They took the train on a Saturday.
It was Nagisa who suggested Saturday — a weekday felt wrong somehow, too ordinary for a thing this size, and she had said this plainly and he had agreed without needing it explained. He closed the shop for the day, which he had not done since his parents' funeral. He wrote a note on the chalkboard: Closed today. Back tomorrow. Then looked at it for a moment and erased it and wrote: Closed today. Back soon. Which was the same information, but felt different.
She was waiting at the station when he arrived. She had dressed carefully — not formally, but with the kind of attention that said this day was being taken seriously. A pale grey coat. Her hair down. She was holding her canned coffee and one for him and she handed it over without ceremony.
"Ready?" he said.
She looked at the train board for a moment. "No," she said. "Let's go."
—
Shirogane was a quiet residential neighbourhood in the way that expensive places often were — the streets clean and tree-lined, the buildings maintaining a certain understated quality, the overall impression being one of deliberate calm. It was a forty-minute train ride and then a short walk from the station, and Nagisa was silent almost the entire way there, which was not unusual except that this silence had a different texture than the comfortable silences they had developed over the past weeks. This one had weight.
He didn't try to fill it.
The address from the manifest led them to a mid-rise residential building, six floors, the exterior a pale sandstone colour that had weathered gracefully. There was a small garden at the entrance — trimmed precisely, a few early summer flowers managed by someone who knew what they were doing. A panel of intercoms beside the door. Clean concrete steps.
Nagisa stood on the pavement across the street and looked at it.
He stood beside her and looked at her looking at it.
"Does it feel like anything?" he asked, after a while.
She was quiet for a long moment. He watched her face moving through things — searching, maybe, or waiting for something to surface. The way you knock on a door and listen for movement on the other side.
"Nothing dramatic," she said finally. "It doesn't — unlock. I thought it might." She sounded neither surprised nor disappointed, as though she had prepared herself for both outcomes and was now simply receiving the actual one. "But it doesn't feel wrong either. It doesn't feel like a stranger's building."
"That's something."
"Yes." She crossed the street.
—
The apartment listed on the manifest was 4C.
They had discussed in advance what to do at this point, and the plan was simple: knock, introduce the situation honestly, ask if anyone remembered the previous occupant. It was a plan that could fail in any number of ways — the apartment could have changed hands several times in five years, the current occupant could have no interest in speaking with them, there could be nothing to find. Kaito had made sure she had accounted for all of these possibilities, and she had said yes, she had, and then she had said, "But we still have to knock," and he had said yes, that was correct.
They took the elevator. Pale, quiet, a small square mirror on the back wall. He watched her in the mirror and she was watching the floor numbers.
Fourth floor. The corridor was carpeted in a dark green that muffled their footsteps. 4A. 4B. 4C.
She knocked.
They waited.
Nothing.
She knocked again, and this time there was a sound from inside — movement, footsteps, a small pause at the door that suggested someone checking through the peephole. Then the door opened.
A woman in her fifties, reading glasses pushed up on her head, the look of someone interrupted mid-task but not unhappily so. She looked at Nagisa. Then at Kaito. Then back at Nagisa, and something changed in her expression.
"Oh," the woman said. And then, very quietly: "Oh my."
—
Her name was Fujimoto Keiko. She had lived in 4B for eleven years, directly across from 4C, which meant she had been there during everything. She invited them inside without being asked, with the urgency of a person who had been waiting for an occasion without knowing it, and made tea with the speed and single-mindedness of someone for whom tea-making under significant circumstances was a reflex.
"I knew it was you," she said, setting cups down. "You look exactly the same. A little older but — I knew immediately." She kept glancing at Nagisa with the slightly stunned expression of someone seeing a photograph come to life.
"You remember me," Nagisa said.
"You lived across the hall for two years. You used to leave little notes under my door when you made too much food — I still have one somewhere." She shook her head slowly. "When the police came. When they said you were missing from the ship. We couldn't—" She stopped. Composed herself. "There was a search. A long one. Your family—"
Nagisa was very still. "They're alive," she said. Not a question. A person receiving something they had not let themselves hope for.
Fujimoto-san looked at her with a specific kind of sadness — the sadness of someone about to give information that was real and true and also incomplete in ways that would require more sadness later.
"Your parents are in Kyoto," she said. "They moved back after everything. I think Tokyo became too difficult to stay in. They searched for a long time — your father especially. He came to this building more than once, just to stand outside. I didn't know what to say to him." She paused. "I don't know if they still— I haven't heard from them in over a year. But they were alive, last I knew. Very much so."
"Kyoto," Nagisa said. The word sat in the air between them like something fragile.
"You were close to them. That I remember clearly. You called your mother every Sunday without fail. She'd sometimes call back if you forgot and you'd apologize as though it were a serious offence." Fujimoto-san smiled at the memory, then caught herself. "The cruise was a graduation gift. From both of them. You had just finished your degree and they wanted to celebrate." She shook her head slowly. "They must have carried that ever since."
"Please keep going," Nagisa said quietly.
"You had been living here two years. You were very self-sufficient. Very—" She searched for the word. "Contained. You didn't trouble people. But you were kind. You remembered everyone's names. You learned that I didn't like the smell of certain flowers and you stopped bringing them when you cooked." A small, sad smile. "Little things."
Kaito watched Nagisa sitting across the table from this woman who was carefully constructing her for her, piece by piece, out of small remembered details. She was listening with the whole of herself — absolutely still, the way she went still when something was being handed to her that she needed to receive carefully.
"Was there anyone else?" Nagisa asked. "Anyone who looked for me. After."
Fujimoto-san's hands moved around her teacup.
"There was a young man," she said. "A friend of yours, I assumed. He came here several times in the months after. He had been trying to find you on his own before the official search ended. He was very — determined. Pale. The kind of pale that comes from not sleeping." She looked at the table. "I haven't seen him in perhaps two years. I think eventually he had to stop. You can't look for someone forever."
Nagisa said: "What was his name?"
"Hayashi. Hayashi Ryō." She tilted her head. "Do you remember him?"
Nagisa looked at the name as though it were a physical thing sitting on the table between them. "No," she said quietly. "Not yet."
—
They sat in a small café near Shirogane station afterward, because neither of them was ready for the train yet.
Nagisa had her coffee in both hands and was looking at the table in the way she looked at things when she was somewhere else inside her own head. Outside the café window the neighbourhood continued its Saturday — people passing, a child with a red balloon, two men arguing pleasantly about something outside a convenience store.
Kaito waited.
She was quiet for a long time. The coffee sat untouched between her palms.
"My parents are in Kyoto," she said finally. As though saying it aloud made it a different kind of real than hearing it had.
"Yes."
"They think I'm dead."
Kaito didn't correct that. It wasn't certain they thought that. But it was the most likely thing, after five years, after the searching had stopped, after the moving away. It was what a person arrived at eventually. "Probably," he said.
She absorbed this without expression. He watched it move through her the way weather moves through a landscape — you can see it coming from a distance and then it arrives and the whole shape of things changes.
"And this Ryō," she said. "She said he stopped two years ago. Because you can't look forever." She repeated the phrase evenly, without bitterness, the way you repeat something you are trying to understand from the inside. "A friend, she said. Someone who cared enough to keep looking on his own." A pause. "I don't remember him at all."
"Apparently not."
"That's a terrible thing to carry." She said it with a particular quality of feeling — not for herself, but outward, for all of them. For the father who stood outside an empty building. For the name she'd been handed, Hayashi Ryō, made of secondhand details and a neighbour's description of pale and determined and eventually, exhausted. "All of them carrying it. And I was just — here. The whole time."
Kaito held his coffee and said nothing. Outside, the child with the red balloon had let it go and was watching it rise with an expression that seemed unsure whether this was a tragedy or an adventure.
"We have to tell them," Nagisa said. "All of them. My parents. Ryō." She looked at him directly. "They deserve to know I'm alive. Whatever comes after that — that part at least is simple."
He looked at her.
"It's not simple," he said gently.
"I know." She held his gaze. "But it's right. And right and simple are close enough for now."
"Yes," he said.
She finally drank her coffee. Outside the balloon had become a red dot and then nothing, somewhere above the tree line and the rooftops and the specific, ordinary Saturday sky.
"Thank you," she said. "For coming today."
"Of course."
"I mean—" She looked at him. "I mean thank you for all of it. The records, the tide tables, the library tables. Closing the shop." She paused. "For taking me seriously when I was just a girl who walked into a flower shop."
He looked at her for a long moment in the afternoon light of a small café in a neighbourhood she had once called home and now had to learn all over again.
"You were never just that," he said.
She held his gaze for a moment. Then she looked down at her cup, and the small line between her brows softened, and outside the sky was perfectly ordinary and the balloon was gone and the street went on being the street.
—
On the train back, she fell asleep against his shoulder somewhere around the third stop.
He didn't move.
The train rocked through its stations, the evening coming in through the windows, the city unreeling in its lit and quiet way. Around them other passengers read and dozed and looked at their phones and existed in the particular private togetherness of train travel.
He looked straight ahead.
At the fifth stop she stirred slightly, and in that half-asleep way said something he almost didn't catch — three syllables, low and formless, not quite a word.
He thought it might have been his name.
He wasn't certain.
The train kept moving, steady and unhurried, carrying them both back through the dark toward the neighbourhood where the river ran and the flower shop waited with its freesia and its ceiling fan and the drawing on the counter that showed two figures, one reaching toward the other, in water that had long since gone still.
— End of Chapter Four —