Finding Hayashi Ryō took four days.
This was not because he was hidden or unreachable but because Nagisa wanted to do it carefully, and carefully took time. She had said this on the Tuesday after Shirogane, sitting on the stool in Haruiro with her coffee, turning the problem over in the way she turned everything over — unhurried, thorough, from every angle before settling on the one that felt right.
"He spent years thinking I was gone," she said. "I can't just — call. Or show up at a door." She looked at her coffee. "He needs warning. He needs time to receive the news before he has to receive me."
Kaito thought she was right. He also thought that the person who had spent years searching and had eventually, exhaustedly, stopped would probably not find any method of being told she was alive entirely easy. But she was right that a letter was better than a phone call and a phone call was better than a door. You gave someone the smallest possible shock first. You worked up.
"A letter," he said.
"A letter," she agreed.
Then she sat with it for two more days, which he understood without needing it explained. There were things that needed thinking before writing. There were things that needed to be true on the inside before they could be true on the page.
—
He found the address through the records connected to the Shirogane building — Fujimoto-san had remembered the name of the company where Ryō had worked at the time, had offered it with the generosity of someone who had decided this whole situation deserved all the help it could get. From the company it was a matter of patient searching through public professional directories, a name that eventually resolved into a current address in Setagaya ward.
He told Nagisa and she wrote it down on a small piece of paper and held it the same way she had held the folded drawing on the first day she walked into the shop.
"He's still in Tokyo," she said.
"Yes."
"He stayed." A pause. "That says something about a person, doesn't it. Staying in the same city."
Kaito watched her face. There was something moving behind it that he didn't entirely know how to read — something careful, and complicated, and not his to interpret. Ryō was a friend she couldn't remember, which was its own specific kind of grief. The grief of a blank where a person should be.
"It might say several things," he said. "We don't know which yet."
She nodded, accepting the correction. "Not yet."
—
She wrote the letter at the back table in Haruiro on a Thursday morning, two hours before they had planned to go anywhere. He had given her the space and gone about the opening routine — water, arrangement, the chalkboard, the sign — and when he came back to check on the kettle he could see her through the doorway, bent over the paper with the focused stillness of someone trying to get something exactly right.
He set a cup of tea near her elbow without interrupting.
She looked up briefly. "Thank you."
He went back to the front.
The shop had its Thursday customers — a regular who came for chrysanthemums without fail, a young man who spent a long time selecting something for someone and eventually chose badly, in Kaito's private assessment, but the choice was his to make. A delivery. A question about seasonal availability. The ordinary work of a flower shop, turning around the extraordinary thing happening in the back room.
He found himself straightening things that were already straight.
When she came through the door from the back she was holding the letter in both hands.
"Will you read it?" she said. "Tell me if it's too much. Or not enough."
He dried his hands on a cloth and took it.
She had written it by hand, which he had not expected and which immediately made sense. The handwriting was small and careful, the letters formed with the deliberateness of someone who had once had to relearn writing entirely and had since made it precise out of hard-earned habit.
—
Hayashi-san,
My name is Tachibana Nagisa. I understand if that name is difficult to read. I am alive and in good health, and I have been in Japan this whole time. I am sorry that no one found a way to tell you sooner.
I lost my memory in the accident. I have spent the last five years recovering and recently trying to find out who I was before. I found your name through a neighbour who remembered you coming to look for me, and who spoke of you kindly.
I don't know what we were to each other. My memory of the time before the accident has not returned, and I want to be honest about that rather than pretend otherwise. But I know that you searched for me when you didn't have to, and that you kept searching for a long time, and that matters to me even without the context I cannot yet access.
I don't have expectations of you. I know that time has passed and that you have had to make your own peace with things. I only wanted you to know that I am alive, because it seemed wrong for you to carry the other version of events when the true one existed.
If you would like to meet, I would welcome that. If you would rather not, I understand completely. Either way, I hope you are well.
Tachibana Nagisa
—
He read it twice. Then he folded it back along its creases and handed it to her.
"It's right," he said.
She exhaled. "You're sure? It's not—"
"It's honest. It doesn't ask for anything. It gives him every option." He paused. "It sounds like you."
She looked at him for a moment. "You've known me for five weeks."
"Yes."
Something moved through her expression — not quite a smile but close enough to one that it functioned the same way. "Okay," she said. She looked down at the letter. "Okay."
She sealed it before she could think about it more.
—
She sent it that afternoon. He walked with her to the post office because she asked him to, and he stood beside her while she bought the envelope and copied the Setagaya address in her careful handwriting and stood at the slot for a moment, the letter between her fingers, before letting it drop.
It disappeared.
They walked out into the afternoon — early June now, the air carrying the first real warmth of the season, the kind of day that asked nothing of you except to be in it. The street was busy in that pleasant mid-afternoon way, unhurried, the city in its between-time.
"Now we wait," she said.
"Now we wait."
She was quiet for a stretch of street. He walked beside her and the afternoon moved around them without urgency.
"My parents," she said. "I've been thinking. That's — the other letter." She paused. "That one is harder."
He had been thinking the same thing and had not said so, not wanting to place it on her before she arrived at it herself. "Yes."
"Writing to a friend you don't remember is one kind of thing." She was watching the pavement ahead. "Writing to your parents who think you're dead is—" She stopped. Let out a breath. "I keep starting it in my head and I don't know where to begin. There's no version that isn't a shock."
"No."
"Maybe a phone call. For them." She thought about it. "Actually hearing my voice. That might be — I don't know. Is that better or worse."
"I don't know either. I think you're the only one who can decide that."
She looked sideways at him. "That's an unhelpful answer."
"It's the only honest one."
She made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost. "Fair."
They walked past a florist — not Haruiro, a different one, larger, less personal, the kind that kept everything in refrigerated glass cases. Nagisa glanced at it as they passed and then looked at him.
"Yours is better," she said.
"It's not mine."
"You know what I mean."
He did. He just didn't know what to do with it, so he looked ahead at the street.
—
They ended up at the river as evening came in, which by now required no discussion. The water was high from recent rain, moving with more purpose than usual, and the two elderly women were absent from their bench — replaced tonight by a young couple sitting close together, the girl's head on the boy's shoulder, the boy's arm around her in the unthinking way of people who had forgotten the gesture was a gesture.
Kaito looked at the river.
"Can I ask you something?" Nagisa said.
"Yes."
"The insomnia. The drives to the coast." She was looking ahead, not at him, which made it easier for both of them. "Was it about your parents?"
He considered the question. The honest answer was yes and also more than that and also he had spent four years being imprecise about it even in his own head.
"Partly," he said.
"And the other part?"
He looked at the water. A piece of something — a leaf, a wrapper — moved past quickly in the current, carried without asking where it was going.
"I think I was waiting for something," he said. "Without knowing what it was. The shop was there and I was there and the days were very similar to each other and I—" He paused. "The coast was the only place where I felt like the horizon was big enough. Like there was room for whatever was supposed to happen next."
She was quiet for a moment.
"And then I was there," she said. Not with vanity — just fitting a piece into a shape she was trying to understand.
"And then you were there."
She seemed to think about this. He let her. Around them the evening continued its unhurried work — the light changing, the water moving, the young couple on the bench existing in their own quiet world.
"I don't believe in fate," she said eventually. "I've had too many things happen by accident to believe anything is arranged. But I do think—" She stopped. Tried again. "I think some people are made of the same material as each other. Like tuning forks. When they're near each other they resonate, even if neither of them is making any sound."
He looked at her.
She was still watching the river, her hair moving slightly in the warm June air, her hands in her lap. She said things like that — these precise, sideways, quietly enormous things — and then continued as though she had merely commented on the weather.
He didn't say anything.
There was nothing that needed to be said.
—
The reply from Ryō came on a Wednesday.
Nagisa called him — not a Tuesday, not a Thursday, a Wednesday, which had never happened before, which was how he knew before answering that something had shifted.
"He wrote back," she said.
"Already?"
"He must have replied the day he received it." A pause in which he could hear her trying to keep her voice level and mostly succeeding. "He wants to meet. He said—" She stopped. He heard paper moving, her reading directly. "He said he had not believed for a long time that a letter like this could exist. And then it did."
Kaito stood in the back of the shop with the kettle in his hand and looked at nothing in particular.
"That's good," he said. "That's a good response."
"Yes." Another pause. "Will you come? When I meet him." A beat, then quickly: "You don't have to. I know it's not — I know he's not your—"
"Yes," Kaito said. Straightforwardly, before she could finish finding reasons it was an imposition. "Of course."
The pause this time was different. Softer.
"Thank you," she said. "I'll — thank you."
After they hung up he stood in the back room for a moment longer than necessary, the kettle still in his hand, the shop quietly doing its flower shop things around him.
He was glad she had called. He was glad she wanted him there. He was also aware, in the way that you become aware of a sound only after it has been going for a while, that gladness had stopped being a simple thing somewhere in the last five weeks. That it had developed weight and complexity and a particular ache at the edges that he did not have a clean name for and had been, with moderate success, not examining too closely.
He set the kettle down.
He went back to the front.
The freesia on the counter needed water. He gave it water. Then he stood in the morning light of his parents' shop with the sound of the street coming in through the gaps around the door, and he thought about tuning forks, and resonance, and the specific quality of a silence that two people made together when they had stopped needing to fill it.
Then he picked up the scissors and got back to work.
— End of Chapter Five —