2. Sophia #2
“We don’t know that something hasn’t.” My voice stays even.
It takes everything I have. “And we are sitting in this house, and every morning I walk to that castle, and I sit on that bench, and I count the days, and I talk to him in my head like that does something, like he can hear me, like—” I stop.
Press my lips together hard. “I need you to tell me what you actually think. Not the protocol. Not the reassurance. What Ian thinks. Right now. In this kitchen. With no one listening.”
He’s quiet for a long time. Long enough that I hear the neighbor’s car start somewhere down the street and pull away into the morning, and the garden settle into its late summer stillness, and the tap begin its thirty seconds and stop.
“I think,” Ian says slowly, “that whatever happened didn’t go the way it was supposed to.”
The words land softly. I absorb them the way you absorb something you already knew—not as a shock but as a confirmation, the thing you’ve been carrying finally being named out loud and given its real shape.
“And Valeria?”
His jaw tightens. “I don’t know.”
“Do you think she has him?”
“Sophia—”
“Ian.” I hold his gaze. “Do you think she has him?”
Something crosses his face. Raw and unguarded for one undefended second—real fear, the kind that lives underneath all the capability and all the competence and all the careful management, the fear of a man who loves someone and cannot reach them—before he gets it back under control.
He breathes out slowly through his nose.
“I think,” he says, “that Reth is the most capable person I have ever known. And I think that whatever is happening right now—” He stops.
Tries again. His voice is very quiet. “He knows where you are. He will get to you. Whatever it takes, whatever state he’s in, whatever she’s done—he will get to you.
That’s not me performing okayness at you.
That’s not the protocol. That’s just—” He exhales.
“I know him. I’ve known him for years. And that part I’m certain of. ”
I look at him for a long moment. At this man who has held me together for three weeks with sarcasm and routine.
Who has made rice in the mornings and gone for runs he doesn’t need and invented reasons to leave the house so I can cry in private and comes back like he didn’t know.
Who has been terrified, quietly, without letting me carry any of it.
Who has gotten into bed with me when the nightmares come.
They started again on day three. The waking up, violent and gasping, the disorientation of an unfamiliar ceiling and the wrong quality of dark, and then Ian already there, sitting on the edge of the mattress with his hand on my shoulder saying You’re in Joetsu, you’re in the house, breathe.
The same low, unhurried tone he used in Paris.
In Greece. The tone of someone who has done this enough times that it lives in his body now, automatic, the way you reach for a light switch in a dark room without thinking.
He’s trying so hard to hide his worry from me, hoping it’ll settle my fears. But for the last few days he’s been struggling to hide the cracks.
“You’re terrified,” I say quietly.
He doesn’t answer. Which is its own answer. And I want to cross the kitchen and put my arms around him the way you do for someone who’s been holding something too heavy for too long, but I don’t, because Ian would fold it back and redirect and make a joke, and some kindnesses aren’t actually kind.
The silence stretches between us, honest and tired.
Then Ian straightens. Uncrosses his arms. And the performance slides back into place, but softer now—less armor and more him, just Ian, choosing to keep going because stopping isn’t something either of them can afford.
“Right,” he says. “Here’s what I think we should do today.”
I blink. “What?”
“I think we should go find a matsuri.”
“A—what?”
“Festival. It’s late summer, and there’s always something on.
We’ll eat things on sticks, you can watch me embarrass myself at whatever game involves throwing rings at bottles, I’ll buy you something horrifyingly touristy, and for approximately four hours we will behave like two completely normal people visiting Japan and not like—” he gestures vaguely at the kitchen, at the weight sitting in it, at both of us, at three weeks of fear wearing the costume of routine “—this.”
I stare at him. “You want to go to a festival?”
“I want to go to a festival.”
“While Reth is—”
“While we are waiting for Reth,” he says, and there’s something firm and almost fierce underneath the lightness.
“Losing our minds in this house is not going to make him appear any faster. And frankly, Sophia, you’ve walked to that castle twenty-one consecutive mornings, and I think the swans are starting to feel pressured.
” He raises his eyebrows. “Come on. Things on sticks. You need things on sticks.”
I look at him. Despite everything—the weight in my chest, the twenty-one days and the empty bench and the flowers that haven’t come—something almost like a laugh moves through me.
Small and involuntary and real, the kind that surprises you, the kind that feels almost like a betrayal of the grief and then doesn’t.
“That’s your solution,” I say. “Things on sticks?”
“I’ve solved problems with less.” He picks up his keys from the counter with the deliberate finality of someone who has made a decision and is not reopening it for discussion. “Get dressed. Wear something Japanese. I don’t know what that means, but I feel like you’ll figure it out.”
“Ian.”
“Sophia.”
“What if—”
“Get dressed.” His voice is gentle now. Stripped of everything except the truth of it. “Please.”
I look at him for one more moment—at the careful hope in his face, the exhaustion underneath it—and I nod and go get dressed.
We find a festival two towns over, a small local bon odori tucked between a parking lot and a shrine, paper lanterns strung in long amber rows between wooden posts, swaying in the last of the summer heat.
We smell it before we see it—yakitori smoke and sugar and something frying in hot oil—and Ian rolls down the car window like a dog on a road trip and says ‘there it is’ with such genuine satisfaction that something in me loosens, just slightly, like a knot finding the smallest amount of slack.
It’s not a grand festival. It’s not the kind of thing that makes travel guides. It’s a neighborhood affair, the kind that exists for the people who live there rather than the people who visit, and that makes it better—more real, less performance.
There are children in yukata chasing each other between the stalls. There’s a group of elderly women doing the bon odori dance in practiced, unhurried unison, their movements so familiar to each other they don’t need to look.
Ian buys us both yakitori within approximately four minutes of arriving, hands me a skewer with the ceremony of someone presenting something important and says “told you” before he’s even taken a bite.
“You’ve literally said nothing that this proves,” I tell him.
“I said things on sticks. These are things on sticks. I’m proven.”
He tries the ring toss. He fails, comprehensively, and then stands at the stall for an additional three minutes constructing a detailed case for structural rigging that involves the words coefficient of friction and consumer protection laws and the teenager running the game going from amused to confused to genuinely uncertain whether he should be taking notes.
I watch it happen and feel the laugh building in my chest and let it out, finally, small and real and aching slightly at the edges because laughter that arrives in the middle of fear always does.
“You lost,” I tell him, when he finally concedes.
“I was robbed. There’s a difference.”
He buys me a ceramic swan from a craft stall. Small, glazed white, with an expression of such profound and specific aggression that I laugh again when I see it, the real kind, the kind that comes from somewhere deep and surprised.
“His name is Gerald,” Ian says solemnly.
“You named him?”
“He came with a name. You can feel it.”
I hold Gerald the ceramic aggressive swan and watch the dancers move through their slow, practiced circles. The graceful, disciplined movements remind me of Reth—the way he moves like violence given perfect form, lethal and beautiful at once.
My chest tightens with missing him, with the phantom press of his hands on my hips, the way he’d pin me down and fuck me like the world could burn around us.
I let myself feel the full weight of it without pushing it down.
Because Ian is beside me eating his third stick of yakitori and pretending very hard that today is a normal day, and the least I can do is let him pretend.
Let this festival be what it is for four hours—paper lanterns and summer heat and the unique grace of people dancing a dance they’ve known their whole lives.
We drive back in the dark with the windows down, the warm late-summer air moving through the car smelling of fields and the faint residue of festival smoke.
Ian has the radio on low, something Japanese, and neither of us speaks.
The silence is different from the silence in the kitchen—looser, less weight-bearing.
He glances at me once, at a red light, and I look back, and whatever passes between us doesn’t need words.
It says I see you and I know and we’re still here and that’s enough. It’s enough for the drive home.