The dinner rush had thinned. Two tables remained occupied — an older man reading a newspaper at the counter, and a group of four near the back who were lingering over their drinks. Hiroto was wiping down a cleared table near the window when Yuki appeared beside him with her own cloth and began on the adjacent one.
They worked in silence for a moment.
"You did okay," she said. Not looking at him. Still wiping.
"I got the order wrong twice."
"Everyone does on the first night. You stopped apologizing for it, which is the important part." A pause. "Ogawa-san hates over-apologizing. Says it slows everything down."
"I'll remember that."
She glanced at him then — brief, sidelong — and something in her expression shifted almost imperceptibly. Not quite amusement. Something adjacent to it.
"You're from around here?"
"Yeah. Grew up here."
"School?"
"Yukihara Second. Third year."
She nodded once. No follow-up. She did not fill silences the way most people did — with noise, with pleasantries, with the reflexive machinery of small talk. The silence between them was simply silence, which Hiroto found, to his mild surprise, comfortable.
He finished the table and straightened up.
"What about you?" he asked. He wasn't sure why.
"What about me?"
"Are you from here?"
She folded her cloth neatly.
"No," she said. "I came here two years ago. For reasons." She said the last two words with a particular flatness that made clear they were a door she was not currently opening. Then she picked up her cloth and moved toward the counter. "Last table needs clearing. Window seats."
He went to the window table.
Outside, through the glass, the street was dark and wet. The rain had started again sometime in the last hour — he hadn't noticed — and now the streetlight above the entrance made the wet pavement glow in a thin, amber strip. The water on the glass ran in slow lines.
Hiroto stood at the window table and looked out at the rain and felt something he couldn't name settle faintly in his chest. Not the hollow ache he'd been carrying for two years. Something different. Smaller. Warmer.
He didn't examine it. He just noted it was there, the way you note a light on in a house you'd thought was empty, and moved on.