Episode 5

> **Dear Kaito,**

> Tokyo called today.

> Not you. Never you.

> Just your city—cold, bureaucratic, indifferent—reaching across two years and three hundred kilometers to tug at a loose thread. The National Archive. Something about a manuscript I cataloged back when I still lived in your world. They want confirmation. A signature. A memory.

> I haven’t called back.

> I don’t know if I will.

> What if they ask for my address? My phone number? What if someone types my name into a database and finds me—here, in Kyoto, in this quiet house with the bamboo grove and the drawer full of unsent letters?

> What if *you* find out I’m still writing to you?

> I know you won’t care.

> That’s the worst part.

> But still.

> I can’t.

> Not yet.

> Maybe not ever.

> And then there’s Rina.

> She found a letter. Read a line. Maybe two. Then gave it back without a word. I should hate her for it. Or at least be angry. But I’m not. I’m… afraid.

> Because she looked at me like she *knew*. Not the facts—your name, our history, the way you used to hum when you made coffee—but the shape of the wound. The way it lives inside me, quiet and deep, like a buried wire.

> Do I want to be known like that?

> I thought I didn’t.

> I built this life on silence. On solitude. On the belief that if I didn’t speak, I couldn’t be hurt.

> But last night, when she said, *“You don’t have to be alone,”* something in me cracked.

> Not wide. Just enough to let in a sliver of light.

> And light, Kaito, is dangerous.

> It shows you what you’ve been hiding from.

> I told her you were no one important.

> It was the easiest lie.

> But it felt like a betrayal—not of you, but of *us*.

> Of the way you used to trace the outline of my hand while we lay in bed, like you were memorizing it.

> Of the way you said my name when you thought I was asleep.

> Of the way you played that unnamed piece when the rain fell, like it was a prayer.

> You were important.

> You *are*.

> And I left because I was terrified that if I stayed, I’d become nothing but the space between your breaths.

> But now I wonder—did I disappear anyway?

> Sometimes I look in the mirror and don’t recognize myself.

> This woman in the grey sweater, who speaks in polite fragments, who restores other people’s memories while burying her own—

> is she me?

> Or is she just the ghost I built to survive losing you?

> I still won’t call Tokyo.

> I still won’t send this.

> But I wrote it.

> And Rina knows.

> And the truth is starting to leak out,

> like ink through thin paper.

> Again,

> Emi

---

She stopped writing just before dawn.

The candle had burned out. The room was cold. She hadn’t noticed.

She sat back, hands in her lap, staring at the page. The ink was dark, the lines uneven—some rushed, some hesitant, like footsteps in snow. She didn’t try to cover it. Didn’t fold the paper or hide it. Just left it there, open, exposed.

For the first time, she didn’t slide the notebook into the drawer.

She left it on the desk.

Where someone could see it.

Where *she* could see it.

She rose, went to the window. Opened it. The air was sharp with morning—clean, damp, alive. A single sparrow hopped across the wet stones of the garden. Haru’s broom leaned against the wall, untouched.

She thought of Rina.

Of the way she’d stood in the archive, clipboard held like a shield.

Of how she’d said, *“You don’t have to be alone.”*

As if loneliness were a choice.

As if she could just *step out* of it.

But it wasn’t that simple.

Loneliness wasn’t the absence of people.

It was the presence of a love you couldn’t speak.

A name you couldn’t call.

A city you couldn’t return to.

She touched the scarf in her pocket.

Still there.