CHAPTER 25 #3
I liked that better than any list. I liked that he wasn't handing me a plan already finished, the way he used to hand me folders full of decisions made on my behalf, back before he learned that wasn't what I wanted from him.
I liked that we were going to write this part together, badly and slowly, the same way we'd written everything else.
We walked until the light went gold and thin through the trees, and on the way back to the car I let myself take stock of how much had changed since the last time this city smelled like this.
My own small translation firm had three clients now, all of them hospitals, two of them in Europe, one of them a direct result of Lise Andersen telling colleagues in Copenhagen that she knew a translator in Tokyo worth paying well for precision.
I worked from the corner desk Kenji had bought me before I'd even asked for one.
Some afternoons I took on a single new consult call myself anyway, just to remember what my own voice sounded like doing work that used to be the only thing in my life that was entirely mine.
Daisuke had become, without either of us quite deciding it out loud, the architect of the whole legitimate side of Kurokawa-kai: real estate instead of routes, security contracts instead of protection money, a decade of careful work already underway in year one.
Kenji hadn't carried the Glock in months.
These days he carried a phone, and sometimes, when Hiro wasn't looking, he let me carry his coffee instead.
My father lived somewhere in Florida, in a small condo bought with whatever remained after Bell Corporation came apart along every seam Kenji had spent months loosening.
I had not spoken to him since that autumn phone call, and I did not intend to.
When I thought of him now—which happened less and less—I felt neither anger nor grief.
Only the clean quiet of a wound that had finished healing instead of merely closing over.
We got home as the sun went down orange over the black glass of the tower, and Kenji led me out onto the balcony instead of straight inside, his hands finding my waist from behind the way they did most evenings now, his palms settling low over my stomach like they already knew exactly where to be.
Tokyo spread out below us the way it had the very first night I stood in that elevator with my whole life in one suitcase, except none of it looked like a cage anymore. It looked like a view I got to keep.
“Are you happy?” Kenji asked, quiet, his mouth close to my ear.
“So happy I don't know what to do with it,” I said, and it was true in a way that left nothing over for exaggeration. “I keep waiting for it to feel like too much. It never does.”
He was quiet a moment, his hands flexing slightly against my stomach, and when he spoke again his voice had gone careful in the particular way it did right before he said something that mattered to him more than he'd ever admit first.
“Marry me,” he said. “Properly. In a courthouse. Next month.”
I turned in his arms to look at him. “We already did the part that mattered. In Hakone. In front of everyone we love.”
“I know.” His thumb found the gold band on my left hand and pressed there once.
“I would still like my name on paper beside yours.
I would like it undeniable, in every country, to any stranger who might ever ask.
I would like our child born into a marriage no government anywhere can pretend isn't real.”
I laughed, because it was such a precisely Kenji way to ask, practical wrapped tight around something enormous. “Yes,” I said. “Obviously yes.”
He kissed my forehead, as he did every day now, then gathered the particular silence that meant something important was coming.
“I want you to know something,” he said.
I waited.
“Watashi wa anata no soba de shinu,” he said, very quietly, each word set down like it cost him something to spend. I will die at your side.
I turned fully in his arms then, until I could see his whole face in the last of the orange light.
“Sonna hi wa mada zutto saki yo,” I told him. That day is still very far away.
He nodded once, like a debt acknowledged and set aside for later. Then he kissed me, slow and measured, the way he kissed me every single time now, except there was nothing left underneath it but certainty.
I looked past his shoulder at the sky, at the first blossoms of the season drifting past the black glass towers, like the whole city had been holding them back all winter just to hand them to us today.
I thought of a version of myself from six months ago, the one who wouldn't have believed a single hour of this if you'd shown it to her whole.
I came here as a debt. I stayed after he destroyed the claim, opened the door, and let the decision become mine. I am staying for the rest of my life because I chose him—and because, somewhere in these six months, he chose to become mine too.
The legal paperwork could wait a month. It didn't change what I already knew, standing there with his hands resting warm over the place where our child was going to grow. He was already my husband in every way that had ever mattered to either of us.
And then I turned back to my husband—my husband—and I kissed him in the last of the winter light and the first of the spring.