CHAPTER 23
Naomi
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The jade was cool against my finger when I woke, cooler than the rest of me, and I lay there a long moment just turning my hand in the thin morning light so I could watch it catch.
Outside the shoji screen a bird I couldn't name was arguing with itself in the pines.
Somewhere below, water moved over stone, a little mountain stream that had been running through this Hakone valley long before anyone built a house beside it.
I'd fallen asleep with my hand tucked under my cheek. I woke with it raised in front of my face instead, like I still couldn't quite believe it, and I hadn't stopped checking since.
It was a slim band, pale green where the light struck it, newer than the ring on my right hand—the one my mother had worn before me.
Two jade rings now. One from the woman I'd lost at twelve.
One from a man who, the day before, had walked into a warehouse with perfect calm and ended a war so I could keep wearing both.
I turned onto my side. Kenji was already awake, propped on one elbow, watching me study my own hand like it was the most interesting object in Kanagawa Prefecture.
“You have been doing that since five,” he said.
“Have I?”
“Since five ten.” He caught my hand before I could tuck it back against my chest out of some leftover reflex of shyness, and pressed his mouth once to the ring, right where it sat against my knuckle. “I like watching you do it.”
My throat went tight, the good kind of tight, the kind I was learning wasn't fear at all. “I keep thinking I'll open my eyes and it won't be there.”
“It will always be there. I checked the fit myself.” There was no performance in his voice at all, only plain certainty, and somehow that hit me harder than anything I'd ever read in translation.
I laughed, and it came out thick, and he didn't say anything about that either. He just laced his fingers through mine on the futon and let me keep the quiet as long as I needed it.
We ate breakfast late, just the two of us, while Riko rested and Hiro kept watch on a leg that had not fully healed. Afterward Kenji asked whether I wanted to walk. I said yes before he finished, because even a beautiful safehouse felt close by the third day.
The garden behind the safehouse was old and mossy, a stone lantern gone soft-edged with weather, a pond no bigger than my living room back in Cambridge had been. Orange and white koi moved beneath the surface like something being stirred slowly with a spoon.
“I have been thinking,” Kenji said, hands in his pockets at the edge of the water, “about the next ten years.”
“That's a big jump from breakfast.”
“I am not a small-jump man.” He crouched down to watch the koi circle.
“The syndicate. I want to move it out of the parts of itself I am not proud of. Slowly. Real estate first, we already own half of that honestly. Private security after, the legal kind. Some of my men will not want to follow me into that world. Some will.”
“How long?”
“Ten years. Maybe more.” He looked up at me. “I wanted you to know the real shape of it. The work, not the version that sounds good over breakfast.”
I sat down on the flat stone beside the pond and thought about that: a decade of him turning the thing that had kept me alive into something calm enough to raise a child inside. The thought slipped out before I'd decided to say it.
“I want kids,” I said. “Someday. If you do.”
He didn't answer right away. He came and sat beside me on the stone, close enough that our knees touched, and he was quiet long enough that I felt the stone's cold work all the way through my palms before he finally spoke.
“I do.” Two words, and his voice had gone rougher than it had been over breakfast, or the koi, or anything since the warehouse. “I did not let myself want that for six years. I am only finding out now how much I do.”
“Not tomorrow,” I said, because I could feel the size of it settling over both of us at once, and one of us had to say the practical thing first.
“Not tomorrow.” A small breath moved through him that was almost a laugh, and mine came right behind it, the same helpless almost-laugh, too big for a garden bench to hold.
“Deal.”
He took my left hand again, his thumb moving once over the new ring, and for a while neither of us said anything else. The koi kept circling. Somewhere in the pines, the bird that had been arguing with itself had finally gone quiet.
“There is something else,” he said. “Your work.”
“What about it?”
“I want you to build your own firm. Not favors for my clinic. Yours. Real hospitals, the kind that would pay for precision like yours and never need to know where you came from. Remote, from the penthouse or wherever you like. I have already spoken to two directors in Zurich and one in Boston who are not aware of my other business.”
I stared at him. “You already thought about this.”
“I thought about you,” he said, “for a long time before you knew I existed.”
I rested my head against his shoulder while the koi circled below us and thought: this is what it feels like to have a future instead of merely surviving toward one.
By the time we came back inside, Riko was up, arm in a pale blue sling, hair pinned, standing at the stove with the same stubborn set to her jaw that meant she'd already decided the argument was over before anyone started it.
“Riko-san, sit,” I said, going straight for the knife she was holding one-handed over the daikon.
She swatted at me with her good hand. “I am not made of glass.”
“You're made of one arm right now.”
She surrendered the knife, but only the knife.
She stayed at the counter directing me in small precise corrections, thinner here, on the diagonal there, more ginger than that, the same way she'd corrected me a dozen times since my first week in this kitchen, back when my knife work made her wince and she was too polite to say so out loud.
I did the cutting. She did the judging. Kenji sat at the counter pretending to read a folder and really watching both of us the whole time.
When the soup was done she tasted it off my spoon, closed her eyes, and gave one satisfied nod, like a teacher passing a favorite student.
“This will do us good,” she said, nodding at the pot. “Broth heals faster than any bandage.”
I didn't argue with her. I'd learned better.
“Good,” she said. “You have been paying attention.”
“I had a good teacher.”
She patted my cheek with her good hand, quick and warm, and didn't say anything else, because she didn't have to.
Daisuke arrived a little after noon and let himself in through the kitchen as he always did, dropping into the chair across from Kenji like a man who'd been driving since dawn, which he had.
“It's finished,” he said, no preamble. “Ryuzaki's remaining men met this morning. They're grateful, if you can believe that word out of their mouths. He was running that family into the ground and everyone under him knew it. No one is coming for revenge. No one even wants to.”
Kenji nodded once, the way he nodded at facts he'd already half expected. “And the territory.”
“Split, mostly to men who'll deal fairly with us. I'll have the real paperwork, and the paperwork we don't file, by next week.” Daisuke's eyes moved to me, and something in his face eased. “You look well, Naomi.”
“I'm getting there.”
“Good.” He looked back at Kenji, something almost sly crossing his mouth. “One more thing. There's a ryokan two towns over. Small, private, six rooms, the whole place bookable. I took the liberty of asking. Next weekend, if the two of you would like somewhere to remember that isn't a safehouse.”
Kenji looked at me before he answered anything, the way he did now, like my face was where his decisions actually lived.
“Yes,” I said, before he could. “God, yes.”
Daisuke laughed, a real one, the first I'd heard from him since the warehouse, and told Kenji he'd handle the booking, and helped himself to Riko's soup without asking, which she allowed only because it was Daisuke.
Yumi arrived just before the light went gold, having driven up from Tokyo the moment Daisuke told her it was safe to. She came through the door already talking, already half crying, and crossed the room to put both arms around me before I'd even gotten off the stool.
“I've been out of my mind,” she said into my hair. “Out of my mind, Naomi.”
“I'm okay. We're okay.”
She pulled back far enough to look at me, her hands gripping my shoulders, and her eyes went straight to my left hand like she'd been waiting all day for an excuse to look there. She made a small, wrecked sound.
“Nii-san.” She didn't look away from the ring. “You didn't tell me.”
“I am telling you now,” Kenji said, dry, from across the room, and Yumi laughed and cried at the same time, which I was starting to think ran in the family.
She kissed his cheek, hard, the way you'd swat someone you loved, then turned back to me and pulled me in again, softer this time.
“Imouto,” she murmured against my hair. Little sister. “You're my sister now. Do you understand that?”
I didn't trust my voice, so I only nodded against her shoulder, and she held on a moment longer before she let me go.
Dinner was loud in the good way. Riko directed traffic from her chair with her good arm.
Yumi told a story about Kenji at nineteen losing an argument with a bicycle.
Daisuke added details Kenji clearly wished he wouldn't. Partway through it Yumi caught my eye and mouthed something that might have been thank you, though I never found out for what, exactly, because Riko chose that moment to top off everyone's cup and the thread of it got lost in the toast. Kenji himself said very little.
He sat beside me with his hand resting easy on the back of my chair and watched the table the way a man watches something he built with his own hands finally standing up straight.
Yumi went to bed first, then Riko, the house going silent floor by floor until it was only us and the low sound of the stream outside.