Deacon Baek Ji-hoon
Written for readers who have finished Book 1.
Deacon Baek Ji-hoon is Seo-yeon's colleague at the counselling centre: somewhere in his fifties, soft-spoken, heavy in the shoulders, with a face that grief rearranged once and that has settled kindly. Twenty years ago he spent the better part of a decade inside a sect, and he is the only person at the centre who has ever been inside one. He came out warm rather than armoured. He weeps at interviews on the family's side of the desk, puts his scarred hand over a stranger's without a word, and insists that the warm ones can smell a lie before the file shows it. Seo-yeon tells him smell isn't evidence. "No," he says. "It's earlier than evidence."