About a year later, I got in to work late. There had been delays on the subway - fifty minutes trapped underground - which meant I had pit stains on the silk blouse I was wearing under my suit. I changed into a spare tank top from my workout bag and put the blouse in the trash. I'd have to remember not to take off my suit jacket during the meeting I had later with people from the mayor's office.

This meeting was a huge deal. The mayor's people were finally talking seriously about implementing a plan my agency had been advocating for ten years. It called for a series of education centers for new teen moms - flexible classes, on-site care, caseworkers, tutoring, an alumnae network. I was really excited about the idea - I'd come up with it. Teen moms need the world to wrap its arms around them and let them know that they have the support to make it through.

With ten minutes before the team from my agency would be leaving, I blotted my temples with a paper towel and opened up my email. My assistant, Yeji, came into my office, noticed the blouse in the trash, and fished it out. "This is redeemable," she said.

I took a sip of my Diet Coke. Yeji raised her brows at that too.

"I realize this is not a perfect nutrition statement," I said in an attempt to head her lecture off at the pass.

And that's the last thing I remember before the phone rang.

Yeji ran to her desk to answer the call, and I listened to her half of her conversation to make sure it didn't have anything to do with the meeting.

And then I kept listening as I registered the surprise in her voice.

Her attempt to put the caller off.

The failure of that attempt as the conversation went on for several minutes. Yeji sat down in her chair and started scribbling intensively on her message pad.

And then I heard her voice, coming to me through both the open door and the intercom. "Suzy, don't go yet."

I was slipping my arms into the sleeves of the jacket. Then Yeji was standing in my office door, her tight curls pushed back by one hand.

"That was a nurse," she said, reading breathlessly from her message pad. "From some kind of military hospital in Germany. Suzy, are you expecting this kind of news?"

This is what I heard: "Military." "Hospital." "News."

This is what I felt: a flash of white wiping out the circuitry of my brain. There was a part of me that had been expecting these words for years, and yet they felt unreal.

"You don't know anyone in the military, do you?" Yeji asked. "Serving in Iraq? Do you know what I'm talking about?"

I'd been standing when she started to talk, but now I was sitting in the desk chair where I had spent so many long days and nights. The one with the broken wheel only I knew how to balance on just right.

I looked at the white-paneled walls of my office, as if I was seeing them for the first time. I looked down at the skirt of my skirt of my suit, the black open-toe pumps, the skin on the back of my hands.

Yeji didn't need to tell me the rest. I knew. Jin. This was the news - Jin had died.

Leaning forward in my chair, I grabbed at my legs to counter the tugging feeling in my gut. I couldn't form the questions. I couldn't speak. I might have been crying. I know the tears came eventually.

"Suzy unnie?" Yeji said gently.

Time was standing still. Except it wasn't. It was moving backward. And forward. And sideways. It was doing what happens at the edge of the universe, shimmering, stretching.

I was sixteen again. As if a great wind had come up and swept me inside it, I felt Jin with me. I could smell him, could feel the touch of his hand on mine.

"I thought he was in Afghanistan." I could barely hear my own voice. "We're supposed to be pulling out of Iraq."

Yeji's eyes were wide with concern. "Listen -" she said.

But I couldn't listen. I felt as if I was looking down on myself from the sky above Seoul. From that perspective I could see halfway around the world to Jin too, his body lying still in the hospital bed in Germany, bandages covering blackened skin. In my imagination, it was the same hospital bed where I'd held his hand when I was sixteen, but he looked older now, stockier, the way he'd described himself inside that dream so many years ago. His eyes were closed. He wasn't dreaming anymore. He'd given up the fight. I could see how he had suffered.

Then, somehow, in my vision, I was there with him. I was telling him I loved him, telling him it was okay, that I knew he'd tried, that his body, not his soul, had given out, that I forgave him, that I had never forgotten.

I was myself at thirty-one saying these things, but I was also sixteen. I was myself. I was sixteen. And then the distinction blurred.

For a second, I caught Yeji's eye, and she took a step back, toward the door and the relative safety of the general office. She must have seen what I felt like inside.

"How -" I remember saying. I looked up at the ceiling, down at the tiles, then at Yeji again, still holding her message pad, frightened.

"Listen," she began again. She swallowed hard. "This nurse. She insisted on telling all this stuff." She looked back down at the pad - I glimpsed her notes scrawled across three different WHILE YOU WERE OUT slips. "I tried to write fast. Do you want to hear this?"

I nodded.

"Okay. I guess this soldier, it was pretty bad. He walked into a bomb, the nurse said. An IED. Given the force of the explosion, he should have died, but by some miracle he arrived at the field hospital with a pulse. Do you want to just call the nurse back? Who is this guy?"

I couldn't look at Yeji. I couldn't raise my head. Each passing second was more painful than the last. "Just tell me the rest," I whispered. "Please."

"Okay." Yeji consulted her notes. Her hand was shaking. I would have felt sorry for her if i had been allowing myself to feel anything at all. "He lived long enough in the hospital in Iraq that apparently they decided to fly him to Germany. I guess his doctors had no idea how he was holding on. The first time this nurse saw him, she said, he was in a coma, which she said is very common for burn victims, but he'd stabilized. His burns had started to heal."

I sat perfectly still. If I moved - if I blinked - I'd need to make sense of Yeji's words. But if I kept myself from moving, they would fall lightly around me, like snow.

"And yesterday, after months, he regained consciousness. The nurse, she was almost crying when she told me this. She called the family and they're all on their way to Germany now, so when he started to talk, she couldn't reach any of them. But he was talking, I guess, a lot. At first they thought he was hallucinating. None of the nurses understood what he was talking about. They almost sedated him, but he protested so violently they held off."

"What did he want?" I dared to ask.

"You," Yeji answered. "He knew your name. He knew where you worked. He made them look you up online. He dictated a message he wanted them to read to you, word for word. I wrote it down."

She was shuffling her notes again. I didn't move. I didn't breathe. Yeji adjusted her glasses. Agony. "His message is: 'I just woke up from a dream that you were in. I believe you saved my life. If you know what I am talking about, please come. Jin.'" Yeji checked her notes. "His name is Kin Seokjin. Do you know him?"

I stood.

I was dizzy.

"Um, Suzy?" Yeji said. "You know what this means?"

And you know how before, I felt like I'd been swept up into the sky, to a place where I could look down on Jin in the hospital? Well, now I began to fall, the way you sometimes fall just as your body is going to sleep. Down, down, and then you catch yourself, as if the brakes on an elevator have finally grabbed hold. Except the braking part wasn't happening.

Yeji had her hands on my shoulders. She was holding on to me, helping me remain upright.

"Suzy!" she was saying. "Help, someone!"

There were other voices. "She's sweating." "Her skin is gray."

Footsteps, movement, then a straw. Orange juice. Cold. I could almost feel the sugar being absorbed by my blood. It filled me with hopefulness. I sat up straighter. There was a thought I was trying to form. I could feel my arms and legs regaining control of themselves, my back tingling, my eyes opening. I drew a deep breath, almost a gasp, like the one Jin took after the nurse brought him back to life in the hospital so many years before.

It wasn't just the orange juice that was making my heart start to pound.

Jin . . . left me a message.

Jin . . . just woke up?

I felt afraid of these words, as if the second I let them mean something, I would learn they were a mistake.

The words could not be real. What was real didn't matter.

What did matter - I could see this now - was the waters of memory, the rocks that bore the mark of the waves.

Jin woke up.

I had been in his dream.

That was no dream.

Yeji looked at the clock on my wall. "The meeting?" she said. "Maybe we should call and tell them you're running late."

"Cancel it," I said.

Yeji's eyes opened extra wide.

"Tell them I'm ill." When you have a meeting with the CEO's, you are not allowed to be ill. But I was already standing, rummaging for my passport. I jammed a pile of folders on my desk into the outbox, hoping someone would go through it eventually. "Tell them I am going to the hospital. Yes, that's right. It's not even a lie!"

"Suzy -" Yeji began. She was going to tell me to sit down, I knew, that I wasn't well.

But I couldn't sit. I could never sit again. I was pulling my purse from the closet, rifling on the desk for my phone. I would run. I would change my shoes. I would find an airport. I would use my credit card. I would get on a plane. I still felt dizzy, like my brain no longer trusted the orientation of the floor, like I was standing on a wildly rocking boat. But it didn't matter. I didn't have to feel confident in the ground beneath my feet, because I was about to fly.