile, medication distribution began. When it reached the bed leg, it was time for people to return from rehabilitation. When it climbed as far as the cable molding at the bottom of the wall, evening roll call was near.

Jeongho laughed the first time he saw me making the marks.

"Building a sundial?"

"There's no clock."

"There's one in the corridor."

"I can't see it when I'm lying down."

"What are you going to do with the time once you know it?"

I did not answer.

Knowing the time did not give me many things I could do. Meals arrived on a schedule. Medication arrived on a schedule. The door did not open when I wanted it to. Visiting hours, exercise time, bathing time—other people decided all of them.

Even so, I wanted to know what time it was.

I hated having a day disappear while I wasn't looking.

Before the accident, I had checked my wristwatch, my phone, and my laptop screen in turn. There was a clock on the office wall and a time display in the lower-right corner of the conference-room monitor. Every device showed the same numbers, and still I kept checking.

Back then, there was never enough time.

Now I had too much.

I was not sure whether time that was scarce and time that was left over were the same thing.

Before two o'clock, Seojin Yoon came in pushing the medication cart. One of its wheels was slightly crooked, so it made a sound at regular intervals as it crossed the corridor floor.

Clunk, clunk, clunk.

When the sound drew near, Jeongho put a bookmark in his Bible. I prepared my cup of water.

"4271, Jaeho Han."

Seojin called my inmate number and name together.

I raised a hand.

She compared the number printed on the medication packet with the band around my wrist. She dropped two small white pills and one yellow capsule into a paper cup.

"Pain?"

"Same as yesterday."

"How many spasms?"

"Twice during the night."

"Did you record them?"

"Only one."

"Why?"

"I couldn't see the time the second time."

Seojin looked at the pencil marks on my table.

"Couldn't measure it with the light?"

"There's no sun at night."

The corner of her mouth moved slightly. It might have been a smile, but she immediately looked down at the chart.

"Even if you don't know the exact time, write down the number of times."

"All right."

I swallowed the medication. Seojin did not inspect my mouth. With some inmates she checked under their tongues to see whether they were hiding pills, but I had never tried to save or trade mine.

It wasn't something I would call trust.

It was closer to a record saying I had not yet been caught doing otherwise.

While Seojin prepared Jeongho's medication, Doyun Na came in carrying mail.

"Mr. Han, one letter for you."

The moment I saw the envelope, I knew who had sent it.

When Yuri wrote the first stroke of the Korean syllable Yu, she extended the left line too far down. She had done it since she was little. On the name tag at her elementary-school entrance ceremony, the first stroke had reached below the other letters. Sujin told her to erase it and write it again, but Yuri said she liked it because her name looked like a giraffe.

The envelope said Yuri Han.

The return address was the apartment where Sujin and Yuri lived, a home I had never once visited.

"Inspection complete."

Doyun said.

One side of the envelope had been sliced open with a knife and resealed with transparent tape.

I put the letter on my lap. I did not open it immediately.

While swallowing his pills, Jeongho asked,

"Your daughter?"

"Yes."

"Read it."

"Later."

"Why save it?"

"I'm not saving it."

"Then are you afraid?"

I put the letter in the table drawer.

"You've taken your medicine. Get some rest."

Jeongho asked nothing more.

Even though the letter was only an object, it changed the shape of the room. The drawer was closed, but I could feel the fact of the letter inside it. Until I knew what Yuri had written, several possibilities existed at once.

It could be about school.

It could say she could not come for a visit.

It could say she did not want to write to me anymore.

Those possibilities existed only until I opened the envelope. Once I read it, only one would remain.

Before the accident, I had also believed that possibilities were preserved as long as a decision was delayed.

I had neither stopped the work nor fully pushed it forward. I decided we would continue for just one hour until the inspection team arrived. For that one hour, it seemed possible to keep the schedule and still verify safety.

In reality, the moment I chose not to stop, I had chosen to proceed.

I thought I had chosen a middle path, but the result belonged to only one side.

The light reached the second grout line.

I opened the drawer.

I took out the envelope and pulled apart the edge along the transparent tape. Inside were two sheets of unlined stationery. There was a small drawing of a cloud at the top of the first page. Yuri was not much of a drawer. The cloud was probably printed on the paper.

Dear Dad,

There was a blank line beneath the greeting.

How are you? I'm fine. Midterms are over. Math went better than I expected and English was a disaster. Mom says it wasn't a disaster, but she doesn't know my score yet.

I read that sentence twice.

English was a disaster.

There were easy things I could answer. I could ask her score. I could tell her the next exam would go better. I could even tell her the memorization tricks I had used when she was younger and I made her study English vocabulary.

But the letter had already moved on.

At school we have an assignment to research the life of a family member or someone around us and give a presentation. I was going to do Mom at first, but she said no. I might do Grandma. I haven't decided yet.

I let my breath out slowly.

I was relieved that Yuri did not want to research me. After the relief came disappointment. The two feelings followed each other so quickly I could not tell which had come first.

Near the end of the letter were three questions.

What did you want most when you were my age?

What did you like best about working at your company?

If the accident hadn't happened, what do you think you'd be doing now?

Beneath the last question, she had added one more sentence.

I'm just curious. It's not for the assignment.

I lowered the letter onto my lap.

What would I be doing now if the accident had not happened?

The question looked easy.

I would probably still be with the company. I might have been promoted. I might have been assigned to an overseas subsidiary. At the time, Division Director Seokho Jang had said that if nothing went wrong, he would put my name forward for executive promotion in the next personnel round. Sujin and Yuri might have gone abroad with me or stayed in Korea.

I would have been walking.

I would have gone to the bathroom by myself.

I might have attended Yuri's school events. I might not have.

I could make as many answers as I wanted. But every one of them assumed that if the accident had not happened, my company, my family, and my body would have continued unchanged.

If there had been no accident, did that mean nothing else would have happened?

The company might have merged. Seokho Jang might not have kept his promise. I might have made some other decision at some other site. Sujin might have left me for reasons that had nothing to do with the accident.

When people imagine lives that never happened, they tend to extend only the good parts.

I used the man I had been the day before the accident as a starting point and assumed everything I possessed then would have continued until now: my job, my family, my body, my daughter's love. None of those things had been guaranteed to continue, yet I thought the accident had taken all of them from me.

The word taken meant I had believed they were mine to begin with.

I read Yuri's letter again.

I tried to answer the first question.

What had I wanted most at fifteen?

I wanted to go abroad. More precisely, I wanted to go somewhere that was not where I lived. I wanted to get far away from a house where my father and mother argued every day for the same reasons, and from a school life where my grades were known before my name was.

But I did not want to write that to Yuri.

I could write that I had wanted to become someone who worked all over the world. Since I had actually ended up in international operations, it would sound convincing. The past could be arranged to fit the present.

I had said the same thing in job interviews.

Since childhood, I have wanted to work in an international environment.

In truth, I had wanted to leave home.

The two statements were not completely different. Because I wanted to leave home, I dreamed about foreign places. Because I dreamed about foreign places, I studied languages. Because of that, I eventually worked overseas. Depending on which sentence I chose as the cause, the shape of my life changed.

I took out a sheet of paper to write my reply.

When Dad was fifteen, he wanted to go abroad.

I wrote the first sentence.

Because,

I stopped there.

If I wrote because I wanted to leave home, Yuri could ask why I had hated home. If I wrote because I wanted to see the world, it would not be a lie, but it would not be the whole truth either.

I crossed out because.

I drew two lines through it. The paper tore slightly.

Jeongho sat up in bed.

"Writing back?"

"Yes."

"Write honestly."

"Do you write every letter honestly?"

"At least the ones to God."

"Does God inspect your mail?"

"He sees everything."

"Then you don't need to write letters at all."

Jeongho thought for a moment and laughed.

"You have a point."

I looked down at the paper.

"What does it mean to be honest?"

"Not to lie."

"What about not saying something?"

"Depends on what you left out."

"What about choosing only the facts you need and saying those?"

"You mean what you used to do at your company?"

I put the pen down.

"Does every conversation have to come back to me?"

"You asked the question."

"I was asking in general."

"When people ask in general, they're usually asking about themselves."

Jeongho opened his Bible and ended the conversation.

I could not continue the reply.

The light was approaching the bed leg. It was not time that moved, but the light, while I stayed in the same place.

Before the accident, I thought schedules pulled time forward.

Monday: steel installation.

Tuesday: electrical wiring.

Wednesday: load test.

Thursday: client inspection.

Friday: provisional approval.

When one box was completed, we moved to the next. Completion percentages rose and days of delay fell. Time flowed in the direction of filling blanks.

Project-management software had something called a status date. Before that date was actual performance; after it was the plan. A vertical line labeled TODAY ran down the middle of the screen. Every day the line moved one square to the right. Unfinished tasks left behind on the line's left side turned red.

I hated red.

A red task was a delay. Someone had to be assigned responsibility and a recovery plan had to be written. To remove red from the screen, people sometimes changed unfinished work to complete, divided large tasks into smaller ones, or adjusted the status date itself.

If you said the plan had been wrong instead of saying time was late, there could be less red.

On the morning of the accident there were seventeen red tasks on the screen.

If the nighttime load work did not begin by four in the afternoon, completion was expected to slip by at least two days. Two days were small numbers on a calendar, but in the company report they became money: delay penalties, emergency shipping costs, temporary warehouse rent, projected losses from interruption at the client's plant.

I was looking at those numbers.

Jinsu Park was looking at the column.

Gwangcheol Oh was listening to the connection.

At the same hour, people see different things.

I understood that only later.

At 3:10, the light reached the bed leg. I heard inmates returning from the rehabilitation room. Wheelchair tires and walking aids scraped along the floor.

It happened at almost the same hour every day.

But today's light was not yesterday's light.

The light that had fallen on the floor yesterday had not been stored anywhere. I thought I was accumulating time, but in reality I was only remembering traces of what had passed.

The dinners with Yuri that I had missed were not being saved somewhere for later use. Neither were the weekends I had promised to make up after business trips.

That thought made answering the letter even harder.

If the accident hadn't happened, what do you think you'd be doing now?

I circled the word now.

Sitting on a bed in the prison medical unit, answering my daughter's letter.

That was a fact about the present.

Instead of inventing a present that had never happened, I decided to write what I could know with certainty.

When Dad was fifteen, he wanted to go abroad. Looking back, it's true that I wanted to see the world, and it's also true that I wanted to leave the place where I was.

I read the sentence.

For the second question I wrote:

What I liked best at the company was solving problems with people from different countries. When a problem was solved, I felt like I was someone people needed.

I had almost written, I liked helping people. I changed it. It was possible that what I had liked was not the helping itself, but the feeling of being necessary.

I stopped for a long time in front of the third question.

If the accident hadn't happened, what do you think you'd be doing now?

At first I wrote, I'd probably still be working at the company. Then I crossed it out.

I'd probably still be working at the company, but I don't know for sure. Something else could have happened even without the accident. I do think I'd probably still be walking. I can't say even that with absolute certainty, though.

The answer looked too complicated.

Yuri had probably asked a simple question. I was treating every sentence as though I were giving testimony in court.

At the end of the reply I wrote:

You can present about Grandma, or you can try to convince Mom. You don't have to do me. Pick whoever you want.

After writing it, the sentence You don't have to do me bothered me. By saying it was fine, I seemed to be asking her to think about me after all.

I crossed that sentence out too.

Pick whoever you want.

That was all I left.

While I folded the letter, a cloud covered the sun.

The rectangle on the floor disappeared.

The room did not suddenly become dark. It was simply less bright than a moment earlier. I looked at the place where the light had been. The pencil marks on the tiles remained, but I could no longer estimate the time.

Jeongho looked out the window.

"Going to rain?"

"Did you see the forecast?"

"My knee hurts."

"Your knee always hurts."

"Today it hurts differently."

A little later, it actually began to rain.

Small drops clung to the window. They tapped against the metal frame. The clock I had made from light did not move again that day.

I moved into my wheelchair so I could see the clock at the end of the corridor. It was 4:22.

Back in the room, I wrote a date beside the pencil mark on the table.

June 17. Cloudy. No light after 3:40 p.m.

Jeongho asked,

"You record that too?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"To compare later."

"With what?"

I started to answer and stopped.

I did not know what I meant to compare it with. Tomorrow's light. Next month's light. After I left this room, perhaps no one would ever look at the marks again.

"I'm just writing down that it was like this today."

I said.

Jeongho nodded.

"That's worth writing too."

After the rain started, the afternoon snack distribution was later than usual.

Normally the cart could be heard at the end of the corridor by 3:50, but after four there was still no sound. Jeongho said he wasn't hungry, yet he looked at the door three times. Across the corridor, someone knocked on a door.

"Why isn't the food coming?"

The same question was asked every time an officer passed on patrol.

"Movement from the kitchen unit has been delayed."

"What time will it come?"

"We're checking."

We're checking made the corridor more uneasy. The snack was only a small roll and milk. No one was going to miss a meal. But when something scheduled did not happen at its scheduled time, people acted as though they had lost time itself.

Jeongho said,

"Your light clock isn't much use today."

"There's still the corridor clock."

"You know the time, but the bread still isn't here."

I checked the corridor clock. It was 4:13. Knowing the number made the delay more definite. Twenty-three minutes late.

At the company, responsibility appeared the moment a delay became a number. Ten minutes was a situation. Over an hour became an issue. A full day became something reported to executives. People tried not to call a problem a problem until it crossed a threshold.

I asked Doyun Na,

"How many minutes late does the kitchen unit say it will be?"

"I don't know."

"You said it was being checked."

"I'm not the one checking."

"Then who is?"

"The person in charge, I suppose."

"You don't know who that is?"

Doyun looked at me.

"Are you uncomfortable because the bread is late, or do you want to know the procedure?"

I could not answer immediately.

"It's easier to wait if I know when it's coming."

"We'll distribute it when it arrives."

He moved on to the next room.

The cart arrived at 4:27. The delay was because rain had made part of the passage between the kitchen wing and medical unit wet, so the cart had to take a detour. The bread was not soggy. The milk was still cold. Nothing was damaged.

Once people received their snacks, no one talked about the delay anymore.

I looked at the clock before opening the wrapper. The thirty-seven-minute delay became the past the moment the bread arrived. That time was not stored somewhere else to be returned later.

"Aren't you eating?"

Jeongho asked.

"I am."

"You made such a fuss while you were waiting."

"I wanted to know when it would arrive."

"Well, it arrived."

He broke the bread in half and ate it.

I looked at the expiration date printed on the milk carton. It was ten days away. The numbers made it seem as though the milk still possessed time ahead of it. But once the carton was opened, it had to be drunk today.

I read the production time printed below the expiration date. At the hour I had been asleep the night before the accident, somewhere milk had been produced and packaged. Important days in my life and all the other hours in the world did not move with the same weight.

After I finished the bread and threw away the wrapper, I wrote the date on the envelope for my reply. I did not know when Yuri would receive the letter, but I could leave behind when I had written it.

After evening roll call, Doyun Na came to collect outgoing mail. I put the folded reply into the envelope and handed it to him.

"It'll be sent after content inspection."

"I know."

He tucked the envelope into a document board. As he was about to leave, he turned at the door.

"Family visit scheduled for Friday."

"Who's coming?"

"Applicant: Sujin Kim. Accompanying visitor: Yuri Han."

Sujin and Yuri.

It had been three months since they had come together.

"What time?"

"Two in the afternoon."

After Doyun left, I looked at the floor.

Friday, two p.m.

On a clear day, at that hour the light would be just about to reach the second grout line.

Under the date on the table, I wrote Friday.

Beside it I drew one small line that meant nothing.

The line did not connect today to Friday.

It only recorded the fact that I believed Friday would come.