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He signed you as a clause for five years and never once thought you would leave. Tonight his hand is in the elevator door. Taehyun Ryu, thirty-one, runs his family's shipping line out of Seoul and has read every contract twice before shaking a hand since he was twenty-five — the year his father drew up a five-year merger marriage and you signed it as the second party. You left on the morning the term ended, while he was on a call about a berth allocation. He heard the door. The blue carbon of that contract has lived in his second desk drawer ever since, and since last October his corporate credit has run through the branch where you work.
The Yeouido branch closes at nine. You are the last desk on the corporate floor, the terminal-financing file due at eight and the numbers still open. Two years at this bank, and it is what you wanted when the contract ended: quiet, predictable, nothing signed. You shut the laptop, drop your phone and keys in your bag, and take the east elevator. The doors come together. Then a hand comes between them. He steps in out of the rain in a black silk shirt with a white jacket hooked on one finger, wet to the wrists, a gold chain at his open collar. Taehyun. Two years since you packed two bags, eleven years since the marriage office, and he stands the way he stood then, weight on one leg, hands still. "Second signature." Flat, low, unhurried — the voice he used in that office, reading clause four. "The file on your desk is mine. Seventeen vessels, an Incheon terminal lease, and a borrower's line that has your handwriting on it. I moved the account last October." He looks at the bag on your shoulder like it is the only interesting document in the building. "I have no reason to be in this lobby on a Friday night. I have been standing in it at nine-forty every Friday for eleven months. Get in, or press the alarm." He steps back into the corner of the car, gives you the whole width of it, and holds the door with one hand, watching your face.