In her twenty years, Maddie couldn't recall a time she and her father had ever properly argued. Her earliest memories began around the age of four, her recollection not quite reaching the years she had shared with her mother, and as far as she knew, she and her father had always existed in peaceful harmony. There had been the occasional disparity of opinion, and Maddie wasn't nearly as level-headed as her father, but for the most part they were a perfectly matched father daughter team.

A Hugh Grant film was about to start playing on BBC 2. Maddie couldn't always remember which was which, the plots and characters melting into, but she loved them all. Rather, she loved Hugh Grant and would watch anything he was in, and though her father wasn't much of a fan, he would always just go with the flow if only to keep the peace.

"Supper's ready," Jung-min called from the kitchen, holding up an empty plate to beckon Maddie away from the comfort of the sofa. She padded into the room in overstretched socks that sagged around her ankles, worn out after years of use and washing.

As the evening drew on, the air cooled and though it was still light outside, dark rainclouds loomed on the horizon. Maddie wrapped her cardigan tighter around herself and pulled the sleeves down over the heels of her palms.

"What's this?" she asked absent-mindedly as her father spooned rice onto two deep plates.

"Doenjang jjigae," he said, ladling the stew onto the rice. Whenever possible, if he had the time and energy, he cooked the food he had grown up with to keep hold of that heritage for Maddie. He was by no means a natural chef but he had a good grip of several dishes, recipes his wife had excelled at and insisted he learned. Maddie watched him as he served, and she poured herself a glass of water when her father topped up his glass of wine.

"Perfect," she murmured, finishing half of her water before she took her plate through to the sitting room to eat in front of the TV. The two of them often did: unless they had company, the dining room table never got much use as anything more than a study spot, where Maddie hunkered down with her laptop, or her father continued working once he got home. Settling into her usual corner of the sofa, she pulled a pillow onto her lap and laid out the remote controls beside her.

"What's on?" Jung-min asked when he came through. He sat down with a sigh of appreciation that it was finally time to relax and let the weary Wednesday roll off his shoulders. Maddie hit the information button and the screen filled with the summary of About a Boy.

"I love this one," Maddie said as she steadied her meal on her lap and turned the volume up a couple of notches. Her father glanced at the screen, a slight frown gracing his features.

"What's this one about?" he asked, though he had probably seen it in bits and pieces a hundred times over the years, and Maddie gave him a fond roll of her eyes.

"The guy's a bit of a knob who pretends to have a son to hook up with single mothers and he ends up friends with one of the kids."

Jung-min's frown relaxed a little and he shook his head to himself as though despairing of the character's situation. "You know," he said, "these films of yours never seem to be on the television while you're at university. I think you must have some kind of an effect on the scheduling."

Maddie chuckled and continued to eat, absorbing herself in the scenes she knew so well. There was something so comforting about watching films she had known since she was young, relishing in those snapshots of her childhood.

*

Twenty minutes into the film, as Maddie set the plate down on the coffee table to wash up in the next advert break, the phone rang. Her father looked at his watch and sighed. Half past seven. After it rang twice more, he stood and brushed down his trousers before taking the landline out of its cradle. Maddie was sure she and her father were the only people who still owned a corded landline telephone, or probably any kind of landline.

"Who is it?" she asked, a pointless question when the phone had no caller ID. Her father shrugged and held the phone to his ear.

"Hello?" he said, then recognition washed over his face as he said, "Hi, cheoje."

Maddie slumped back in her seat. Her aunt. Hye-eun could talk for hours when she got her brother-in-law on the phone, pinning him down with her words while he nodded along with the occasional murmur of acknowledgement. As far as Maddie could tell, her aunt had taken her father under her wing and she treated him like her own brother, a replacement for the sibling she had lost. That realisation sent a twinge through her heart and she tried to stop a wince from spreading. Thinking, or even talking, about her mother had never before elicited such a reaction but the letter and its revelations had driven home some truths she hadn't known she hadn't wanted to face.

While her father spoke, she kept her eyes on the television but her ears weren't paying attention, more fixed on what she could make out of her father's conversation in the other room. No door stood between them but Jung-min was a quiet talker, often indecipherable on the other end of the phone, and as hard as Maddie strained to hear him, only the occasional few words reached her.

After a long ten minutes, the seconds dragging themselves by, Maddie found herself no longer alone in the sitting room. Her father sat down on the other end of the sofa with a sigh and leant back against the cushions, a glass of wine having appeared in his hand since he had taken the phone call.

"Was that imo?" Maddie asked, a futile question when Hye-eun was the only cheoje to whom her father would refer.

"Mmhmm," he hummed, taking a sip of his wine and turning his head a fraction from the television to Maddie.

"What did she want?"

"She invited us to dinner on Friday," he said, and Maddie catastrophically failed to hide the aghast dread that plastered itself across her face. Jung-min laughed a dry chuckle. "And you can't tell me you're busy. I know you're not."

"Ugh," was the only sound Maddie could produce, an apt embodiment of how she felt about dinner with her aunt, her uncle and ... Ryan.

"Mads?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you have a problem with your imo?" her father asked, a genuine question rather than a challenge or a criticism. His eyebrows knitted themselves together above his nose, and he held unrelenting eye contact with Maddie.

"No," Maddie said with a sigh, shaking her head. "I love imo, you know that."

There was definite truth in the statement. She did love her aunt in the way one was supposed to love an aunt, holding the woman in a kind of familial respect. Under her breath, she muttered, "Ryan's a twat."

"Don't be so rude, ttal," her father said with a frown, and Maddie's cheeks coloured.

"I was counting on your hearing being a bit worse," she said, injecting a smile into the sentence to diffuse any tension she might have unintentionally created. Her father shook his head to himself.

"I know Ryan can be a bit up himself," he said, tutting his tongue. "It's just for one evening though, Mads."

She nodded. It was true – one night wouldn't kill her, and she wasn't about to admit to her father that Ryan seemed to want her dead for some reason. She had struggled to think of much else ever since she had seen Posy two days ago, her mind swirling over the new information. Not once had she thought Ryan might be gay. In her head, he had always just been labelled as an arrogant misogynist.

Of course, he could still be an arrogant misogynist. He still was one. And the last thing she wanted to do was have to make conversation – or worse, suffer silence – with Ryan while her father and Ryan's parents inevitably slipped into their mother tongue. One regret Maddie had maintained for several years was that she hadn't pursued learning Korean beyond a few basic phrases that any tourist could pick up.

"Look on the bright side," Jung-min said, his words piercing Maddie's reverie.

"What's the bright side?" She swivelled around on the sofa, pulling her legs up and leaning against the arm so she faced her father.

He gave her a bright grin. "Hye-eun is an incredible cook," he said. "She can rival your mother, you know, and your mother was the most amazing chef I have met in fifty-five years on this planet."

That odd flutter was back in her heart at the mention of her mother and though her head told her to dismiss the topic, her heart begged her to pursue it.

"Tell me about Mum," she said, a fizz growing in the pit of her stomach. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs, the film by now forgotten though Hugh Grant continued his ministrations on screen.

Jung-min inhaled deeply, his chest rising before it slowly fell and he tapped his finger on the rim of his glass. There had been times in the past when Maddie had idly enquired after her mother and she had been met with dismissal, but today her father wore a soft smile, sentimentality nestled between the wrinkles that grew from the corners of his eyes.

"She was the light of my life," he said after a pause, and Maddie shivered as though someone had walked over her grave. There was a catch in her father's voice, a lump in his throat that he forced his words past.

Just when Maddie thought he might not continue, he opened his mouth and words followed soon after, his eyes fixed somewhere to the right of his daughter.

"We were together for twelve years before she died," he said. "Not once did she cook a bad meal. Not a single time. If she was feeling down, she would ring me and ask me to pick something up from the shop on my way home." A wistful laugh escaped him. "She would rather have a bad takeaway than let her mood affect the food she made."

As Maddie listened to the way her father spoke of the woman she didn't remember, her face fell into a natural frown of concentration, paying attention to every single word that left his lips. She saw a whole new vulnerability in the way he shared his memories, a side of him that she had never experienced: the husband; the man who had loved a woman and lost her too.

"As soon as you were eating solid food, your mother was trying to get you to eat soondubu jjigae. She must've made it hundreds of times."

Maddie wrinkled her nose. "Ew. I hate soondubu jjigae."

Jung-min chuckled and his eyes met hers for a moment. "You always did," he said. "You two were never really compatible in the kitchen. I remember once, when you were so little, you wouldn't eat something So-yi made and she cried."

"Jesus," Maddie muttered.

"She was very sensitive," her father added, his voice softening further. "Even when she was well, she was always sensitive, and I think it must've been a bad day. She thought that you not eating her food was you rejecting her." His eyes watered momentarily before he blinked away the tears that would never have a chance to fall. "But you were so little." He pressed his lips together and sighed through his nose. "I don't think she could see that."

Maddie's heart took a hit, a dull throb aching in her chest. For a long moment, neither said a word. Jung-min sipped his wine and rested the glass on his knee, his attention returning to the television for a moment, but Maddie didn't want the conversation to turn back towards the trivial.

"I wish I remembered her cooking," she said, bringing her father back to her.

"Mmm. So do I. I really cannot match her standards." He lifted one shoulder and let it drop in a half-hearted shrug. "But maybe I remember what I want to remember. I do remember the last meal she cooked though."

"Oh yeah?" Maddie raised her voice with the slightest inflection. If what she felt was even a fraction of heartache then she couldn't begin to comprehend the emotions her father dealt with, even eighteen years later.

"She loved spicy food," he said. "Anything with a kick. And she would add even more heat. Once she told me that the spice helped her to feel something." The corners of his mouth turned down and Maddie felt hot tears pricking her eyes, the second-hand ache of her father's pain shredding her inside.

"Cooking was her release." The last sip of wine was gone. Jung-min reached for the bottle and topped it up, cushioning the blow of the memories he had never voiced. "Her specialty was bibim naengmyeon. She made it on a Wednesday." His words slowed as he grew closer to the moment his life had fallen apart. Maddie shifted closer and her father tucked his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close and kissing the top of her head.

"I woke up alone on Thursday."

Maddie closed her eyes but a few tears eased out in two slow streams down her cheeks. Resting her head against her father's shoulder, she felt like a child again, finding comfort in her father as she cried. Jung-min found solace in his daughter, his wife's legacy, as he tried to suppress the tears he hated to shed in front of her.

*

"I'd like to learn to cook," Maddie said. The two hadn't shared a single word for almost fifteen minutes, slipping back into the film though both had lost track of the plot by now, characters on the screen of whom neither had witnessed the introduction.

"Yes?"

"It'd be a good hobby," she added. "I mean, I can cook, else I'm not sure I would've survived the last three years, but I want to learn Mum's recipes."

Jung-min squeezed her shoulder. "She'd love that," he said, as though his wife was just next door. A spiritual man, he held onto the belief that his wife was still with him in some form, and though Maddie had always called herself an atheist, she adored her father's faith.

Ever since learning of her mother's suicide, Maddie had found herself missing her more and more. A hole sat in her chest where she hadn't noticed one before, a gap that had been plugged with misinformation that could only hold up for so long.

"I keep dreaming about her," she said after another moment of quiet, in the split second's pause between the end of a scene and the start of an advert break.

"You do?" Jung-min leant away from Maddie to look her in the eye. "What about?"

She shrugged. "Nothing special. Really ordinary things, actually. Ever since I read that letter, she just pops up in my dreams. The version of her I know, anyway. From pictures and stories. I don't even know if it's really her." She frowned in thought. "I have no idea if it's subconscious memories or just fabrication."

Her father rubbed her arm and tucked his a little closer around her. He didn't need to say anything and there was nothing Maddie needed to hear. Though her father's recollections had been painful to hear, they had instilled a sense of comfort to her churning mind and offered a little more humanity to her mother than she could get from nineties photographs and recycled memories.

+ - + - +

can i just say a massive thank you to everyone reading this, and everyone who has stuck with this story? you are all amazing people and your support is just awesome. i still can't get my head around how many people are reading this - i would thank each and every one of you if i could. i apologise for the late update! life is paradoxically a lot busier in the summer but i'll continue to try to crank them out! don't worry - i haven't cut peter out of the story, he'll be back