Part 1 — Eight Years Old
The lecture had been going for twenty minutes.
Minami Tsukasa knew this because she had looked at the clock twenty minutes ago and had not looked at it since. Professor Adachi was saying something about market structures. The whiteboard had a diagram. The students around her were taking notes with varying degrees of investment.
She was not taking notes.
She was eight years old, and it was summer, and there was a boy under a tree.
My name is Minami Tsukasa.
I grew up in an apartment on the east side of the city with two parents who loved me very much and were almost never home. They came home tired most nights — the good tired of people doing what they'd decided to do, but tired. Dinner was often reheated. Bedtime was often before they got back.
I was their only child. I was also, for long stretches of most days, alone.
I didn't mind, exactly. I had books. I had the small balcony where I'd sit and watch the street below with the focused attention of a child who has learned to make company out of observation. I knew the neighbourhood's schedules by heart — the woman who watered her plants at seven AM, the old man who walked his dog at exactly four thirty, the children from the building across the street who played in the courtyard until their mothers called them in.
I watched from the balcony.
I didn't go down.
I didn't know how to go down.
He was sitting under the large tree at the edge of the park.
A boy, roughly my age. Always alone. Always under that tree, with the particular stillness of a child who had gotten used to their own company and stopped expecting it to change.
He had a sad smile.
Not performing sadness — just the smile of someone who had found something small to be pleased about in the middle of something larger that wasn't. I recognised it. I had made that smile in mirrors.
I went down.
I don't know why. Something about the specific quality of that stillness — the way he sat under the tree like he had no plans to be anywhere else because anywhere else had nothing for him — made me put on my shoes and go through the building entrance and across the street.
I stood in front of him.
He looked up.
"Do you want to play?" I said.
He looked at me for a moment with the serious consideration of a child making an important decision.
"Okay," he said.
His name was Kaito.
He had dark hair and calm eyes and he laughed at things I said in a way that felt different from polite — like I had actually said something worth laughing at.
He was an orphan. I learned this in pieces, the way children learn things about each other, without fully understanding what it meant. No parents mentioned. No home described in detail. A vagueness about his daily life that I didn't probe because I was eight and the present tense of playing with someone felt like enough.
We played every day that summer.
When my mother asked who I'd been with I said: "A friend."
She smiled — the tired, genuine, relieved smile of a parent who had been quietly worried about the only-child stillness. "That's wonderful, Tsukasa."
It was wonderful.
It was the most wonderful summer I had.
I asked him one afternoon, lying in the grass under the tree, watching clouds:
"When we grow up — will you marry me?"
I was eight. The question had the absolute, uncomplicated weight of things that matter completely before you understand what they cost.
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he smiled — not the sad one. The other one. The one I had only seen a few times, the one that reached his eyes and changed everything in his face.
"Okay," he said.
Like it was simple. Like it was already decided.
I was so happy I couldn't speak for a full minute, which was unusual for me.
Then one day he didn't come.
I waited under the tree. He didn't come the next day either.
He's sick, I thought. He'll be better soon. Tomorrow, probably tomorrow.
Tomorrow became a week. A week became two. Two weeks became the end of summer and the beginning of school and the slow, arriving understanding that something had changed in a way I didn't have the language for yet.
I never found out what happened.
I looked for him the way an eight-year-old looks for someone — checking the park every day for a month, walking past the places we'd been, waiting under the tree until my mother called me in.
He never came back.
I grew up.
Boys noticed me.
The honest version: I developed early and obviously, and the boys around me treated it as an open topic requiring their commentary. Classmates in middle school who discussed my body like a public object. High school boys who decided my face was an invitation. The slow, grinding education of existing in a world that had looked at the ratio and concluded girls should be grateful for attention of any kind.
I learned to keep my hair forward.
I learned to make myself smaller.
I learned to move through spaces quietly so the least number of people would find reasons to look.
But somewhere underneath all of it — underneath the hair and the cardigan and the careful invisibility — I kept something small and specific.
The memory of a summer.
A boy under a tree.
Okay, he said. Like it was simple.
I came to Nishioka telling myself I had let it go.
I had done a reasonable job of believing this.
And then on a Wednesday morning in the enrollment queue, a boy with dark hair and calm eyes had walked through the main gate and the world had done something strange and I had stood very still and thought:
That face.
That's the face.
The name I already knew.
The bell rang.
Minami surfaced.
The lecture was over. Around her the room was transitioning — bags, phones, the sounds of people returning to their own days. Professor Adachi was erasing the whiteboard.
She looked at the seat beside her.
He was already standing. Jacket on, bag over one shoulder.
She had been preparing for this moment in the background of every lecture for two days — what to say, how to say it, what she needed from him before she could properly breathe.
She opened her mouth.
"Umm—"
"Kaito."
The voice came from the doorway.