There were things about Baek Soha that I had pieced together slowly, the way you piece together a portrait from fragments.
She was twenty-six. She had studied law through correspondence courses while working as a records keeper at the district office. She had been dismissed from that position two years ago for "procedural irregularities," which was the official language for the fact that she had flagged inconsistencies in the Cen Bosheng estate filings and been shown the door within a week. She had not, as far as I could tell, been bitter about it. She had simply pivoted—found private clients, built a small network of people who needed someone who was very good at finding documents that other people had tried to make disappear.
She arrived on a Tuesday afternoon when the courtyard was full of weak winter sun and the gardener was doing something optimistic with bulbs near the eastern wall.
