Rei is sitting on the floor when I get back.
Not the chair, not the low table. The floor, back against the wall beneath the window, knees up, her personal notebook open across them. The lamp on the table is the only light and it makes the room smaller than it is, a circle of yellow in the cedar and old paper dark.
She looks up when I come in.
She looks at my face first, the way she always does, the professional read, checking for damage or threat or the particular quality of expression that signals something went wrong. Then she looks at my hands. Then at the drive.
"You got it," she says.
"Yes."
I sit at the low table. I put both drives on it, the original and Minami's, side by side. I look at them for a moment and then I tell her everything. Not the operational summary, not the version edited for tactical relevance. Everything. Minami's real name, the aunt, the seventeen years, the recruitment at twenty-three, the memorial inscription on the stone, the wrong timeline and the 20:58 message and what it cost her to have been wrong by thirty-six minutes.
Rei listens without interrupting.
She closes the notebook somewhere in the middle of it and holds it in her lap and listens with the specific quality of attention she brings to evidence she knows she'll only hear once. When I finish she looks at the two drives on the table.
"She placed the inscription before last night," she says.
"Yes. The stone looked weathered. Not recently cut." I pause. "I think she placed it when he left Ryūsei. When he walked away eighteen months ago she marked him as gone because walking away from Ryūsei is supposed to be the same thing."
"But she kept working."
"She kept working."
Rei looks at the inscription in her mind, I think. The way she's looking at the middle distance has the quality of someone seeing something that isn't in the room.
"She recruited him," she says. "She put him inside something that costs everything it touches and she built a case on top of what it cost him." A pause. "And she's been carrying that for seventeen years."
"Yes."
"Her condition. That you tell her what happened to him." She looks at me then. Direct, fully, the professional surface present but thinner than it's been all day. "Can you."
"I don't know yet." I look at the drives. "I told her I'd tell her what I know. Everything I know."
"That's not the same as having an answer."
"No. It isn't."
Silence.
The lamp flickers once, settling, and the room adjusts around it. Outside the garden is dark and the persimmon tree is invisible and the city is doing its midnight thing, distant and continuous and indifferent to the specific weight of what's happening in this small circle of light.
Rei closes her eyes for a moment. Opens them.
"Léo," she says.
The name lands in the room like something that's been waiting to be said since the holding room at three in the morning. Not Saitō. Not Saitō-san. Not the careful professional address she's been using all day as a way of managing the distance between what she knows and what she doesn't.
My actual name.
I look at her.
"That's your name," she says. "Isn't it."
"Yes."
"Léo." She tests it once more, quietly, the way you test a word in a language you're learning to see if it produces the right meaning. "French."
"Yes."
"How old."
"Twenty-two."
She absorbs this. "Student."
"Economics. Paris." I pause. "Third year. I was in a lecture hall the morning before I woke up in that apartment."
She looks at me for a long time. Not the assessment of the first holding room, not the professional recalibration of the apartment. Something more direct than that, more genuinely curious, the look of a person who has been working alongside a fact all day that she couldn't name and has just been given the name and is now deciding what to do with the whole shape of it.
"You speak Japanese," she says.
"Saitō speaks Japanese. I'm using what he has." I pause. "It's fluent. I don't know where mine ends and his begins."
"But you think in French."
"Yes. Always. The Japanese comes out correctly but the processing underneath is French." I look at the table. "Sometimes it's disorienting. The language that comes out of my mouth is one thing and the thought behind it is another."
"Like translation with no gap," she says.
"Exactly like that."
She looks at the drives again. "Economics," she says. "Third year. That's why you read the payment list the way you did. The routing structure."
"It helped."
"It more than helped." She pauses. "Saitō would have read it as operational intelligence. Names, exposure, leverage. You read it as a financial instrument. You saw the mechanism instead of the actors." A pause. "That's why you convinced Tada. You didn't argue like Saitō would have argued. You reframed the risk architecture."
I look at her. "You know about Tada."
"Nishida told me. On the way to Kasumigaseki." She almost smiles. Not quite. The shape of it without the completion. "He said you argued a Ryūsei operative out of his objective using behavioral economics and he wasn't sure whether to be impressed or concerned."
"Both responses seem reasonable."
This time the shape of it completes. Small, brief, gone before it fully arrives. But it was there.
I look at the table.
"How did you know my name," I say. "You've been using Saitō all day."
"I've been using it because it was the name that worked. The name that kept the operational frame intact." She looks at her notebook. "But in the holding room this morning, before the formal interview, you said something. You told me the person I knew was not the person sitting in front of me." She pauses. "The way you said it wasn't Saitō. The syntax was wrong. The rhythm was wrong." She looks at me. "Saitō would never have explained himself. He would have deflected, redirected, found the version of a statement that gave nothing away. You told me directly." A pause. "That's not a Japanese communication pattern. That's not even a Saitō communication pattern. That's something else."
"French," I say.
"French," she agrees.
The word sits between us.
I think about the holding room, the recorder off, her standing at the door telling me to ask for a lawyer. I think about every moment since when she's been using the professional frame and the operational distance and the careful management of what she knows against what she doesn't. She's known since the holding room that something fundamental was wrong with who was wearing this face.
She's been working alongside that knowledge all day.
Building a case. Protecting a source. Making decisions that her institutional standing shouldn't allow. She's been doing all of it while carrying the knowledge that the person she was doing it with was not the person the evidence said he was.
"Why didn't you ask earlier," I say.
She looks at the window. The dark glass, the garden invisible behind it. "Because the answer would have required me to stop and I couldn't stop." A pause. "And because." She stops.
"Because," I say.
A silence that lasts long enough to have its own shape.
"Because the question changes things," she says finally. "Once I know who you actually are, the framework changes. Everything I've been building my decisions on today, the decisions about what to protect and what to risk and who to trust, they were built on something I was deliberately not examining." She looks at me. "Once I examine it, I have to rebuild the decisions."
"Or keep them," I say.
She looks at me.
"The decisions you made today," I say carefully. "The recorder. Calling Nishida. Coming to Kōtō ward. Working with Kuramoto. Taking the drive from Minami." I pause. "None of those decisions required Saitō specifically. They required someone who was trying to do the right thing with what they had." I pause again. "That's still true."
She holds my gaze for a moment. Then she looks at the drives.
"Twenty-two," she says.
"Yes."
"In a thirty-year-old body with four years of yakuza training and eighteen months of survival instinct and whatever Saitō was at the end of it." She pauses. "That's what I've been working with all day."
"That's what you've been working with all day."
She closes her eyes again. Opens them. When she looks at me this time the professional frame is still there but it's doing something different. It's not managing a distance. It's managing a proximity. The specific effort of a person maintaining a boundary they've identified as necessary while being fully aware of exactly what they're maintaining it against.
I see it and I don't name it and I file it in the category marked later which is becoming dangerously full.
"The drives," she says. Her voice is back to the operational register. Steady, purposeful. "I need three hours with both of them tonight. Cross-referencing Minami's fourteen months against Saitō's original documentation. Building the submission package for Kuramoto."
"I'll stay up," I say.
"You don't need to."
"I read financial documentation faster than you do."
A pause. "That's probably true." She moves to the table. Sits across from me. Opens her notebook to a clean page. "Walk me through the payment list structure first. I want to understand the routing before I look at Minami's additions."
I pull the original documents from the waterproof bag.
We work.
For three hours we work in the small circle of lamp light in the cedar-smelling room while Tokyo breathes its deep night outside and the persimmon tree stands invisible in the garden and somewhere in Yanaka cemetery a stone carries a name that is also the name of whatever I'm wearing.
At 3:40 Rei puts her pen down.
She looks at what we've built. The cross-referenced structure, the submission outline, the annotated documentation that turns two drives and a payment list into a filing package that a SIS prosecutor can use.
"This is enough," she says. "This is more than enough."
"Kuramoto said days rather than weeks with the full package."
"He was right." She closes the notebook. Looks at the table. "Thirty-one hours left in the window."
"We can make it."
She looks up at me. The lamp between us, the circle of yellow, the specific intimacy of three hours of shared work in the middle of the night in a room that belongs to neither of us.
"Léo," she says.
"Yes."
She looks like she's going to say something. The shape of it is there, the preparation, the slight adjustment of posture that precedes a sentence someone has decided to say after considering not saying it.
Then her phone vibrates on the table.
She looks at it. Her expression changes.
She turns it so I can see the screen.
A message from a number she doesn't have saved. Unknown sender, Tokyo prefix, sent at 3:42 in the morning.
Four words.
I know about Minami.