Entry and exit stood beside the same door.
On January 30, Seorin unfolded the permitted plan received by the company. It was another sheet from yesterday's exhibition photographs. One drawn door bore two small names. Yunjae wanted a limited comparison between these marks and the confirmed passage position. Finding the original key or opening an envelope formed no part of it.
She sent the first question through the company: from which side had the author faced the door? Was the top north, or was the view looking out from inside? Two names supplied no second doorway. Until the answer came she wrote no convenient direction beside the wall.
Across the table Doun organised his current equipment-check results. She did not hand over the plan and ask what he thought. Knowing Eundam's old lines gave him no automatic access to every document supplied today. He noticed her empty cup and offered more water. She passed only the cup.
After lunch the answer identified the adult facilities drawing assistant, Oh Minseo, within the permitted reply. The name was not supplied for publication as witness testimony. Minseo had faced the door from outside. The top was not north; it represented the front as seen from that standing position. Seorin discarded the north she had almost added in her head.
“Does the opening direction use that same side?” she asked.
The little curve could indicate a door leaf or a route. While the question travelled, she marked where it appeared to cross a wall. An error candidate, not a discovered hidden room. Paper passed through walls more easily than people did.
Minseo explained that the curve indicated a person turning back out. The original contained no door-swing symbol. It summarised entering from outside and coming out through the same exterior door. Seorin now had an answer for the two names. What happened between them remained a separate question.
The small supplied copy was sharp enough to read, but its lower edge had been cut off. The company contact asked whether matching the door was enough. Seorin needed to know whether the line's end could be read as the movement's end. Prior minimum confirmation already established the exit. This drawing alone neither cancelled that nor filled every intermediate step.
An ordinary inspection result arrived for another currently used building. She kept its sheet apart. A door's observed present closing state and an account of someone's old departure did different work. The company actually received the ordinary result. Only after finishing that task did she return to the empty receiving place for Eundam material.
Doun brought the water and joked about paper multiplying doors.
“One confirmed today,” she said.
“Reducing doors, then?”
“Not counting two names as two doors.”
“Keep both cups, please. Those really are two.”
They laughed and took their own. The cups required no further exchange of restricted plans to make the joke complete.
Towards evening a permitted supplement showed one exterior marker in Minseo's reference view. Before matching it to the whole building's compass directions, Seorin could compare marker and threshold. In the supplied photograph the marker was on the same side; the wall turn beside the door agreed. She need not invert inside and outside to read the drawing.
She summarised two checked points: the top meant the author's front, not north; entrance and exit named opposite travel through one exterior door. Who had actually passed and when depended on the separate passage confirmation. Yunjae received that explanation. The key and envelope contents had gained no new answer.
Could the supplement close? The cropped legend remained. She was asking for the allowed original explanation of solid and broken lines, not every route to be investigated anew. Yunjae would receive that small check through the existing route. She requested no wider record merely because the first copy was incomplete.
At home she took the public exhibition leaflet from her private bag. Its small rear-door photograph contained nobody going in or out. She laid no work plan over it. She remembered only Doun wanting to enter that picture. An unanswered private remark left no official access log incomplete.
His message asked whether she had eaten. Yes; she intended an early rest. He was eating at his own home too. Neither hurried a new appointment. She asked whether the little window remained his strongest picture. Tonight, he replied, the window by his table was closer and winning. She questioned whether those belonged in the same competition.
She could laugh without reducing his past work responsibility. Its formal questions and his present private table both existed. Learning that one person did not consist entirely of one question had taken time. She returned the leaflet to her bag and washed her own cup. The water had a temperature her present hands could feel.
On January 31 the legend reply was waiting at work. No unrestricted original had arrived. The custodian supplied an explanation from the permitted area: solid lines represented movement described directly to the author, broken lines connected positions for reference. A broken section did not mark a path actually walked.
In the reduced copy a short solid piece overlapped a short broken one. Their gaps had appeared joined. Seorin asked whether a permitted enlarged copy could show the actual breaks. Enlargement would add no original information; source quality mattered. The custodian would confirm the allowed area.
While waiting, Seorin drew a similar curve on blank explanatory paper. She reduced solid and broken pieces until they seemed to join. The exercise demonstrated a possibility, not the original's history. She named herself as its maker and kept it away from the source material. A reproduction must not walk quietly into the place of an event.
The company contact thought this could look like someone deliberately changing a copy. So far, Seorin answered, the established differences were a cropped legend and small overlapping lines. Intent had no supplied evidence. The contact removed deliberately from the description. A key remained missing; an unnecessary accusation need not join it.
Before lunch the custodian's enlarged permitted copy arrived with its source. Seorin checked the date and provision route. Near the little door, the solid line ended briefly before the outward turn. Beyond it lay broken line. The bend that appeared to take a person through a wall was not the end of an actual movement account.
Minseo asked whether to redraw the explanation. Seorin sent a narrower request: separate what had actually been described from what had been connected for reference. There was no need to smooth the past into a perfect new plan. Minseo recalled adding one connection while uncertain where the received explanation ended and would identify it before replying.
A little square caught Seorin's eye. She had first read a projection in the wall. Enlarged, its small text said Waiting. Minseo's own standing place, or the place where a described worker had paused? Neither had been established. She stopped her hand. The two-door question was answered; whose waiting the square represented was not.
She sent the narrowed difference through the company to Yunjae. Sugyeom's confirmed departure stayed confirmed. The square was no new location for a person holding the original key. People could wait without keys. It was an obvious sentence, yet a small shape made it surprisingly easy to forget.
At the window she saw someone enter a door across the street and emerge later. Observing that gave no view of the interval inside. She let the stranger keep an unknown purpose and returned to cold water at her desk.
Doun asked whether she had rested after lunch, rather than whether she had solved the material. She had sat; it was not quite the same.
“Don't blame the chair.”
A chair could support her body without stopping her thoughts. She understood his joke that way, with no complaint against the furniture. There was a present task she could pause; the people in the old account did not become more or less stationary when she did so.
For a few minutes they put work aside. He described a fold inside his shoe, and she told him to fix it first. As he actually did so, she closed the screen. Her current pause changed no past movement. The copy would remain when she returned, but the waiting square looked less urgent afterwards. There was time to leave an unconfirmed hand out of it.
Yunjae would seek the explanation through the existing people. Seorin covered the plan. Before placing a missing person's face or a culprit's hand in that empty square, she needed the actual answer to who had drawn it, and from what.