Chapter Two
The Space Between Four O'Clock and Evening
He had not expected her to come back.
That was not entirely true. He had expected her in the way you expect weather — not with certainty, but with an awareness that it was possible, that you had left the window open, that if it rained you would not be entirely surprised. He had closed the shop at four as he said he would. He had changed his shirt, which was something he noticed himself doing and then decided not to think about. He had stood behind the counter arranging and rearranging a bundle of white freesia for approximately twelve minutes before setting it down and accepting that he was waiting.
She arrived at four past four, slightly out of breath, her hair down today.
"I'm sorry," she said, stepping through the door. "The train was—"
"It's fine," he said.
She looked at him. Then at the freesia on the counter. Then back at him.
"Okay," she said.
—
They walked.
He had not planned anything elaborate. He was not the kind of person who planned things elaborately. What he had done was think, the previous evening and again that morning, about what he actually knew about the coast near Misakicho — the geography of it, the communities, the places a person might have come from or passed through. The cruise ship angle was significant. He had looked up the terminal records online, which were partially public, and found that there had been three vessels in transit through those waters during the relevant period. It was a start. Not much of one, but a direction.
He told her this as they walked, and she listened the way she had listened the day before — without interrupting, without performing surprise or gratitude, simply taking in the information and turning it over quietly.
"Three ships," she said.
"Yes."
"That's — actually more concrete than anything I've had before." She was quiet for a moment. "For a long time the hospital thought I might have simply walked into the water. Not an accident. That I had meant to." She said it without particular weight, reporting a theory that had been applied to her without her consent and had since been discarded. "It took about a year before anyone seriously considered the cruise ship possibility. I don't think it occurred to them that I could have been so far from wherever I started."
Kaito considered this. The coast at Misakicho was not close to anything particularly central. It was the kind of stretch you reached by driving for a while on roads that gradually became narrower and less confident. For someone to end up there from a cruise ship passage, the drift and current would have had to carry them for some distance. Hours, potentially.
"You were lucky with the tide," he said.
"I know." A pause. "You were lucky to be there."
He didn't answer that. They walked past a row of closed shutters, a vending machine casting pale light onto the pavement, a cat watching them from a wall with the serene indifference that cats brought to everything.
"Why were you there?" she asked. "That morning."
It was a reasonable question. He had been wondering when she would ask it.
"I drive there sometimes," he said. "When I can't sleep."
"Is that often?"
"Less than it used to be."
She nodded, which meant she understood there was more to that sentence and had decided not to pull on it. He appreciated that about her. It was a rare quality — knowing which threads to leave alone.
—
They found a small place to sit near the river that ran through the center of the neighborhood. There was a low concrete wall and beyond it the water moving in that particular evening way, dark and slow and catching the last of the light in fragments. A few other people were out — a man walking a dog, two elderly women on a bench sharing something wrapped in paper, a child running ahead of parents who called after her without urgency.
Nagisa sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the water.
"Does it bother you?" he asked. "Water."
"No," she said. "That's the strange part. People always expect it to. The doctors expected it. The family that took me in kept apologizing whenever we drove near the coast, as though I might come apart." She tilted her head slightly. "But it never felt dangerous to me. It just felt like water."
"Maybe you grew up near it."
"Maybe." She looked at it a moment longer. "Or maybe the brain keeps the fear and loses the memory. And since I don't remember what happened, there's nothing to be afraid of."
"That's either very fortunate or very unfortunate."
"I've been trying to decide that for five years." She said it lightly, the way someone says a thing they have made peace with. Then: "The family that looked after me. The Okamotos. They were very kind. They didn't have to do what they did. I had no one, no identification, no way to pay them back. They just — took me in." She paused. "I still have dinner with them on Sundays."
"You have people, then."
"I have people." She turned and looked at him, something evaluating in her expression that wasn't unkind. "You said the shop belonged to your parents. Past tense."
"Yes."
"Both of them?"
"Car accident. Four years ago." He said it the way he always said it — cleanly, with no performance around it. Grief that had been handled enough times to be portable. "I was twenty. I'd been helping in the shop since I was old enough to hold a watering can. After, I just — kept going. It seemed like the right thing to do."
Nagisa was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "What was it like. Before."
He thought about it genuinely. He could have deflected, and she would have let him. But she had shared her things honestly, and it seemed right to return that.
"Loud," he said. "My mother talked constantly. About the flowers, about the customers, about nothing. She narrated everything as if she was afraid silence would take over if she let it. My father was the opposite — he barely spoke but he was always there, in the background, a kind of constant." He looked at the water. "The shop is very quiet now. I've gotten used to it. But sometimes I catch myself about to say something out loud and I realize I'm not saying it to anyone."
She didn't say she was sorry. He was glad. He had enough sorries in storage for a lifetime.
"I do that too," she said instead. "I'll notice something — a color, a smell — and I'll have this reflex to share it, and then I remember there's no one there who knows what it's connected to. No one who has the context." A pause. "It's different from loneliness. It's more like — speaking a language and being the only one who knows it."
Kaito looked at her.
The light was going now, the sky above the river moving through its evening colors — the amber and the soft grey and the particular shade of blue that came in just before dark that he had never found a name for. The water caught all of it imperfectly. The child had been gathered up by her parents and was being carried back the way they came, reaching over her father's shoulder toward something only she could see.
"We should find the ship records," he said. "Properly. There may be a manifest. If your name is on one of them—"
"Then I have a last name," she said. "A real one."
"Yes."
She looked at him for a moment in the falling light. There was something in her expression that he couldn't precisely read, and he had the instinct not to try too hard.
"Kaito," she said. It was the first time she had used his given name. It sounded different in her voice than it did in his own head, which was a strange thing to notice but he noticed it anyway. "Thank you. For — this. For taking it seriously."
"It's a serious thing."
"Most people treated it like a curiosity. Something unusual that had happened to an unusual person." She turned back toward the water. "You treat it like it matters."
"It does matter."
She didn't say anything after that. The river moved. The last of the light finished its work and let the dark come in. Somewhere behind them the two elderly women were still on their bench, still sharing whatever they had wrapped in paper, in no particular hurry to be anywhere else.
—
He walked her to the train station.
They didn't talk much on the way back — not because there was nothing to say, but because the silence had become comfortable enough to walk inside without effort. He had not noticed it becoming that way. It had simply arrived, the way evenings do, gradually and then all at once.
At the station entrance she stopped and turned.
"Same time Thursday?" she said.
He had not suggested Thursday. She had said it as though it were already decided, which perhaps it was.
"Same time Thursday," he said.
She nodded. Moved to go. Then paused once more — she had a habit of that, he was beginning to notice, a rhythm of almost-leaving and then thinking of one more thing.
"The freesia on the counter," she said. "What does it mean? The flower."
He looked at her.
He knew the answer. He had known it for twenty years, because his mother had taught him hanakotoba the way other parents taught their children nursery rhymes — early and thoroughly and without explanation of why it mattered. The white freesia meant innocence. Trust. The specific kind of sweetness that had not yet learned to protect itself.
"It means you can rely on someone," he said. Which was also true.
Nagisa looked at him for a moment. Then she smiled — the third smile, and the most unguarded of the three — and went through the gate without another word.
Kaito stood outside the station until the sound of the train faded. Then he put his hands in his pockets and started walking back.
The freesia would need water in the morning.
— End of Chapter Two —