Episode 1

> **Dear Kaito,**

>

> It rained again last night. Not the kind of rain that crashes down, but the kind that lingers—soft, insistent, as if the sky couldn’t decide whether to cry or simply hover on the edge of it. I opened the window anyway. Let the damp crawl in. Let it settle into the pages of the book I wasn’t reading, the one left open on the kotatsu like a forgotten thought.

>

> I think I saw someone today who looked like you.

>

> Same coat—dark, wool, slightly too long in the sleeves. Same way of holding an umbrella just low enough to shadow the eyes. He turned the corner near Nishiki Market, and for a second, my breath caught. I almost called out. But I didn’t. I don’t even know if I’d recognize your voice now.

>

> Two years is a long time to love a ghost.

>

> I started restoring a diary yesterday. Nineteenth century. A woman wrote to her husband every day while he was at sea. She never mailed them. She tucked them between the pages of a poetry book. When they found it after her death, the ink had blurred in places—water damage, they said. But I think it was tears.

>

> I wonder if she, too, believed that silence was a kind of faith.

>

> I still have your scarf. The grey one, frayed at one end where you caught it on a train door. I keep it in the bottom drawer, wrapped in tissue paper like something sacred. I wear it when the archive is cold. Not because I miss you.

>

> (I miss you.)

>

> But I won’t send this.

>

> Again,

> Emi

---

The ink dried slowly.

Emi set the pen down beside the notebook, its metal weight cool against the wood. She didn’t reread it. She never did. To read it again would be to invite doubt, and doubt was the enemy of ritual.

Outside, the first light of morning pressed through the paper screen, pale and hesitant. Rain still fell, tapping the roof in uneven rhythm—like a message in code she no longer knew how to break.

She closed the notebook. Not with force, but with care, as though it might sigh if handled too roughly. Then she slid it into the left drawer of her desk, the one that stuck unless you hit it just right. She tapped it twice—once to close, once to seal—and turned on the lamp.

The room was small: a low table, a kotatsu half-hidden under a faded quilt, a single shelf of books in no order. No photographs. No postcards. Nothing to say, *I was loved. I left. I remember.*

Only the letters.

She lit a stick of incense—*sakaki*, the kind used in shrines—and sat cross-legged on the floor, watching the smoke curl toward the ceiling like a question without an answer.

In Tokyo, you used to say, *“If you don’t speak it, it doesn’t exist.”*

But here, in this quiet house in Kyoto, the opposite feels true.

The things I never say are the ones that live the longest.

She exhaled.

And for the first time that day, allowed herself to feel it—the hollow beneath her ribs, the one shaped exactly like your name.

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