you?”
“Then say that. Tell me you’re frightened. Tell me you need time. But don’t tell me everything is fine when it isn’t.”
Kenji nodded slowly.
“I can do that.”
“You will have to do more than agree today.”
“I know.”
For the first time since discovering the locked room, Yuki felt some of the tension leave her shoulders.
The secret had not revealed a second marriage, a hidden fortune, or a calculated scheme.
It had revealed something more ordinary and, in its own way, more difficult: a man who had learned how to survive loss but had not learned how to let another person stand beside him while he remembered it.
Their marriage had nearly been damaged not by the past itself, but by the fear that the past could not be spoken aloud.
That evening, they ate dinner together.
The conversation was quieter than usual. They did not
