CHAPTER 25 #2
I told her. There was a full second of dead air, and then Yumi screamed, an actual scream, delighted and unfiltered, loud enough that I had to hold the phone away from my ear while Kenji laughed out loud, a real one.
“I'm going to be an obasan,” Yumi said, half-crying already. “Imouto, I am coming over the second I finish this client call. Don't argue with me.”
“I wouldn't dream of it,” I said, and meant it.
Riko was already in the kitchen doorway by the time I hung up, drying hands that didn't need drying, because Kenji must have told her while I was catching my breath from Yumi.
She didn't say anything in either language for a moment.
She just pressed both hands to her mouth, her eyes going bright and overflowing all at once, and she crossed the tea room faster than I'd ever seen her move and folded me into her small, fierce arms.
“Musume,” she said into my shoulder, the word she'd called me once before, in a doorway in Hakone with her own arm freshly bandaged. Daughter. She said it three more times before she let me go, and each time it came out wetter than the last.
Daisuke arrived within the hour, because Kenji had texted him one line and Daisuke Mori had never once been able to sit through good news any better than he could sit through bad.
He came through the genkan already smiling, and when he reached the tea room he did something I'd never once seen him do.
He bowed to me, low and formal, both hands at his sides, the same bow he probably gave men twice his rank.
Then he straightened, grinned like the boy Riko swore he'd always been underneath the suits, and pulled me into a hug that lifted me half off my feet.
“Congratulations,” he said into my hair, and then, quieter, just for me, “Uncle Daisuke is going to spoil this child rotten. Fair warning.”
Hiro came up last, quiet as always, standing a step back near the genkan as he always did, like the edge of the room was his natural post. He didn't hug me.
He didn't smile in any way I could point to.
He just looked at me, and then at Kenji, and then back at me, and said, in careful, precise English, “Congratulations, sister.”
It was the first full sentence he'd said to me in months.
My eyes went hot all over again, and I crossed the room before I'd decided to and hugged him anyway, quick, before he could weigh whether to allow it.
For one whole second his arms actually started to lift, like he might hug me back after all.
Then old habit won, and he went stiff as a post instead, patting my shoulder twice like he was putting out a small fire.
But he didn't step back. That was new. That was almost everything.
The tea room smelled like Riko's kettle and too much happiness for one small room to hold.
By mid-afternoon the house had emptied back out around us.
Yumi was already texting a list of names Kenji vetoed one by one.
Daisuke had gone back to whatever quiet architecture he was building out of his boss's old empire.
Riko was humming something in the kitchen that might have been a lullaby forty years early.
Kenji asked if I wanted to see the blossoms properly instead of just watching them fall past a window.
We went to Ueno.
The park was full the particular way it only gets for two weeks a year, blue tarps spread under every tree, whole office departments already three drinks into a Tuesday afternoon, petals coming down thick enough that they caught in my hair before I'd walked twenty feet under the canopy.
Kenji held my hand the whole way down the main path, which he almost never did in public, an old habit more than any real shame about it, a lifetime of a man who never handed strangers anything to grab onto.
Today he didn't seem to care who saw. We bought dango from a stall by the pond, sweet soy glaze catching the last of the sun, and I ate mine walking, which Kenji found faintly scandalous no matter how many months I'd lived here.
“Riko wants a boy,” I said, watching a little girl chase a falling petal near the pond. “She hasn't said it, but she keeps buying blue things for the guest room.”
“Yumi wants a girl. She already has three names picked out, and none of them are hers to pick.”
“We don't even know which one we're getting yet.”
“No,” he agreed. “We don't know anything yet. Not the name. Not whether it will have your stubbornness or my patience, though I suspect we both already know which is more likely.” A petal landed in my hair, and he left it there instead of brushing it away.
“We will decide as it arrives. All of it. One piece at a time.”
“Even the hard parts?” I asked.
“Especially those,” he said. “I have found I am good at very little else lately.”