Chapter 5: Jiyeon's Dossier on Kang Minjoon

The thing about Kang Minjoon was that he was not trying to be unknowable. That was the first thing Jiyeon corrected in her working theory, around day four, after she'd spent three evenings reconstructing his professional history from public sources and a few semi-public ones.

Men who wanted to be unknowable worked at it. They arranged themselves with deliberate mystique, cultivated the specific blankness that invited projection. Minjoon did not do this. He was simply, efficiently, privately himself—which had the same effect as mystique but was far more difficult to navigate, because there was nothing performed about it that she could peel back.

She added this to her notes.