The izakaya was warm.
Warm with the comfort of cheap alcohol, loud with the voices of satisfied men, full of noise that meant nothing and everything at once. The clatter of skewers being set down. The hiss of another round being poured. Laughter spilling across tables.
Hiro sat with his tie loosened and his jacket slung over the back of his chair, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, people were looking at him like he'd done something worth celebrating.
"To Hiro," Tanaka said, raising his glass so high that beer sloshed over the rim. "Youngest department head this branch has seen in a decade. The man who actually reads the reports before the meeting."
"Terrifying," Okuda agreed solemnly. "Absolutely terrifying man."
Hiro laughed.
It was the easy laugh that came as naturally as breathing. He had gotten so good at it that sometimes he forgot it wasn't real.
He clinked his glass against theirs.
This was fine.
This was good, even.
A win was a win, and it had been a long time since he'd let himself hold one without immediately setting it back down.
That was when the girl hit him.
She came out of nowhere, laughing at something on her boyfriend's phone, her hip catching the edge of the table hard enough to send Hiro's glass sliding.
Beer splashed across his sleeve.
"Ah!"
She gasped and dropped into a crouch before he'd even fully registered what had happened, grabbing napkins and dabbing frantically at his cuff.
"Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I wasn't looking. Are you okay? Is it hot?"
"It's alright," Hiro said, rubbing the back of his head and smiling.
The smile.
"Just beer. I'll live."
Her boyfriend was already fishing for his wallet, apologizing with the exaggerated responsibility of a young man trying to look responsible in front of his girlfriend.
"Let us get your next round. Seriously."
"No, no. Don't worry about it." Hiro waved him off. "Go enjoy your night."
They bowed, apologized one more time each, and drifted off toward a booth near the window.
Tanaka watched them go, already shaking his head.
"Kids these days. No spatial awareness. Too busy staring at each other to watch where they're walking."
"Careful," Okuda said, grinning into his glass. "You're just jealous. Remember when we used to look at our wives like that?"
"I do look at my wife like that. Right before she asks why I'm home so late again."
The table dissolved into laughter.
Hiro laughed too.
A half-beat behind everyone else.
His eyes had drifted to the booth by the window.
The boyfriend reached over without thinking, the kind of gesture that came naturally with young love, and brushed a single grain of rice from the corner of the girl's mouth.
He ate it off his own finger like it was nothing.
She laughed, mortified, swatting at his arm.
The tips of her ears, visible beneath her pink hair, went pink too.
Something in Hiro's chest ached.
Not sharply.
Not enough to make him wince.
Just enough to remind him that it was there.
Her ears went pink like that too.
That was the whole reason they named her Sakura. Her mother used to say she blushed so easily as a baby that her ears turned the color of cherry blossoms.
I used to tease her about it.
I used to—
"Hiro. Oi. Earth to department head."
He blinked.
Okuda was waving a hand in front of his face, grinning, oblivious.
"Sorry," Hiro said.
He picked his glass back up and did not look at the booth again for the rest of the night.
"What were you saying?"
He didn't hear the answer.
He nodded in the right places anyway.
He was good at that too.
They said their goodbyes at the ticket gates an hour later, voices too loud in the mostly empty station, filled with the warmth of men who drank together partly so they didn't have to talk about anything real.
"You good to get home?" Tanaka asked, already swaying slightly.
"I'll walk. Sober up a bit."
He watched them disappear through the turnstiles.
Then he turned the other way and started walking, hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, his tie hanging loose and forgotten around his neck.
The city thinned out block by block.
The noise of the bar district faded into shuttered shopfronts, a lone vending machine humming on a corner like it was keeping itself company.
His breath fogged faintly in the cold.
His reflection slid across dark windows as he passed.
A tired man in a good suit.
He thought, not for the first time, that he looked exactly like what he was supposed to be.
Successful.
Composed.
Fine.
It was a good disguise.
He'd had thirteen years to perfect it.
The apartment greeted him with silence.
Not the silence of an empty house.
The silence of a hollow one.
A single pair of sneakers sat by the door, toes pointed neatly toward the wall.
She must have forgotten to take them.
On the shoe rack, a small yellow sticky note sat in handwriting he would have known blind.
Even now.
Even after everything.
Miso in the fridge. Don't let it go bad again.
He almost smiled.
Almost.
He moved through the apartment, turning on lights room by room, and each one revealed a little more of the strange half-life they'd built here.
Clean.
Orderly.
And somehow entirely bereft of warmth.
Two toothbrushes stood on the bathroom counter in their cups, looking like they belonged to strangers who happened to share plumbing.
He paused in the doorway and breathed in without meaning to.
Her shampoo.
Still faint in the steam-damp air, hours old but not entirely gone.
He closed his eyes.
It still smells like her.
Every night I come home to a house that smells like she was just here. Like I missed her by minutes.
Like if I'd just come home a little earlier—
He opened his eyes.
Wiped the thought away like condensation from a window.
Then he kept walking.
He passed a door near the end of the hall.
There was no name on it anymore.
There hadn't been for years.
Just two small nail holes where a wooden sign used to hang.
Hand-painted.
Two names in a child's careful hiragana.
A sliver of hallway light fell across the door and stopped there, as though even the light knew not to go any further.
Hiro didn't touch the handle.
He couldn't.
In the living room, he peeled off his beer-stained jacket and fed it into the washing machine, more out of habit than care, then started it running.
In the kitchen, he pulled a pack of instant ramen from the cabinet and set water to boil.
He moved through the motions on autopilot.
A welcome distraction from the hollowness of the apartment.
On the coffee table sat a game controller beside a console left on standby.
Hers, clearly, judging by the save file glowing faintly on the paused screen.
SAKURA.
He ate his ramen standing at the counter.
Then, finally, he dropped onto the couch, picked up the controller, and pressed continue almost without deciding to.
The game loaded.
And somewhere behind his eyes, uninvited, a memory surfaced.
He was sixteen.
The window was cracked open exactly the width he always left it.
Sakura was climbing through it before her feet had even found the floor, controller already snatched from his desk, grinning like she'd won something simply by getting there first.
"You said you'd wait for me!"
"You said you'd use the door like a normal person!" he'd said, flustered, hiding the smile that came anyway.
Then the door had burst open.
His mother was already mid-scold before she was fully inside the room, and Sakura had laughed so hard she'd nearly dropped the controller.
None of them had known yet.
None of them could have possibly known how many years they had left before—
Hiro blinked.
The memory dissolved as quickly as it had come, leaving only the hum of the console and the low blue light of the paused screen.
He set the controller down harder than he meant to.
It clattered against the table.
He sat there for a moment, breathing.
Then he got up.
Grabbed his coat from the hook.
And went back out into the cold.
The grocery store at this hour was fluorescent-lit and nearly empty, filled with a quiet that made every footstep sound louder than it should.
Hiro moved through the aisles slowly, picking things up almost at random.
Vegetables he wasn't sure he'd use.
A cut of meat.
Ginger.
Scallions.
He passed the sake shelf and stopped despite himself.
There it was.
The bottle she used to like.
Plain white label.
A crane on the front.
His hand hovered.
She doesn't drink that anymore.
She doesn't do a lot of things anymore.
He put it in the basket anyway.
Back home, he cooked properly this time.
Knife against cutting board.
A steady rhythm.
Steam curling from the pan.
The domestic, unhurried version of himself that no one from the office would recognize.
For a few minutes, hands busy and mind quiet, he almost felt like a person again instead of a performance of one.
Then the door pinged.
He froze.
Knife still in hand.
The lock clicked.
The door slid open.
Sakura stepped inside.
And stopped dead the moment she saw him standing at the stove, apron on, dinner half-plated behind him.
Genuine shock crossed her face.
Unprotected.
Unplanned.
There for exactly one second before she caught it and put it away again.
This wasn't supposed to happen.
He wasn't supposed to be awake.
He never was.
She looked different tonight.
More different than usual.
It took him a moment to understand why.
Her hair was cut short now, cropped at the jaw, nothing like the long ponytail he still pictured without meaning to.
Two small silver piercings glinted in one ear.
New.
Her ring finger was bare.
It had been for a while now, but every time he noticed it, it caught somewhere in his chest, like touching a bruise he'd forgotten was there.
She carried her old dream bag, the big canvas one she'd used since her playing days, packed full and slung heavily over one shoulder.
She smelled like sweat.
Beneath it, faint and familiar, was her perfume.
"Welcome home," he said.
He smiled.Too easily.The smile doing all the work his voice couldn't.A beat passed.
MShe ran a hand through her short hair, eyes sliding away from him.
"...Yeah."
Her voice was quiet.
"I'm back."
That was all.She didn't wait for anything more.She walked straight past him.Past the food.Past the small offered warmth of the kitchen.Into the bathroom.
The door shut.
Water began to run.Hiro stood there with the spatula still in his hand.
Slowly, the smile slid off his face.
The way it always did when there was no one left to perform it for.
She looked at me for two seconds and it was already too much.
His eyes drifted down the hall.
Toward the door that used to belong to their children.
The one he never touched.Something small and stupid rose inside him.
Hope.
Maybe tonight he'd knock.
Maybe tonight he'd say, I made dinner. Come eat while it's warm.
Maybe tonight would be different simply because he wanted it to be.
He took one step.
Stopped.
His hand curled at his side.Fear won.It always won.He was used to it now.He lived in it.Just weather.Just the climate he lived in.
Instead, he plated the food carefully.
Set it on the table.
Grabbed a sticky note from the drawer.
He wrote something short.
Dinner's out. Still warm.
He pressed it to her door.
Then retreated to the sink and started washing the pan.
She emerged some time later, a towel wrapped around her head, wearing pajamas he'd never seen before.
Soft.
Worn-in.
Unmistakably hers.
Chosen without any thought of him.
She saw the plate.
Saw the note.Picked up the food without a word.Then disappeared back into her room.
The door didn't slam.
Exactly.
But it didn't close gently either.Hiro flinched at the sound anyway.He kept washing dishes he didn't need to wash.
A few minutes later, her door opened again.
She padded out, towel still damp around her hair, and came straight to the sink beside him.
"Move," she said, not looking at him. "You'll chip them."
He stepped aside without a word.
She took over the washing.
And somehow, without either of them deciding it, a towel ended up in his hands.
He fell into drying.
Plates.
Bowls.
The small clink of ceramic being set down.
Neither of them looked at the other.
Their bodies remembered what their hearts had forgotten.Thirteen years married, and this is what's left of us.Washing dishes in silence like roommates who used to be something else.They worked like that for a while.
Long enough that the silence stopped being awkward and became another texture in the apartment.
Like the smell of her shampoo.
Like the note on the shoe rack.
Like the closed door at the end of the hallway.
"Your hair's too long." She said suddenly.
Hiro glanced at her.
She continued rinsing a plate.
"It's getting in your eyes."
That was it.
That was all she gave him.
She dried her hands, tossed the towel over the oven handle, and walked into the living room without waiting to see what he'd do with that.She dropped onto the couch.Picked up the controller he'd abandoned earlier.The game flickered back to life.Blue light washed over her face.
Unreadable.
Hiro lingered in the kitchen doorway a moment too long, watching her, cataloguing the shape of her in the television glow the way he still did sometimes.
Helplessly.
Like a man checking a wound was still there.
She noticed my hair.
That's something.
That's—
That has to be something.
"Goodnight," he said.
He put a little cheerfulness into it.Enough to make it sound normal.She didn't answer.
Only the soft, steady click of buttons beneath her thumbs.
He watched her for a moment longer than he should have.Then turned.
Walked down the hallway toward his room.
As always, he passed the door with no name on it.
Two small nail holes.
A strip of darkness beneath the frame.A silence neither of them had ever learned how to cross.His door closed behind him.
Down the hall, the television glow flickered on alone, lighting up a room that used to be full.A room that was now, like so much else in that apartment, simply occupied.