They met Hayashi Ryō on a Sunday, at a café in Sangenjaya that he had suggested and that turned out to be the kind of place that had been there for decades and knew it — dark wood, unhurried staff, windows that looked out onto a covered shopping street busy with afternoon people. A good choice, Kaito thought, when they arrived. Neutral enough to be safe. Comfortable enough to allow for a long conversation. The choice of someone who had thought about this carefully.
Nagisa had been quiet on the train. Not the heavy silence of Shirogane, not the comfortable silence of their usual evenings — something in between, a silence with a slight current running through it. She had worn the pale grey coat again. He had noticed this and not said anything about it.
They arrived five minutes early and were shown to a table near the window. Nagisa sat facing the door. Kaito sat across from her and watched her watch the entrance and tried to be a calm and unobtrusive presence, which was the only useful thing he could be right now.
"What if I don't feel anything?" she said. "When I see him."
"Then you don't. That's allowed."
"He came all this way—"
"He came because he wanted to. Not to be felt something at." He paused. "Stop managing his experience before he's even here."
She looked at him. Then something released slightly in her shoulders. "You're right."
"I know."
"That was smug."
"A little."
The corner of her mouth moved. It wasn't quite a smile but it was the thing just before one, and it was enough.
—
Hayashi Ryō arrived at two minutes past the hour.
He was tall, with the kind of build that suggested he had once been more athletic and had since settled into something quieter. His hair was slightly longer than tidy, and there was something around his eyes — a quality of watchfulness, of a person who had spent time looking for things and had not entirely stopped — that was immediately recognizable as the person Fujimoto-san had described. The pale was gone, mostly. But the watchfulness remained.
He saw Nagisa before he reached the table.
He stopped walking.
Just for a moment — three seconds, perhaps four — he simply stood in the middle of the café and looked at her with the expression of a man receiving something he had spent a long time not letting himself want. Then he collected himself and came the rest of the way to the table, and Kaito had the impression of someone who had learned, through considerable practice, how to carry large things without letting them show.
"Tachibana-san," he said.
"Hayashi-san." Nagisa stood. For a moment neither of them seemed sure what to do with the formality they had defaulted to — whether to stay inside it or step out of it. Then Ryō bowed, and she bowed, and the formality held, and somehow that was the right choice. It gave them both somewhere to put their hands.
He sat. He looked at Kaito with an expression that was polite and also clearly processing.
"Miyamoto Kaito," Kaito said, and explained briefly — the coast, the morning, the flower shop. Ryō listened to the whole of it and then bowed his head slightly.
"Thank you," he said. It was two words that he meant in a way that most people didn't manage with sentences.
—
The coffee came and the conversation found its footing slowly, which was appropriate. This was not the kind of meeting that arrived at ease quickly. It arrived at ease the way the tide came in — gradually, measurably, until at some point you looked down and everything was covered.
Ryō asked about her health first, about the recovery, about the years of not knowing. He asked carefully, with the precision of someone who had thought about what he was allowed to ask and had stayed within it. Nagisa answered honestly, in the same clear way she answered everything, and Kaito watched Ryō listening to her with a quality of attention that was unmistakably the attention of someone for whom this voice was not new, even across five years and an enormous silence.
He knew how she talked. That was visible. He was not adjusting to her; he was recognising her, which was a different thing entirely.
"You seem—" Ryō paused, searching for the word honestly. "The same," he said. "Which I know sounds strange given everything. But the way you — the way you explain things. The order you put them in." He shook his head slightly. "It's the same."
Nagisa looked at him with a careful expression. "I don't remember you," she said. Directly, because that was how she was. "I want to be clear about that. It isn't — I'm not holding something back. There's simply nothing there yet."
"I know," he said. "Your letter said so." A pause. "I appreciated that you said it plainly."
"It seemed kinder than pretending."
"It was." He looked at his coffee. "I had — I had prepared for several versions of today. I didn't know which one I was walking into." He looked up. "This version is better than most of them."
Something in his expression when he said it — a specific quality of restraint, of a man choosing his words with enormous care because the unedited version was too large for this table — made Kaito look away. At the window. At the covered street outside, the Sunday afternoon moving through it unhurried, people with bags and children and no awareness of what was happening inside this café.
He felt, for the first time, acutely aware of where he was sitting.
—
An hour passed. Then most of another.
Ryō talked about the search — the early months when he had been certain she would be found, the later months when certainty had curdled into something grimmer, the point at which the official search had ended and he had continued on his own. He talked about it factually, without performing the suffering it had clearly cost him, which Kaito recognised as the same quality Nagisa had when she talked about the years of not knowing. Two people who had processed their respective losses thoroughly enough that they could discuss them without bleeding.
He told her small things about before. A restaurant she had always ordered the same thing at. An argument they had once had about directions that had turned into a long walk that turned into something better. A habit she had of reading the last page of a book first, which he had found maddening.
At the last one Nagisa sat up slightly. "I still do that," she said.
Ryō went very still.
"I thought it was something I had developed," she said. "After. The doctors said some habits persist even through memory loss. Basic personality structures." She looked at him. "You knew that about me."
"Yes," he said. Quietly.
"What else did you know?"
He looked at her for a long moment. There was something happening behind his eyes that Kaito couldn't fully read and had the instinct not to try too hard. Then Ryō reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and placed something on the table between them.
A photograph. Small, slightly worn at one corner. Two people — a younger Nagisa, unmistakably, her hair longer, laughing at something outside the frame. And beside her, a younger Ryō, not looking at the camera but at her, with the uncomplicated and total attention of a person who has no idea they are being photographed because they are not thinking about anything except the person next to them.
Nagisa picked it up. Looked at it for a long time.
Kaito looked at it too. He looked at young Ryō's face in the photograph, at the angle of that attention, at the specific quality of it — and something shifted very quietly in his chest. The way a floorboard shifts when you step on it unexpectedly in the dark. You were not hurt. But you know the house differently now.
"We look happy," Nagisa said.
"We were," Ryō said. Simply.
The photograph sat on the table between them.
Outside the café, the Sunday afternoon continued in its ordinary way, entire and unconcerned. A child pressed her face against the window glass from the outside, fogging it, and was pulled away by a parent. The staff moved between tables with the practised rhythm of people who had done this ten thousand times. The coffee cooled.
Kaito excused himself to find the bathroom, which he did not need, but which gave him a reason to stand up and cross the room and stand in a narrow corridor for ninety seconds doing nothing, looking at a framed print of indeterminate subject matter on the wall, breathing.
He was fine.
He was completely fine.
He went back to the table.
—
When they left the café the three of them stood on the covered street for a moment in the way of people who have shared something large and are not quite sure how to close the parenthesis around it.
Ryō looked at Nagisa with the expression he had been carefully managing for two hours.
"Can I—" He paused. "Would it be alright to meet again? I'm not asking for anything specific. I know this is—" He stopped. Tried again with the honesty that seemed to be his native mode. "I spent a long time not knowing if you were alive. Now I know you are. I would simply like to be allowed to know that on a continuing basis, if that's possible."
Nagisa looked at him. "Yes," she said. "I'd like that."
He exhaled. A small, controlled exhale, barely visible. "Good." He bowed to them both. To Kaito he said, again: "Thank you. For finding her."
"She found herself," Kaito said. "I just helped with the records."
Ryō looked at him for a moment — a measuring look, not unfriendly, the look of a person cataloguing something they have not decided what to make of yet. Then he nodded, and said goodbye, and walked away down the covered street until the crowd took him.
Nagisa watched him go.
"He's kind," she said. "Isn't he."
"Yes," Kaito said.
"I can't remember him at all and he's—" She stopped. "He's clearly a very kind person."
"Yes."
She turned away from the direction he had gone and looked at Kaito. Her expression was open and slightly searching, the way it got when she was working through something complex and had not reached a conclusion yet.
"Are you alright?" she said.
He looked at her. The covered street moved around them, the afternoon doing its Sunday things.
"I'm glad it went well," he said. Which was true.
She held his gaze for a moment in the particular way she had — steady and unhurried, not asking him to be anything other than what he was.
"Okay," she said.
—
They walked to the station together, and he was very careful not to think about the photograph, and the angle of a young man's attention, and the specific word that Ryō had used when he said they had been happy.
Were.
Past tense.
He told himself that past tense was the only tense available to a person in Ryō's position. That it was the only honest grammar for a five-year absence. He told himself this on the train back, and again while unlocking the shop, and once more while watering the freesia in the dark before he went upstairs.
The freesia didn't need watering. He had watered it that morning.
He watered it anyway.
— End of Chapter Six —