The next morning, Seorin looked again at the sheet carrying her signature.
October 27.
The date was no longer in the future. That did not change the fact that the paper had been prepared yesterday. While the person responsible for preservation checked its seal, Seorin showed the access staff a new site visit notice from her company.
She had not come to finish the safety confirmation. She had returned to inspect the remaining hazards.
The rain had stopped. Outside stairs were still wet. Yesterday’s footprints by the rooftop door would have blurred by now. Glad they had photographed them while they could, she resolved not to fill anything absent from those photographs with memory.
Baek Haeun was in the office.
Her bag stood beside crutches. She sat by the window with her foot raised. Jeong Yunjae nodded to Seorin from a conversation with the access staff. He was connecting the people responsible for today’s handover of material and additional hazard checks.
“You’re not going farther inside?” Seorin asked Haeun.
“No. We agreed I’d only show things here. The hospital said not to walk around either.”
Haeun took out an envelope. Not yesterday’s crumpled white one, but a wide-bottomed transparent document wallet. Paper covered the sides bearing names and contact details.
“I asked my mother. She said I could show just the address. I haven’t opened anyone else’s letters.”
Seorin brought a chair and sat level with her. Standing above would make Haeun keep looking up. A small thing she could do before receiving any material.
The first envelope had a four-line address.
EUNDAM RESIDENCE, DORIM.
BLOCK 3, LOWER LEVEL 07.
The recipient was covered. An old postage mark; edges softened by repeated handling.
“Does lower level mean half a floor down?”
“That’s how I remember it. My mother called it the room under the stairs.”
Seorin first wrote how I remember it. Haeun had not grown up here; some of her memories were things her mother had told her. What she had seen during visits needed distinguishing from what she had heard.
Haeun produced a second sheet, a copy of a notice from years earlier. Following a change in block names, all mail would be received at the caretaker’s office. No table matched old numbers to new.
“That was when it became the west wing, she says. But she never got a new room number for her address.”
Seorin spread out the current plan. She put a finger on Room 207 on the second floor, then withdrew it.
There was no reason Lower Level 07 should mean 207.
Matching numbers were the easiest way to send someone to the wrong door. She remembered herself staring into an empty Room 214 yesterday.
Doun came in after his access check. He asked about Haeun’s ankle and looked at the material from a distance. He carried yesterday’s recalled cable route, rather than a new plan.
“Old buildings didn’t necessarily number ten rooms to a floor. They might have started again for each construction area.”
“Might have?” Seorin checked.
“Yes. I’m saying nobody should find a room by following my memory.”
Haeun smiled a little, moved her sore foot in trying to smile, and Seorin shifted the bag out of her way. The person who had sunk to the floor on a screen needed a chair and a footrest today.
Yunjae asked which material they could use to check the building’s layout. Haeun kept the original envelopes. Only copies of the address sections she agreed to show remained. Seorin wrote who had shown them and when on their edges. She added a line: the existence of mail did not establish present residence.
Gijun stood at the threshold.
“That’s an old address.”
“Yes. We’re comparing it with today’s plan.”
“Those people have already moved out.”
Haeun tightened her grip on the envelope. Her lips parted, as though she had swallowed the start of something longer.
“We keep asking what date they moved. I’m not saying my mother stayed here. I want the record to show where she was transferred. Living somewhere else now and becoming someone who never lived at this address are different things.”
Gijun did not answer.
Seorin did not shorten Haeun’s words for her. There was a reason to hear the whole sentence.
The person checking the storage compartment arrived. Yesterday’s secured duplicate key had opened its door. Access to the connecting section remained restricted. Seorin could accompany the responsible staff member to check the location from a safe area outside the doorway.
Haeun did not follow.
From her chair, she raised the envelope.
“Photographs, please. I’ll stay here.”
Seorin nodded. Having records did not require someone to go everywhere those records led.
The connecting stairs stayed dark even by day. Outside light could not turn the corner. Under the staff member’s lamp, the screw holes from a removed sign showed again above the blue door.
Instead of counting steps, Seorin compared floor heights. Half a floor down from the west wing’s second floor; a landing midway up the east-wing stairs. Lower level made sense here. That did not establish a room number of 07.
The storage compartment opened off the passage inside the blue door. She stayed outside while the staff member lit its frame. Below a patch of missing paint, one faint curve of a digit showed.
A 7 or a 2. Impossible to tell.
“Don’t scrape away the paint to see it.”
The staff member had already stopped his hand. He nodded. His job was to preserve what was visible. Change the surface to get a number, and the next person could not inspect the same thing.
A mailbox support remained in a narrow gap beside the door. The boxes were gone; vertical marks lined the wall. Seorin compared its position with the pipe thickness on the current drawing. A place to receive letters had become a solid wall on paper.
The staff member showed photographs of the contents. Bags, cooking utensils, mail held with rubber bands. They had opened no envelopes and were checking only external addresses. The uppermost letter read BLOCK 3, LOWER LEVEL and bore a recent postmark.
A surviving address did not mean a remaining person.
But why did letters keep coming to an address where nobody received them?
From outside, Seorin checked the distance between the compartment and the landing. The passage where Haeun had been trapped connected to the mail’s storage location, but they were not the same compartment. Call it all one room, and the access route disappeared too.
Doun was checking photographs from higher on the stairs. He pointed to a blue end at a wall corner. The staff member shone a light from a distance. It was a strap securing the old mailbox support, not a cable.
“I didn’t do that one.”
“Different method too?”
“Yes. Just tied in place.”
She noted that yesterday’s knot did not explain every blue strap today. Watching her write, Doun smiled a little this time.
“One bad color choice and I nearly got summoned to every site for the rest of my life.”
“The cable you left is still getting its own entry.”
“I know.”
They climbed at the same pace. Humor had not removed responsibility, but it had made room to finish an answer.
In the office, Haeun was making a table Seorin had not seen before. Old name. Reported location. Personally verified location. Most cells in the third column were empty.
“It’s all right to leave this many blanks?”
“Yes. As long as we don’t create a new address while copying the old one.”
Beside Lower Level 07, Seorin did not enter the connecting-section compartment as a confirmed address. She wrote candidate location and linked the supporting photograph numbers. Support, envelope address, and floor height pointed the same way. They still lacked an official old layout.
Gijun took folded paper from the drawer. He folded the contact details inward and offered a small drawing on the reverse.
A hand-drawn map of former storage locations.
East wing: Block 1. West wing: Block 3. Beneath the middle stairs, LOWER LEVEL. A line joined its first and last rooms, but only some door numbers were marked.
“Who drew this?”
“I did. To explain where things were when people came for them.”
“When?”
“I don’t know the exact date. I had it last year.”
Before taking it, Seorin asked the staff member to record its source. A caretaker’s sketch might remember actual routes better than an old architectural plan. It did not prove that every door he drew had existed.
Another rectangle appeared at the map’s lower edge.
STAFF WAITING AREA.
The current plan called it a storehouse for vacancy inspections. Even the entrance was on the other side. She did not announce it as their next search area. Today’s question concerned the place an old address pointed to.
Putting an envelope away, Haeun smoothed a folded corner.
“My mother says she was embarrassed to use this address. Tell people you live in supported housing and you have to explain so much. Now the first thing she says is that she shouldn’t have had to feel ashamed.”
Seorin remembered the flower bed in the photograph. Faces she had passed over while studying the number above their heads. Before the building’s name meant a contract area, it had meant home to them.
“You’re not asking us to make this address public?”
“No. I want an accurate record first. My mother can choose who sees it.”
Haeun closed the wallet. Seorin stopped short of writing someone else’s feelings beside lower level. Restoring something did not have to mean displaying the whole of someone’s story.
Yunjae checked Haeun’s transport home. A friend would collect her. Seorin asked the access staff to record her departure too, so no visitor showing documents would become another person left inside.
Around noon, the contractor supplied more material. Eungyeong called it a retained copy of the revision history, rather than a new drawing. Seorin used that description as its file title.
The lower level had disappeared at a different time from the electrical area’s change of name.
Gone from the architectural plan, the area remained on the electrical layout. Its circuit was called BLOCK 3, LOWER AUXILIARY. A handwritten note ran beside it.
ISOLATE DURING WORK. CHECK SURVEILLANCE POWER SEPARATELY.
Doun looked up.
“We need separate times for the lights going off and the picture cutting out.”
Seorin reopened yesterday’s cabinet photograph. Displayed setting change: 17:56. The accuracy of its clock remained unverified.
A printout tucked beneath the electrical layout carried another time.
16:00. LOWER-AREA LIGHTING ISOLATED.
She drew no line between the two times. First they needed to know which camera had stayed on in that darkness.