CHAPTER 25
Naomi
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The sencha tasted wrong that morning, a thin metallic note where the green should have been, and I held the cup in both hands anyway and watched the steam curl toward the window.
Cherry blossoms had taken over the branch outside the tea room glass sometime in the last four days, the way they always do in this city, all at once, like spring had been holding its breath since November and finally let it go.
Every time the wind moved through the branch, a few petals came loose and drifted past the glass, pink against the black towers of Roppongi.
Miso occupied the heated window ledge beneath it, one paw hanging over the edge and his tail laid across a stack of translation notes I still needed.
He had arrived three weeks earlier after months of forms, blood tests, waiting, and video calls in which he had treated my face on a screen as a personal insult.
His first night in Tokyo, he had hidden behind the bath cabinet for four hours.
His second, he had slept on Kenji's black suit jacket.
By the third morning he had established that Riko belonged to him, Hiro was suspicious, and the oyabun of Kurokawa-kai existed primarily to open doors and provide heated places to sleep.
Kenji claimed not to mind. This was difficult to believe when I had caught him at two in the morning carrying Miso away from a security monitor with both hands under the cat's stomach, explaining in formal Japanese that no, he could not sit on the alarm panel.
The red sencha tin sat on the shelf above my desk now, beside the aquarium photograph and the journals that had crossed the ocean after me.
I had opened it that morning for the first time since Cambridge.
The leaves inside were new; the tin was not.
My thumb still found its old dent without looking.
Not everything had become gentle because I was happy.
I still woke hard when a hallway bulb flickered.
I still checked a locked door twice on bad nights, and some weeks the therapy appointment left me too raw to speak until dinner.
Kenji drove me when I asked, waited downstairs, and never once requested a report.
In January, after a doctor answered every practical question and after Kenji and I had the same conversation three separate times to be certain neither of us was borrowing the other's certainty, we stopped preventing a pregnancy.
There had been no debt on that clock, no command, no deadline.
Only a decision we made together and were free to change.
Miso raised his head when the nausea tightened through me. He blinked, jumped down with the heavy confidence of a creature who had never doubted gravity would cooperate, and crossed the tatami to press his forehead against my knee.
“You know something, don't you?” I murmured.
He climbed into my lap, stepped directly on the place I had begun protecting without thought, and settled there purring. I moved him two inches higher and accepted his offended look as the first judgment our child would ever receive from family.
My mother's jade ring sat plain and familiar on my right hand.
These days, looking at it didn't mean fear anymore.
Then I looked at my left hand instead. The slim jade band Kenji had set on the tatami in front of me in Hakone.
The gold one underneath it that he'd slid onto my finger in a small quiet hall, in front of Yumi and Daisuke and Hiro and Riko, while I cried through every word of my own vows.
Behind me the tea room held its usual morning quiet, Riko's kettle ticking as it cooled, traffic humming faint and steady from the street far below, sunlight warming a stripe across the tatami by my knee.
The nausea rolled in low and familiar, the way it had for four mornings running, and I set the cup down before I trusted my stomach with more of it.
I smiled anyway. Some part of me had worked out exactly what that metal taste meant after the second morning.
The rest of me had just been waiting to feel steady enough to say it out loud without my voice breaking on the first word.
I had counted on my own fingers three separate times already.
Eight weeks, maybe nine. Once, eight weeks had been the threat timetable Kenji confused with the timetable of my freedom—until he understood, opened the door, and let me choose.
Now the number meant something small and stubborn growing quietly under my heart, and I liked its meaning much better this time.
Kenji had left before seven, suit pressed, the Grand Seiko catching the light at his wrist the way it always did, for a meeting with the last of the Amsterdam group.
The same hotel outside Kyoto I'd spent a week putting into English precise enough that no lawyer in the Netherlands could find a hole in it, months ago now.
The sale was closing today. Six months of legitimate paperwork laid carefully over illegitimate history, one contract at a time. He'd promised to be home by noon.
I spent the quiet house on my own recipe for once.
Rice glossy in the cooker, a good fillet of salmon from the market downstairs, a small pot of dashi I'd finally learned to make from Riko without a single lump of miso left unstirred.
I carried everything through to the tea room instead of the kitchen counter, because some meals called for tatami under my knees and the low black table instead of stools, and because the chipped kintsugi bowl that had been Kenji's mother's still sat exactly where I'd first noticed it six months ago, gold seams catching the afternoon light.
It felt like the right table for what I was about to tell him.
He came through the genkan a little after noon, calling something to Riko in the kitchen before his shoes were even off, and I heard the particular quiet of him crossing the tatami toward me a moment later, measured, the way he moved through every room in this penthouse like he already knew it would be standing there waiting for him.
He'd shed his jacket somewhere between the entry and here, sleeves already turned back once at each wrist, and he crossed the last of the distance and kissed my forehead before he'd even looked at the table. Then he looked at the table.
“You cooked,” he said.
“I cooked.”
“Without supervision.”
“Riko was in the next room the entire time,” I said. “Technically supervised.”
“Technically.” The corner of his mouth moved, the small private thing he still did instead of a real smile most days, though I'd learned to read it as one anyway.
He folded himself down across from me at the low table, knees settling easy against the tatami after a lifetime of practice.
“The first time you cooked without her standing guard, the rice was memorable for reasons I chose not to mention at the time.”
“That was one bad batch.”
“It was heroic of me not to mention it.”
“You're mentioning it now.”
“I waited months,” he said. “I consider that restraint.”
We ate slowly, the way we did most lunches now that no one needed either of us to hurry through anything.
Steam came up off the miso between us. Outside the window another gust took a fresh scatter of petals off the branch, and I watched them fall instead of looking at him, because I'd rehearsed this a dozen times already, in the shower, in the elevator, once under my breath in this very tea room when I thought no one was listening, and every version had started the same way.
“Kenji,” I said.
He looked up from his bowl right away, as he always did when I used his name like that, like the single word had already told him something was coming.
“Watashitachi ni akachan ga dekita,” I said. We're having a baby. The words did not shake, though I had braced for them to. Then, because I needed him to hear it plainly in the language that left no room for softening: “I'm pregnant.”
He didn't move for a long moment. His chopsticks hung half raised, a piece of salmon caught between them, and then he set them down against the rim of the bowl, carefully, the way he set down everything that mattered to him.
He looked at me. He kept looking at me, one breath, then another, long enough that I felt my own heart start tripping over itself waiting for him.
Then he stood, came around the low table, and knelt beside me. His left palm settled carefully over my stomach, the shortened little finger making the familiar line of his hand unmistakably his. My body had not changed shape yet; nothing visible had happened. He closed his eyes.
He didn't speak. For a long moment the only sound in the tea room was the wind working through the cherry branch outside, and Riko's kettle ticking somewhere down the hall, and my own pulse loud enough that I was sure he could feel it under his palm.
Then he opened his eyes, and he pulled me down out of my chair and into his lap on the tatami, both arms wrapped clean around me, his forehead dropping into my hair.
I felt him breathe out, one long breath that shook slightly on its way, which from Kenji Tatsuya was the same as another man sobbing outright.
“Arigatou,” he said, into my hair. Thank you.
I laughed, and then I was crying, both at once, badly, and I turned in his lap and kissed him, salt and rice and the particular warmth of him, and he kissed me back like I'd handed him something he'd stopped letting himself want a long time ago.
We told Yumi first, because Kenji said she'd never forgive either of us if she heard it secondhand. He dialed and set the phone on the table between us.
Yumi picked up before the second ring finished. “Tell me you're both alive, because Riko texted me one word an hour ago and then went silent, and I have spent that entire hour imagining things.”
“We are alive,” Kenji said. “Naomi has something to tell you.”