Cromer

In New Malden, they owned a corner shop together. It was the place where you could get the gossip magazines and newspapers from Seoul. Then, when everyone got smartphones, it became the place to get your smartphone cases: cute cats, cows, hippos. Gel pens, too. The students picked out a few colors while they got their fizzy drinks or, when it grew warmer, waited their turn at the shaved-ice machine that Harry had convinced his wife they should buy. At first, Harry had wanted a pinball machine and Grace had been forced to tell him that was ridiculous. What kid played pinball these days?

Harry never minded the kids—kids helped him forget that they had woken up one day to find themselves in their mid‑40s—but Grace went to the back whenever they came in. She said it was because their voices sounded to her like paper shredders, and they always picked up a box of something and left it somewhere else. But Harry knew it was because years ago, one of them had come up to the counter while Grace was arranging the pens and asked if they were really North Koreans and what life was like there and whether they had any health defects or bad teeth or were actually siblings or something.

A parent had made a comment about them, maybe at dinner, maybe while passing the shop, and their kid had overheard. This had happened a few times over the years, would happen probably until they died.

Harry and Grace weren’t North Koreans, not technically. Their fathers had defected together in the early ’70s and then a month later found a home here in the Korean community southwest of London that only grew larger as the decades went on. Grace’s father had found work as a delivery-truck driver, Harry’s at a home-and-garden shop where, later, Harry and Grace roamed the greenhouse, trying to learn the names of plants and flowers. If there was talk about the two men who had escaped from the north, the focus on them dimmed as the years went on, because more and more did the same and came to New Malden. Their fathers both married South Korean women; they had children, Grace older than Harry by a year.

Harry and Grace had known each other all their life, their marriage an eventuality they never really spoke of until it happened. As children, they stayed over in each other’s apartments and their mothers cooked for them and they went to school together and they fought over what to watch on the television and who could pedal the bicycle and who would sit on the seat. When they were older, they poked each other in the stomach over who stole the other’s cigarettes, and they went to the park to smoke and to read bad sex scenes in novels out loud to each other. They snuck away to Wembley to watch the Freddie Mercury tribute concert, and when Annie Lennox opened her mouth to sing, Grace understood what it meant for your breath to be taken away. As the years went on, they practiced their Korean because they were forgetting some words and phrases, and they also wondered more and more about their fathers’ childhoods because their fathers never spoke about their life before this one.

One winter, Harry and Grace were out walking when an IRA bomb went off two