Kensei Jon's Arc

Chapter 31 of 49

The magic book sat on the shelf, but the wall still did not stand. Kensei set it aside. The house had one room, and Ha-ni slept in the corner where every noise reached her. Last night a dog barked outside and she woke crying. So did the night before. None of them had slept a full night in a week. "We build it today," Jeon-min said. He did not look up from the sketch on his knee. "One wall. Her room, our room. Today." Kensei had the boards already, stacked by the door. He had cut them wrong twice. He knew how to sew now, not how to build. But he lifted the first board and held it upright against the wall. "Higher on the left," Jeon-min said. He set the baby down and came over. He pressed a hand flat to the wood. "There. Nail it." Kensei drove the first nail crooked. The second went straight. They worked through the morning, board by board, Jeon-min measuring with a length of string, Kensei hammering. Ha-ni watched from her blanket. When the hammer struck, she flinched, but she did not cry. By midday the wall stood halfway. A gap remained near the top where a board had split. Kensei stared at it. "If I leave the gap, sound still passes," he said. "She'll wake." "Then don't leave it." Jeon-min handed him a fresh board. "Cut this one right." Kensei measured twice. He cut it slow. It fit. He fixed it in place, and the wall closed from floor to ceiling. They stepped back together. The room was two rooms now. On one side, the bed. On the other, Ha-ni's corner with her crib and the window. The gap was gone. The house had a wall. Jeon-min carried Ha-ni to her side and laid her in the crib. Kensei stood on the other side of the wall and knocked once, soft. "Say something," he called. "She's asleep already," Jeon-min said, low. Kensei barely heard it. He grinned. That night Ha-ni slept. A cart rolled past outside near midnight. Kensei tensed, waiting for the cry. It did not come. He lay against Jeon-min in the dark, on their own side of the wall, and heard nothing but his husband breathing. "She slept through it," Kensei whispered. "She did." Jeon-min turned toward him. "First full night." Then a thin cry cut through the wall. Not fear. Hunger. Ha-ni was awake and needed feeding, and now there was a wall between them and her, and neither could see her from the bed. Kensei rose in the dark. He found the doorway they had left in the wall, felt his way around it, and knelt at the crib. "Ah-pa," Ha-ni said, quiet, working the sound. She was hungry, and she was alone in a room of her own now, and she wanted the face. Kensei lifted her. The wall had given them rest. It had also put his daughter behind a door he could no longer see through.