## Chapter 245 — Where the Year Begins Matsuda’s message arrived on the morning of New Year’s Eve while Thomas was deciding whether one bundle of spring onions represented preparation or evidence that he had begun preparing too much. **Are you free for one errand? I need someone capable of rejecting unnecessary food.** Thomas read it twice. The first sentence sounded ordinary. The second narrowed the likely task to a department-store basement, a family meal or an intervention that should have been directed toward Saitō instead. Isha stood beside the kitchen counter in her climbing-centre uniform, eating the last piece of grilled salmon from breakfast while checking the weather on her phone. Her final shift of the year ended shortly after noon. The centre had reduced its opening hours, though Yoshida had warned that customers who arrived on the last day often behaved as if the calendar had personally limited their climbing. Thomas told Isha that Matsuda wanted help with an errand and offered her the phone. She read the message, then returned it while reaching for her coat. “He asked you. He may want time with his friend without making it a group arrangement.” Thomas suggested that Matsuda might instead have concluded she was insufficiently committed to rejecting food. The observation was not entirely unserious, but Isha’s expression prevented him from using it to avoid the simpler point. “You are allowed to go without identifying what function the friendship serves first,” she said. Thomas looked again at Matsuda’s wording. Since waking, most contact from their university circle had arrived through pairs or groups: Matsuda and Kanno visiting the hospital, an alumni gathering, birthdays, lunch in 202. The slight alignment between the four of them had become obvious without requiring division. Kanno had already become someone Isha met without him. Matsuda’s message contained no reason to include anyone else. Thomas replied that he was free until mid-afternoon and asked where to meet. Matsuda sent the east entrance of Sendai Station and a time forty minutes away. As Isha put on her boots, she observed that the meeting allowed Thomas twenty-three minutes to classify the spring onions. He defended the purchase as preparation for the evening’s soba; she pointed out that he had bought two bundles, and his answer that one had been fresher did not improve the classification. Isha opened the door, then turned back long enough to kiss him. “Reject unnecessary food with courage.” The instruction followed Thomas down the stairs after her. --- Sendai Station had acquired the compressed movement of a city preparing to become private. Travellers stood beside suitcases large enough to carry several versions of the holiday. Department-store bags accumulated around family groups. Recorded announcements repeated platform changes, reserved-seat warnings and requests not to stop where everyone had already stopped. Matsuda waited beneath the clock with his dark hair arranged more carefully than the errand appeared to require. He wore a charcoal coat, glasses and the expression of someone who had arrived early enough to inspect every exit while denying that he had waited. No shopping bag accompanied him. Matsuda greeted him with enough relief to confirm that the food was genuinely at risk. “My mother said I should bring anything I like for tomorrow. She also said not to spend too much, not to bring too much, not to arrive empty-handed and not to choose anything everyone has already bought.” He turned toward the department store. “I require an interpretation that survives contact with a shop.” Thomas followed after accepting the seriousness of the situation. The lower food floor was warm, bright and crowded enough that every stall seemed to have developed its own queue. Lacquered boxes, grilled fish, rolled omelette, sweets, pickles and carefully arranged vegetables occupied displays whose order would not survive the day. Staff repeated greetings and stock warnings with professional stamina. Thomas had planned a modest meal for two and had still spent the previous afternoon moving items between a list headed *necessary* and another headed *tradition is not necessity*. He recognised the hazard. Thomas asked what was already being prepared. “My mother ordered most of the New Year food. My father will make soup and complain that the mochi was cut incorrectly. My sister is bringing fruit and has been excused from ambition.” Matsuda checked a message thread. “I was assigned one dish and something small for tea by a family consensus that no participant remembers forming.” Thomas considered the cases. The tea item could be bought. The dish should travel well, tolerate waiting and remain edible after other food had occupied everyone’s attention. Matsuda rejected anything requiring fish preparation, deep-frying or confidence with decorative cutting. Thomas rejected the boxed assortment Matsuda first selected because it contained enough sweets for a seminar rather than one family table. They settled upon a smaller box of bean-paste sweets whose individual wrapping would survive indecision after lunch. For the dish, Thomas suggested burdock and carrot cooked with sesame and soy: forgiving, suitable at room temperature and dependent more upon even cutting than rare skill. Matsuda regarded a display of prepared vegetables. “We could buy it.” Thomas agreed, then pointed out that Matsuda had rejected everything that looked as though it had arrived without evidence of his labour. “I did not say it had to contain evidence of my labour,” Matsuda said. “No,” Thomas replied, “but you appear to want it to.” The observation held Matsuda still for a moment. Around them, shoppers advanced in small negotiations over baskets and space. A child asked repeatedly whether a red sweet tasted red. The mother answered that colour was not a flavour and then bought it anyway. Matsuda moved toward the fresh-food floor. “I would prefer to make one thing.” Thomas followed without asking why. They chose two firm carrots, burdock, sesame seeds and the remaining ingredients Matsuda did not already possess. Thomas explained the useful size of the cuts, then stopped when the explanation began expanding toward pan temperature and moisture control. “You were invited to reject unnecessary food,” Matsuda said while Thomas explained the cut size. “The remit may include unnecessary instruction.” Thomas placed the sesame oil back after confirming Matsuda already had some. “Then keep one principle. The dish will remain edible if the pieces vary. Do not correct every difference until nothing finishes cooking.” “That sounds less culinary than intended,” Matsuda said, looking into the basket. Thomas waited. Matsuda’s tone had changed only slightly, but the errand no longer required enough attention to conceal it. They paid for the ingredients and left the food floor by a quieter corridor connecting the station buildings. Winter light entered through high glass, pale against tiled floors and the dark coats of people moving beneath it. Matsuda carried the bag in one hand. The sweets remained level inside Thomas’s smaller paper carrier because Matsuda had said that Thomas possessed the more trustworthy relationship with horizontal surfaces. “My employer has asked whether I will take a transfer to Tokyo in April,” Matsuda said. The sentence arrived without preparation, which was perhaps why the food had been necessary first. Thomas adjusted his pace rather than stopping in the corridor. “Temporary or permanent?” “Eighteen months initially. The position is better. The salary is somewhat better. They say I would probably return with broader responsibility, which means they have promised a possibility using enough words to avoid promising it.” “Do you have to answer immediately?” “After the holiday. I asked for time before agreeing, which caused everyone to speak as though I had already declined.” Matsuda’s mouth tightened. “My manager believes hesitation means I am insufficiently ambitious. My parents will believe accepting means I have decided Sendai is too small. My sister will ask whether the company pays moving costs and thereby become the only person discussing a fact.” Thomas recognised the shape from the office and refused to turn the station corridor into another consultation table. There were still questions that belonged around the edges: whether Matsuda would keep his current home, what the transfer actually changed, whether refusal damaged his prospects, what eighteen months meant to the relationships and routines he valued. None could determine whether he should go. “What makes the position better?” Thomas asked. “More responsibility, more visible work and access to projects that do not happen here. Those are the employer’s words, but I am not certain they are false.” Matsuda glanced at him. When Thomas asked what made staying better, the answer came more quickly. “My life is here. That sounds weak beside a position description. I mean my apartment, my parents close enough to visit without turning it into travel, people I see without planning a month in advance. This city is a size I understand. I have only recently stopped treating every weekend as time left over from work.” The last sentence carried more than the others. Thomas let several steps pass before speaking. “Are you worried that staying would be fear, or that going would be?” Thomas asked. “Both. Staying may mean I chose comfort because I dislike disruption. Going may mean I chose the more impressive sentence because refusing it felt like failure.” Matsuda adjusted the shopping bag around a family who had stopped across most of the corridor. “I thought saying it aloud might make one motive obviously dishonest. It has only allowed both motives to become more articulate.” Thomas understood the complaint. He had spent years constructing clear reasons around choices already made by fear, duty or love. Clarity could expose a motive. It could also make the motive more persuasive without making it more true. “Discomfort is not evidence that a choice is valuable,” he said. “Comfort is not evidence that it is cowardly. You may still decide that the work is worth moving for, or that the life here is worth limiting work for. But the more impressive description does not become the better life merely because it fits in an announcement.” Matsuda considered this beneath the station’s year-end advertisements, where every meal, journey and gift had acquired language about beginning properly. “That was less complicated than expected.” “I am not at work,” Thomas said. Matsuda reminded him that he had not asked the international-support office. “Then I should resist giving you a form.” Thomas found two temporarily unclaimed seats and suggested they sit before the sweets became a physical responsibility. “Do you know what information would actually change your decision?” Matsuda sat beside him, leaving the shopping bag between his shoes. The question moved him away from motives and toward facts without pretending facts would choose. He wanted to know whether the return to Sendai was real or merely likely, how much control he would have over housing, whether the Tokyo work would continue after eighteen months and what refusing meant for his current role. He had asked some of it and accepted vague answers because the offer had been framed as recognition. Thomas listened without producing headings. When Matsuda finished, he said, “Those questions belong to the employer. You do not owe them gratitude in place of details.” “I knew you would eventually become procedural.” “Only around the part procedure can answer.” Thomas folded the top of the sweets bag away from a passing coat. “The rest remains inconveniently yours.” Matsuda leaned back against the bench. His face relaxed by a small amount, not because the decision had become easier but because Thomas had declined to seize it. “The student was fortunate.” Thomas looked at him. Matsuda had heard only a general account of the difficult final workday: a student needed help separating university deadlines from family travel. No name or private detail had been included. “The student had offices that could remove some consequences. You may have one employer willing to clarify its own offer.” “That was not what I meant.” Matsuda watched travellers cross the concourse. “I meant that you appear to have become good at not making help into ownership.” The praise was more difficult to receive than comment upon food. Thomas could list the corrections, the cases where Mori had intervened, Isha’s repeated insistence that care did not grant authority and the older failures Matsuda could not know. Explaining them would turn progress into a defence against being seen. “I am improving,” Thomas said. Matsuda accepted the qualification, then added, “The accident seems to have made you more deliberate about which parts of your life you continue. I know that may be an unfair interpretation of memory loss.” “It is incomplete,” Thomas said. The recorded life between them remained real to Matsuda and largely uninhabited to Thomas. Correcting him fully would require truths he had no right to receive. “But deliberate is not entirely wrong.” “I did not ask Kanno,” Matsuda continued, “because she would tell me the offer is using prestige to hide missing terms, and then she would be correct before I had finished being impressed.” Thomas suspected Kanno’s answer would contain more nuance and no less accuracy. “You may eventually have to tell her.” “I will tell several people after I have spoken to my family. For now, could this remain between us?” “Yes.” Thomas did not add Isha as an automatic exception. Confidence shared with one partner did not become jointly owned merely because their own life had few closed doors. Matsuda looked toward the paper carrier in Thomas’s hands. “You may tell Isha that the sweets survived.” Thomas confirmed that this information had not been protected by the original request. They stood. At the station exit, Matsuda attempted to take both bags. Thomas retained the sweets until the pavement widened, then surrendered them with instructions about keeping the box level that Matsuda described as evidence of unresolved institutional behaviour. Before they separated, Matsuda told Thomas not to offer to repair the dish that afternoon. Thomas denied having offered, but Matsuda had recognised the stage immediately before it. Thomas accepted the boundary and requested a photograph only if criticism was wanted. “I may send one to prove that the ingredients reached a conclusion,” Matsuda said. Matsuda walked toward the taxi rank carrying a dish he had not made and a decision he had not surrendered. Thomas watched until the crowd absorbed the carefully arranged dark hair and the level box of sweets, then turned toward home. --- Isha returned from the climbing centre with chalk beneath one thumbnail, cold in the ends of her pale hair and a small paper packet Yoshida had distributed to the final staff on duty. It contained two mandarins and a handwritten warning not to inspect climbing equipment before the second day of the new year unless the building was visibly on fire. Thomas was slicing spring onions when she entered 202. One bundle had proved sufficient. The second remained whole in the vegetable drawer, where it no longer represented immediate failure. After changing her shoes, Isha asked whether the unnecessary food had been rejected. Thomas described the smaller sweets and Matsuda’s intention to make the vegetable dish himself, then told her that the rest of their conversation had been given in confidence. Her attention sharpened without becoming investigative. “Then you should not repeat it.” Thomas confirmed that Matsuda had permitted disclosure only concerning the survival of the sweets. “That appears proportionate.” Isha washed her hands and inspected the counter. Two portions of soba waited beneath a cloth; the broth was finished, and sliced fish cake, greens and spring onion stood ready. The tempura remained in a paper-lined container carrying the name of a shop rather than Thomas’s work. “You bought part of dinner without attempting to outperform it after returning home.” “The prawns were already fried. Intervention would have made them worse.” Thomas accepted her kiss against the side of his neck. When she praised her apprentice for entering the new year with restraint, he pointed out that the year had not begun. Isha therefore marked the result provisional. The meal required no performance. Thomas reheated the broth while Isha separated the noodles and arranged the purchased tempura on one of Matsuda and Kanno’s serving boards. They ate before the late-night television programmes reached their loudest stages, sitting at the low table beneath the warm light. The cyclamen had produced another red flower beside the window. Beyond the glass, balconies and narrow streets showed only occasional movement. Thomas had chosen buckwheat noodles because they belonged to the evening and because Isha liked them. The broth carried dashi, soy and a restrained sweetness. Tempura softened where it touched the liquid and remained crisp where it did not. Isha ate the long noodles without difficulty, though she paused after the first mouthful to ask whether breaking them would shorten the coming year. Thomas explained that the noodles represented continuity and leaving the old year’s hardship behind, while biting them carried no legal consequence. Isha considered that fortunate because the culture had already assigned enough responsibility to food. “This is not solely my culture,” Thomas said. He had lived in Japan long enough to know the custom and not long enough to claim every reason people kept it. “Most customs survive because people are permitted to perform them imperfectly.” Isha looked toward the purchased tempura and observed that he was applying the day’s lesson broadly. Thomas replied that repetition supported learning. After dinner they washed the bowls, covered the remaining broth and placed the extra spring onions where Thomas would remember they existed. The television remained on at low volume for a while, offering songs, bright stages and references to public figures neither of them recognised from lived memory. Some faces appeared in photographs stored among their supplied possessions. Recognition did not arrive with the images. They turned it off before midnight. The flat changed when the screen went dark. Heating moved air through the LDK. A pipe shifted somewhere inside the wall. From outside came the reduced sound of traffic and, later, a distant bell whose individual notes arrived too softly to count. Thomas and Isha sat together on the sofa, her legs across his lap and his hand resting beneath the fall of her hair. In the fantasy world, different settlements and peoples had marked years, seasons, reigns, plantings, snows and returns by customs that did not align neatly. Thomas remembered crowded halls, family work and winter roads more clearly than any single boundary between one number and the next. None of those memories had prepared him to hear a temple bell in Sendai while Kelda’s page waited inside a locked box less than three metres away. The distance no longer meant ignorance. That had changed the shape of grief without making it smaller. Mira knew he lived. Sereth knew Isha remained herself. Kelda had written from a house kept closed but not sealed. Every passage still required another month and still passed through Thomas badly, but the silence was no longer absolute. It was possible to mistake that difference for an instruction to wait. Isha’s fingers moved over his wrist. “You are counting something.” “Not the bell.” Thomas looked toward the cabinet that held the document box. The next opening remained weeks away, but they could make the clean copy the following day. “We could,” Isha said, without refusal or urgency. “Do you want the first day of the year to become preparation for leaving a page?” Thomas considered the nearly complete draft: healthy bodies, absent powers, work, neighbours, Mugi, friendship and the sentence **We are living**. Copying it would not be wrong. Readiness was sensible, especially when one error in Common could consume space they would not recover. Yet he recognised the pull to begin the year by making himself useful to people beyond reach, as if their relief depended upon immediate evidence that he had not neglected the road. “No,” he said. “Not tomorrow.” Isha shifted closer until her head rested against his shoulder. “Then it remains ready enough for tonight.” At midnight, phones and distant buildings supplied brief sounds of celebration. Thomas’s screen lit with messages from colleagues, automated services, Matsuda, Kanno and several people whose names belonged more confidently to records than to memory. Kanno had sent a formal New Year greeting accompanied by a badly drawn pine decoration. Matsuda’s message contained only a picture of carrot and burdock cut into pieces whose differences remained visible after cooking. **It reached a conclusion. No criticism requested.** Thomas showed Isha because the photograph fell within the authorised disclosure. She examined it with grave attention. “It appears edible.” “That is the appropriate standard.” Thomas replied with a greeting and no assessment. Then he put the phone face down. They exchanged New Year greetings in Japanese, not because the language carried more truth than Common or English but because it belonged to the room, the city and the night they were actually in. Isha’s pronunciation had become natural enough that the phrase no longer sounded practised. Thomas kissed her after she said it. The year changed while they remained on the same sofa, in the same chosen home, with no system text appearing across his sight. Isha remained close after the kiss, then looked toward the shelf holding the portable printer and album. “We should take a photograph.” “Now?” Thomas glanced at the room. Two tea cups remained on the table. The folded blanket had slipped from the sofa, one cushion stood at an angle and the spring onions had been discussed too recently for him to regard the kitchen as neutral. “The light is poor.” “The light records where we are.” Isha followed his attention across the room and recognised the beginning of preparation before he moved. “Do not improve the home for evidence that we live in it.” Thomas accepted the restriction with more difficulty than the purchased tempura. They placed his phone against a tea tin on one of the serving boards, using the front camera only long enough to confirm that both would remain in frame. Isha sat beside him on the sofa. Thomas started the timer and returned before the first warning flash, but the photograph caught him looking toward the screen to verify the shutter. Isha examined the result and declared that the recorder had been compromised at the end. Thomas objected that the phrase was being used beyond its original scope. “The evidence supports expansion,” she said. The second attempt was technically complete and looked as though they had been asked to provide proof of co-residence. Thomas sat too straight. Isha’s hands rested too symmetrically in her lap. Their expressions were pleasant, composed and unrelated to the previous half-hour. Thomas deleted it after Isha said it resembled an application for continued permission to occupy 202. For the third, she started the timer herself. Instead of returning to the exact place, she sat closer and drew Thomas toward her with one arm around his waist. He began to object that the movement had changed the framing. Isha turned her face toward him before he finished. The shutter caught Thomas looking at her, Isha beginning to laugh and both of them leaning slightly away from the centre of the sofa. One tea cup remained visible. The cyclamen appeared near the edge of the frame as a red interruption against the dark window. Thomas studied the image. It did not show the room efficiently. It showed enough of the new flat to distinguish it from 304, enough of Isha’s pale hair to obscure part of his shoulder and enough unplanned movement to make the moment unavailable to their supplied history. Isha chose the third image. Thomas objected that he was not looking at the camera. “You are looking at me,” she said. Her answer did not argue that this was better. It treated the fact as sufficient. They printed the photograph. The small machine worked with a subdued mechanical sound beneath the distant celebration, producing the image in stages until the colours settled. Thomas opened the album to the first empty space after the housewarming photographs. The earlier pages contained images Matsuda and Kanno had helped create or send: the birthday table, the move, Mugi on the guest mattress, the new kitchen. Their gift had become a way of placing present memories beside a past recorded for them. Isha fixed the photograph beneath the clear sheet and wrote a short caption in Japanese: **First New Year in 202.** She did not add that they were safe, happy or together. The photograph already carried those claims without turning them into a report. Thomas touched the edge of the page. “Someone reading this later may think we are distinguishing it from other New Years here.” “We are.” Isha closed the album carefully. “There will be this one, even if there are others.” The sentence held hope without demanding a guarantee. Thomas returned the album to the shelf, where it stood several steps from Kelda’s page and belonged to a different kind of record. When they finally went to bed, the room retained the tea cups, the displaced cushion and the small evidence that no preparation had made the moment more complete. --- They woke later than intended to pale sunlight spread across the curtains. Mugi had not appeared that morning. Her absence required no explanation; the community cat had several routes and more than one place where New Year food might be defended from her. Breakfast approached lunch. Thomas made a clear soup with grilled mochi, chicken and greens, then placed it beside the small assortment they had bought rather than constructed: rolled omelette, pickled vegetables, black beans from Saitō and two pieces of sweet chestnut preparation selected because Isha had liked the sample. The meal occupied four dishes instead of the entire table. Saitō had delivered the beans the previous afternoon with instructions not to return the container filled with anything more ambitious until at least the third day of the year. Yoshimura had left a smaller packet of pickles at their door and accepted mandarins in return. The exchanges did not make 202 a common room. They marked doors through which people could offer something and then go home. Isha lifted one black bean with her chopsticks. “Saitō cooked these better than the shop version.” “She would consider comparison with a shop insufficiently specific.” “She is not here to require detail.” Isha ate it and looked toward the soup. “This is good.” Thomas waited for the qualification that did not come. The broth was clear, warm and appropriately seasoned. It did not need to prove he could design a better dish than the satsuma dessert. He ate his own portion before it cooled. They left the flat in the late morning. The entrance decoration remained above the glass door, slightly off-centre by an amount no resident had corrected. Sunlight made the cleaned surface reveal every scratch Thomas’s cloth and Cleanse alike could not remove. The street beyond was quieter than an ordinary holiday and more populated than the previous night: families walking together, older couples moving carefully over shaded patches and children wearing new coats they had not yet learned to close. Thomas and Isha followed the river for part of the route. Bare cherry branches crossed the pale sky. The narrow water moved between engineered walls without ceremony, carrying reflected winter light beneath bridges and past the exercise ground where Isha had run. No stopwatch appeared. She matched Thomas’s pace because they were walking together, not because speed had become forbidden. The local shrine was busy without being overwhelmed. A short queue extended from the approach. People spoke quietly, took photographs away from the main line and adjusted children’s scarves. Thomas showed Isha where to wash her hands, then admitted that local practice varied enough that she should not treat him as ceremonial authority. Isha observed that Thomas had brought her to a ritual while disclaiming competence. He knew the broad procedure, he said, but not what every person present believed they were doing. “That makes it resemble most institutions,” she replied. The humour settled before they reached the front. Thomas placed a coin in the offering box. He bowed, followed the familiar sequence and closed his eyes. Prayer had once been entangled with systems that recognised him, gods whose existence remained uncertain, Holy force that answered need and offices that mistook capacity for duty. He did not ask for power, return or explanation. He did not ask that the two worlds move at a kinder rate, because kindness was not a unit time accepted. He held the people whose lives continued beyond reach, the woman beside him and the home waiting several streets away. Gratitude and grief occupied the same silence without resolving one another. When Thomas stepped aside, Isha completed the gesture with close attention but no imitation beyond what the public act required. They moved away before either asked what the other had said. Near the edge of the grounds, small paper fortunes attracted a line. Isha considered them, learned that an unfavourable result could be tied at the shrine rather than carried home and decided that a prediction offered with an accepted disposal route lacked useful authority. Thomas bought one anyway. It was moderately favourable in most categories and vague concerning travel. After reading the translation, Isha concluded that Thomas had received permission to proceed carefully. He pointed out that he already possessed that instruction. “Then the paper has confirmed established canon,” she said. Thomas folded it into his wallet because discarding it after paying would have felt needlessly argumentative. They walked home by a different street. The cold had sharpened as the sun moved westward, though afternoon had barely begun. Isha slipped one gloved hand into Thomas’s coat pocket and closed it around his hand inside. The arrangement pulled them slightly nearer without requiring either to stop. Isha asked whether he had requested anything. Thomas had tried to be grateful without assigning an outcome; when he returned the question, she answered, “I asked that we continue choosing this life while it is ours.” The wording avoided permanence without making loss inevitable. Thomas tightened his hand around hers and admitted that her approach seemed more effective. Isha reminded him it was not a competition; he agreed, adding that she would otherwise have established stopping rules. Isha’s laughter escaped in one warm breath against the cold. Matsuda’s next message arrived while they were waiting at a pedestrian crossing. **I told them about Tokyo. My father asked about housing. My mother asked whether I wanted to go. My sister asked about moving costs. No decision yet.** Thomas read it once and did not begin composing an answer before the light changed. They crossed with the other pedestrians. On the far side, he wrote: **Then the useful questions have begun. The decision remains yours. Happy New Year.** Matsuda replied with a single acknowledgement and no request for more. Back at the building, they found Mugi sitting beside the entrance where winter sun reached the tiles. She accepted Isha’s greeting, smelled Thomas’s glove and walked toward the exterior stair without attempting to enter with them. On the second-floor landing, Saitō’s door opened long enough for her to ask whether the shrine had improved either of them. “Thomas has received permission to proceed carefully,” Isha said. Saitō regarded him over the top of her glasses. “The shrine has wasted paper.” She closed the door after confirming that they had eaten. Inside 202, the afternoon light reached farther across the LDK than it had in the old flat. It touched the cyclamen, the serving boards and the edge of the cabinet containing Kelda’s returned page. Thomas removed his coat, then stood for a moment with one hand near the drawer where their draft rested. Isha did not tell him to leave it closed. She moved beside him and waited until the choice belonged clearly to both of them. “Tomorrow?” Thomas asked. “Perhaps.” He let his hand fall. There would be time to copy the page, reconsider three words and prepare for the next dangerous opening. There would also be work, climbing, neighbours, Matsuda’s unresolved answer, meals that did not need to improve and winter days whose importance came from being lived before they could be reported. Thomas went to the kitchen and reheated water for tea. Isha opened the curtains wider. The page remained in the drawer, ready for a road that had not yet opened. In 202, the first day continued without needing it.