Chapter Eight Lies
Chapter Eight
Lies
Keishin was not in the habit of lying, but today, half kneeling in the back room of a strange little pawnshop, in the company of its wounded owner, he made an exception. The woman whose bleeding foot was now resting on his knee would not have accepted his help otherwise. He steadied his hand, hovering a tweezer over the shard of glass stuck in her heel. “I’m going to pull it out now. Try not to move, okay?”
The woman nodded, her back stiff against the chair. “Thank you.”
“I haven’t done anything yet.”
She looked up at him. “You stayed.”
“I thought you didn’t want me here.”
“I don’t. What one wants and needs are two very different things.”
Keishin quirked a brow and wrestled it down. In a morning filled with the unusual, this woman was the most extraordinary of it all. There was a calmness in the way she spoke, a steadiness he did not expect from a person in her circumstances. Her large brown eyes mirrored her quiet composure, filled with something he had long desired for himself.
An absolute certainty of purpose.
He did not know as of yet what this purpose might be, only that this question would gnaw at him until he found the answer to it.
“Hold still.” He pulled the piece of glass out in one smooth motion. “Got it.”
The woman exhaled.
Keishin dabbed at the wound with a clean cloth soaked in alcohol and bandaged it. “How does it feel?”
“Much better. Thank you.” The woman stood up and packed away the medicine kit into a small basket. She paused, her eyes fixed on a gap between two amber bottles. Her forehead creased.
“Is something wrong?”
“No.” She smoothed her brow before meeting his eyes. “Thank you for your help.”
“It was the least I could do. You wouldn’t have stepped on glass if I hadn’t startled you. Are you sure that you don’t want to call the police?”
“Yes.”
“Why not?”
“They…cannot help me.”
Keishin glanced around the room and lowered his voice. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“I am grateful for your concern and for helping me with my foot, Minatozaki-san, but—”
“Please, call me Kei.”
“Kei…” The woman said his name quietly and slowly as though buying time to consider what she was going to say next. “You should not be here. It is not safe.”
“Not safe? Then you shouldn’t be here either. Is there somewhere I can take you? Do you have family you can stay with? Friends?”
“Please just go.”
“You can’t expect me to just walk out and leave you here, do you? Were you robbed? Do you know who did this?”
“I know that you mean well, but if you insist on getting answers…” The woman folded her arms over her chest. “I will be forced to lie to you.”
“Look, whatever you say won’t change what I can see right in front of me. I know that something terrible happened here,” Keishin said. “But go ahead and lie if you want to. It’s only fair.”
“Fair?”
“Because I lied to you too.”
The woman backed away from him. “About what?”
“Who I really am.”