Jeong

Mrs Bae had disliked her daughter-in-law for eleven years, and would have said so, and had said so, frequently, to her sister on the telephone.

The girl was careless with money. She let the child watch too much of that tablet. She had once, in 2014, referred to Mrs Bae's kimchi as "quite nice," a phrase Mrs Bae had carried around like a stone in a shoe for the better part of a decade.

So it was a matter of some irritation to Mrs Bae to discover, at seventy-three, in a hospital corridor at four in the morning, that she could not imagine her life without her.