“Yes,” he said. “The old way.”

The machines couldn’t read grief.

Ji-hoon tried modern scanners. He tried phone apps with AI enhancement. He tried cloud OCR that promised to “preserve handwriting with love.” But the algorithms kept correcting his mother’s notes. They turned her cramped cursive into clean text. They erased the tremble in her hand, the coffee stain shaped like a bird, the way she used to dot her i’s with a tiny star.