I didn’t sleep much that night either.

Rain lingered against the café windows long after Tomás left, tapping softly like fingers asking to be let in. I ended up staying long past closing, cleaning things that were already clean and rearranging jars that didn’t need to be rearranged.

It wasn’t the work that kept me awake; it was this strange feeling of pressure behind my ribs and a hum under my skin. The kind of quiet tension that comes when a question has been asked but not answered.

Finally coming up with the courage to leave, I locked the café and climbed the narrow stairs to my apartment above the café. I couldn’t bring myself to jump straight into being, so I just sat on the edge of my bed staring at the photo that Tomás first handed me for almost an hour.

My grandmother, young and laughing, standing beside a man who had Tomás’s face. I couldn’t help but turn the photograph over again. Just like the first time I did it, nothing was written on the back. No date. No place. Just the faint yellowing of an old photograph.

“Nona,” I murmured to the empty room. “What did you do?”

The apartment smelled faintly of roasted sesame and sugar from the kitchen below. Normally, the scent comforted me, but tonight it only made the silence feel heavier. I reached for her laptop. If Tomás was right, if their families were somehow connected, there had to be a trace somewhere. Maybe in the town records, or someplace written in history, Something I could find to give me the answers that I can’t stop thinking about.

I typed slowly, trying to think of what to look up. The first thing that came to my mind was ’Korean immigration Argentina 1950s.’ I typed it in the search bar, and a dozen articles appeared. Most talked about the larger migration waves in the 1960s and 70s. Korean families are opening textile shops in Buenos Aires. Communities are forming in neighborhoods like Flores and Once.

The years just after the war were different; they were scattered all over the place, not making any sense, a lot of uncertainty. Smaller groups, some of individuals, sailors, merchants, and refugees.

His grandfather had arrived in Argentina in 1953; that was the only thing Tomás knew. I clicked on another article. There were mentions of shipping routes between Busan and South America during the early fifties. Cargo ships that took weeks to cross the Pacific had a passenger list, but the passengers were listed only by first name, and some passenger lists were incomplete manifests.

I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. I was getting nowhere. Especially since I don’t know anything. I looked across the room, laying my eyes on the battered recipe book that sat on the small kitchen table. I couldn’t help but just stare at it for a moment before getting up and walking towards it. The book was heavier than it looked, thick with decades of flour dust and penciled notes. Nona’s handwriting filled the margins in two languages: Hangul and looping Spanish cursive.

I flipped through slowly, looking at all the recipes that I had come to know by heart.

The honey sesame cakes, kimchi empanadas, and the makgeolli syrup reductions.

This book held little memories folded into the measurements and ingredients, like Nona had used it as a diary because sometimes the notes felt too close.

I ran my finger along a faded line of ink beside a recipe for chestnut alfajores. ‘Too sweet for winter. Add more sesame.’ I couldn’t help but smile faintly.

I noticed a small star drawn beside the recipe that I didn’t notice before. It wasn’t part of the instructions, so I didn’t pay attention to it, but flipping through more pages, I started noticing more stars on all the recipes that blended Korean and Argentine flavors. A star was on the mate with jujube, same with the Doenjang caramel receipt and even one on the sweet rice cakes with dulce de leche.

A fusion of two cultures colliding into something new. An experiment. Nona built something here, a life that blended two worlds. I ran my finger over one of the little stars again. I must have flipped past these pages a thousand times growing up. I knew the recipes by heart, knew which ones Nona would make on rainy days and which ones she saved for birthdays. But the stars had never meant anything to me before.

They weren’t part of the instructions, so I never paid attention to them. Now they stood out like tiny lanterns across the pages. I turned another sheet carefully. I stared at the star beside the mate with jujube recipe. I smiled faintly when I saw it. Nona used to make that for me when I had nightmares.

Now that I looked closer, the margins around the recipe were filled with the small Hangul notes I had always ignored. I didn’t understand the language, so they had never felt important. Just something Nona must have copied from a cookbook somewhere. Except… Nona didn’t own any Korean cookbooks, now that I think about it. I sat back in the chair slowly, the realization creeping in piece by piece. She must have learned it from someone.

My eyes drifted across the page again, following the familiar handwriting I had seen my entire life. Some of the Hangul characters looked slightly different from the others. Less confident. Like someone had written them slowly, like they had been taught. I flipped to another starred recipe. Then another. The pattern repeated itself every time.

Argentine ingredients and Korean ingredients. Some notes in Spanish and some words in Hangul. My grandmother had always told people she liked experimenting with flavors. I had believed her without thinking twice, but now the pages felt different in my hands, less like a cookbook and more like a conversation. A quiet exchange between two people learning from each other. I stared at the book for a long moment before whispering into the empty apartment. “Who were you cooking with, Nona?”

I closed the cook book at looked at the time, it was 2:18 a.m., too late to call anyone and too early to pretend I wasn’t going to see Tomás again. I shut the laptop and went to bed. Sleep would come eventually, and when it did, it was restless and filled with strange half-dreams. I saw hands kneading dough and heard humming. I even started to smell the honey warming on the stove. In the background, I could hear a man’s voice speaking Korean, a language I never learned.