## Chapter 359 — The Shelf and the List

Thomas turned the wooden bird once more in his hand, finding the shallow cut beneath the left wing with his thumb. Kanno had stopped smiling about Mara's potato comparison. The little carving was too badly proportioned to become beautiful through age, but it had acquired the unmistakable look of something handled, moved, lost among other possessions and kept anyway. Thomas could remember making the cut. That was sufficient to make the room quiet again.

Tessa's arrow occupied most of the long side of the dining table. Beside it lay Isha's dark-green ribbon, Sereth's empty bowl and the two glossy photographs Ian had produced on the train. The objects had no reason to belong together beyond the man who had placed them into Isha's hands. Kanno looked over the group, then at Thomas's thumb returning to the same mark in the bird.

“Before you keep touching everything, we should record what it looks like now,” she said. “I am not telling you not to touch it. I am telling you that in six months one of you will remember the nick on the arrow being somewhere else, and then we will spend an evening deciding whether reality changed or memory did.”

Isha lowered the foot she had tucked beneath her chair. “Photographs and notes.”

“Yes. Short notes.” Kanno's attention shifted to Thomas before he could turn the phrase into a records standard. “Enough to preserve tonight. Not enough to create a new profession.”

It was already after ten. The tea had cooled, the city beyond the balcony had disappeared into reflection, and Kanno had work the next morning. Thomas considered postponing the record until daylight, then looked at the bird in his hand and understood the point. By tomorrow the objects would already have acquired another night of handling and another layer of memory about what they had looked like when they arrived.

They moved the record to the floor because the dining table was too narrow to hold Tessa's arrow against a clean background. Isha brought two sheets of heavy cream-white paper from the stack she used for her hanging pieces. Thomas fetched a steel ruler from his office. He paused in the doorway as though considering something else, returned with only the ruler, and received a narrow look from Kanno.

“I decided independently that we do not need to weigh the bowl,” he said.

“Good. Independence suits you.”

Isha spread the paper near the centre of the LDK where the ceiling light fell evenly. Kanno switched off the standing lamp because its warmer light made one side of the shaft look darker. Thomas crouched with his phone while Isha carried the arrow from the table and laid it down carefully, fletching clear of the paper edge.

The first images were deliberately dull. Full shaft from above, then fletching, point, binding and the ash-darkened section. Isha showed them the small nick she remembered from Tessa's knife and the place where the binding had been corrected rather than restarted. Kanno had Thomas take one frame with Isha's finger indicating each feature, then a second with her hand removed. A ruler appeared beside the shaft for scale and disappeared again for the cleaner reference image.

Thomas adjusted the phone. “No attractive diagonal composition?”

“If you want a beautiful photograph later, take one. This one needs to tell us whether the mark was already the same length.” Kanno shifted onto one knee and checked the screen from the side. “And do not make the ash prettier than it is.”

Isha watched both of them with the patience of someone who had spent several lives around people capable of turning tools into personality. She rotated the arrow when Kanno asked, corrected Thomas when he nearly placed the remembered nick face-down, and gave no opinion on composition beyond making sure the shaft was not bent for the sake of fitting it into the frame.

The wooden bird required fewer photographs. Thomas placed it on the paper, then turned it through each side while Isha held the ruler out of the way until needed. Before they magnified anything on the phone, Kanno asked Thomas to say what he remembered: the left-wing cut from the small knife, the flattened correction near the tail, Mara's insult about the chest, and a vague period when Tessa had taken the bird for some game he could no longer reconstruct. Thomas wrote those into the household notebook himself, then made a second list of what the object visibly showed.

“Memory and observation,” he said, sounding more comfortable now that the impossible had acquired columns.

Kanno gave him the pen back. “Yes. You may approve quietly.”

“I approve quietly.”

The ribbon barely needed equipment. Isha laid it flat and turned it over, revealing the softer edge, the faint fading along old folds and the tiny pull near one end. When Thomas finished, she held it between both hands for a few seconds before folding it again. The gesture belonged to use rather than evidence; Kanno did not ask her to repeat it for the camera.

Sereth's bowl was harder to document because its most important property had already been eaten. Kanno photographed the worn rim, the old mark Isha remembered beneath her thumb, the spoon and the underside. Then Thomas wrote one sentence while Isha dictated: she had recognised the bowl and the meal immediately as Sereth's, associated with returning home wet and hungry after patrol, although she had not previously described that meal to Thomas or Kanno. He stopped there. The record did not need to say that she had cried over the last mouthful.

The photographs came last among the physical objects. Kanno handled the computer-room image by its corners and made Thomas photograph the whole print first, preserving the glossy border and the visible shape of the monitor, before taking a closer image where the text could be read. The second print—the garden, pale houses and wooded hill beyond Ian's window—received the same treatment. There was something mildly absurd in making a photograph of a photograph of a computer conversation, but none of them improved the situation by saying so until the files existed.

Thomas had already saved screenshots of the senderless message from Isha's phone. Kanno checked the original thread once more. The top remained blank: no contact, no number, no *unknown sender*, and no field in which Isha could type a reply. Thomas tapped once near the upper edge, then wisely moved his hand away before curiosity became an experiment.

“Do not delete it to see whether it returns,” Kanno said.

“I was not going to.” Thomas met Isha's gaze and amended the claim. “I had considered what the result might tell us.” The temptation was familiar: disturb a system, watch what it repaired, infer the rule from the repair. It had served him often enough in safer places to remain attractive here. Isha's expression reminded him that a message from outside reality was a poor place to perform harmless curiosity.

“That is exactly why I said it,” Kanno replied, and returned the phone without offering him another experiment.

They saved the object photographs and screenshots in one private folder, copied the folder to Thomas's computer and wrote the date and location in the household notebook. Thomas began proposing a file-name structure with object, view and sequence number. Kanno allowed him enough organisation that another person could find the fletching without opening thirty images and stopped him when he suggested a separate metadata sheet.

“You already have a notebook,” she said. “Make one text file telling you what the folder is. Then stop.”

Thomas did. Kanno read over his shoulder while he typed: **26 Aug 2027. Private record of objects and message associated with Ian encounter. Photographed in flat 202 after Isha's account. Identification and provenance remain witness memory unless separately observable.** She tapped the final sentence with one fingernail, and Thomas left it unchanged.

Isha remained beside the arrow while they finished. She lifted it from the paper and looked along the shaft, the fletching close to her face. Kanno asked whether either of them wanted material testing. Thomas answered quickly that he did not want anything cut, scraped or consumed for analysis, and Isha agreed before he could turn that into a broader decision for her.

“Wood species, fibres, residue, print dating,” Thomas said after a moment. “Most ordinary results would tell us very little about how it arrived. An impossible result would be interesting, but I don't want to damage the thing in order to go looking for one.”

Isha lowered the arrow across her knees. “It is already the arrow.”

For her, recognition carried farther than any laboratory result available to them. Thomas did not pretend the same sentence settled every question for him. He merely closed the list of possible tests in his head and did not reopen it.

When the background paper had been rolled away and the ruler returned to Thomas's office, he asked Kanno whether she wanted copies of the files. She refused so promptly that he looked surprised.

“I know where they are and I know what I saw,” she said, sliding the household notebook back towards him rather than putting any notes into her own bag. “If you lose both copies, that is a household backup failure. It is not a reason for me to carry a private archive of your semi-author.”

Isha's mouth moved at the phrase. Thomas accepted it with less enthusiasm.

Kanno looked over the arrow, bowl, bird and folded ribbon once more. “This is not a booklet.”

“No,” Thomas said.

“I mean it. Not a public booklet, not a private art project, not *Until Replaced: Reality Edition*. I am helping you make a record because these objects are going to become household possessions and memories will move around them.”

Thomas had been about to object to the invented title. The rest of the sentence stopped him. Kanno's own work had begun with objects whose temporary status changed after people lived around them. She did not need another project merely because Ian had bought the first one.

“Private record,” Isha said.

“Exactly. If something changes, compare it. If nothing changes, leave it alone.” Kanno put her watch back on after having removed it to keep the buckle away from the ribbon. “I have had enough surprises for one week. That is a preference, not a prediction.”

They gathered the objects with more care than the recording procedure had required. Isha took the arrow and Thomas rolled the paper; neither treated the duplication as a failure of trust. By the time Kanno reached the genkan, the bowl and ribbon were back on the table and the bird remained beside Thomas's hand.

Isha followed her to the door. “You have work tomorrow?”

“Yes. And before you ask, this is not my unreachable Saturday. The next one is still mine.” Kanno slipped her shoes on and adjusted the strap of her black bag. “If another message arrives with no sender, tell me. If a normal English number sends hello, consider the less interesting possibility that someone has a phone.”

Thomas opened the door. “Thank you for restoring standards.”

“Someone has to.”

The lift arrived before the exchange could become another argument. Kanno raised one hand from inside, the doors closed, and the corridor returned to the ordinary hum of the building late at night.

When Thomas came back into 202, Isha was washing Sereth's bowl.

He stopped at the edge of the kitchen. She had used warm water and the soft side of a clean sponge, nothing more dramatic. The spoon waited beside the sink. Isha rinsed the bowl, ran her thumb once around the worn inner curve and handed it to Thomas because the drying cloth was on his side.

“I was thinking we might never use it,” he admitted as he dried the outer surface.

“Why?” Isha rinsed the spoon, and Thomas gave the answer that had been sitting beneath every careful movement since she brought the bowl home. “Because we cannot replace it.”

She let the water run over the spoon for another moment. In Sereth's house, an old bowl had been valuable because somebody had shaped it well, kept it from splitting and continued putting food into it. No one had protected it from supper. “We could not replace it before either,” Isha said. She saw Thomas's expression and added, “I know that is not quite the same.”

Thomas looked down at the wet wood, darker now than it had been on the train photograph. “No.”

“My mother used bowls.” Isha nudged his hip with hers so she could reach the draining board. “I am not proposing that we put it in the dishwasher.”

Thomas looked from the damp wood to the cupboard where their everyday dishes lived. Preserving it forever would prevent damage. It would also make Sereth's ordinary meal the last food the bowl was ever permitted to hold. “We do not put wooden bowls in the dishwasher anyway,” he said.

“Then we already have a policy.” Isha set the spoon beside it, satisfied with a rule considerably smaller than the problem that had delivered the bowl.

They dried the bowl and left it upside down on a cloth overnight rather than putting it away damp. The arrow required more thought. The locked correspondence storage was not shaped for a full shaft, and neither wanted it leaning in a corner where a bag or vacuum cleaner could catch the fletching. They eventually wrapped it loosely in clean cotton and placed it horizontally on a high clear shelf in the flexible room until they could buy a proper long storage box. Thomas checked the depth once. Isha checked the clearance from the nearest stored bag twice. Neither commented on the arithmetic.

The two glossy photographs went into an envelope with the written account and then into the locked private storage. The senderless message stayed on Isha's phone, with screenshots copied elsewhere. That left the ribbon and Thomas's childhood bird on the dining table.

Isha picked up the bird. “Where did Mira keep this?”

“Different places. There was a shelf in the sitting room for a while, then I think a box. When she gave it back before the western road, I put it in Magic Pocket.” Thomas watched her turn it. “That answer is not useful, is it?”

“No.”

Her attention moved towards the low shelf where the album, several photographs and Kanno's booklet already lived among objects they had deliberately kept visible. Thomas followed the look and understood before she moved.

“I don't know whether I want that displayed.”

Isha paused with the bird in her hand. She had expected the problem to be Ian, or the unsettling route by which the carving had returned. Thomas was looking instead at the disproportionate body with the particular embarrassment of an adult confronted by surviving childhood workmanship. “Because Ian gave it to us?” she asked.

“Because I made it when I was nine.” He pointed at her before her attention could settle too visibly on the chest. “Do not say potato.”

Isha studied the carving with offensive care. “I was considering whether Mara had been unfair.”

“And?”

“She was not.”

Thomas sighed while Isha placed the bird on the shelf.

It looked ridiculous between a framed photograph and the clean little spine of *Until Replaced*. One wing dipped, the body was too heavy for the legs Thomas had barely carved, and the blunt beak pointed slightly towards the wall. It also looked less strange there than it had among the evidence on the table.

Thomas stood in front of it for a while and eventually said, “Fine.”

Isha touched his shoulder once, then returned for the ribbon. She folded it into a smaller rectangle, carried it down the hall and came back without it.

“With the ring case,” she said when Thomas looked towards the bedroom.

He nodded. That answer suited the ribbon better than the locked archive would have.

By the time they turned off the LDK lights, it was nearly midnight. Ian's computer room and garden were sealed in an envelope. Tessa's arrow rested flat and protected. The badly carved bird occupied a shelf, and Sereth's bowl dried beside the sink. Thomas checked the front door once before following Isha down the hall.

She looked back at him. “Are you expecting Ian to knock?”

“No.”

“Good.”

They went to bed.

---

Friday passed without requiring a theory of reality.

Thomas went to the university. The arrival pilot produced two questions before lunch, neither of which belonged to him, and both were answered by the offices that owned the relevant dates. Sugiyama asked whether a housing note should link directly to the new local-address field or to the general arrival page. Thomas read the wording, recommended the general page because it would survive future field changes better, and returned to a student case whose difficulty began and ended with missing documentation.

Isha worked at the climbing centre. A returning beginner had forgotten how tightly a harness should sit and remembered enough to ask before guessing. Another customer wanted to know whether the bouldering mats made falling safe; Isha answered that they made particular falls safer and showed him how to climb down instead of jumping from every finish. She spent part of the afternoon checking beginner-session equipment and the rest moving among questions that ceased to matter once somebody understood the answer.

After work, she went to the gym. The session had been planned before Ian appeared and remained on the calendar afterward: moderate squats, bench work, pull-ups and a little shoulder training, with no maximal effort and no new number worth recording. Her calves still remembered Thursday's long run, but the stiffness eased as she warmed up.

Once, while resting between sets, she looked at the blank wall beyond the rack and remembered Ian asking when she would go weight lifting again. The thought amused her for perhaps three seconds. She did not address the wall. When the timer sounded, she began the next set.

At home that evening, Sereth's bowl held two peaches. Thomas had put them there because the ceramic fruit bowl was full of onions after a shopping mistake entirely his own. Isha noticed, ran one finger around the old rim and took a peach. Neither announced that an impossible artifact had become kitchen storage.

They did not discuss the wedding that night. Thomas cooked. Isha worked on the second paper hanging and managed to make the smoky-blue strip worse before deciding that the failure gave her useful information. They watched an episode of a programme neither cared enough about to discuss afterward and went to bed early.

On Saturday morning, the wedding notebook reappeared because Thomas was looking for something else.

He had moved several notebooks after making the Ian record and wanted the smaller one containing the gold-sale tax questions. The wedding book came out first. It opened at the page where Saitō had a tick beside her name and Miyake remained represented only by the line **someone we want — decision later**.

Isha sat at the dining table with coffee, wearing an old loose T-shirt and shorts, her hair still unbraided from sleep. Sereth's bowl stood between them with the last peach and three small plums Thomas had bought on his way home.

“You found the wedding,” she said.

“I was looking for tax.” Thomas sat opposite her with the notebook. The accidental route was sufficiently close to the way marriage had first become a live question that he could not object when Isha's mouth curved. “I appreciate that this is a dangerous route into marriage planning.”

“It has precedent,” she said, and pushed the fruit bowl slightly aside so the notebook had room.

The last two days made the page feel almost aggressively simple. No anomaly, no reality engine, no external reader. It contained names and a request for chairs. Thomas read their first decisions again: **small Earth ceremony wanted**, **Kanno + Matsuda definitely present if possible**, then the later additions for Saitō and easy access.

He placed the notebook between them. “I think we have delayed Miyake long enough.”

Isha took one of the plums from Sereth's bowl. “Probably.”

“Do you want her there?”

“Yes.” This time the answer came before Isha had finished turning the fruit in her fingers. A week earlier she had been trying to solve the size of the ceremony at the same time as the person; after Miyake's ordinary lift conversation, the second question had become easier to separate. She looked across at Thomas. “Do you?”

He did not need the same delay. “Yes.” Thomas wrote **Miyake** beneath Saitō and added the same small tick.

The pen stroke settled one person and immediately exposed the larger problem. Four guests were now names: Kanno, Matsuda, Saitō and Miyake. Beyond them, the building still contained people Thomas and Isha liked and expected to remain part of their lives. Yoshimura would probably learn the wedding date through building conversation before anyone formally told her. Arakawa would ask about flooring and transport. Mrs Nakahara had hugged Isha when they announced the engagement. None of those relationships became less real merely because the ceremony remained small.

Isha ate half the plum while reading the list. “I still want the ceremony small. And I still want to eat with the building later.”

Thomas nodded. Saitō's suggestion had survived the week without becoming more complicated. “A separate meal. Properly separate, not inviting people for whatever food survived the wedding.”

“That was her warning.”

“More or less.”

He wrote **building/community meal separate** in the margin and stopped before turning the line into another guest list. Isha watched the pen, then tapped Saitō's name.

“She is not there because she represents the building.”

“I know. Miyake isn't either.” Thomas looked at the two names. Saitō had become family-adjacent through food, criticism and repeated entry into their home; Miyake had become a friend by a quieter route through books, repairs, photographs and neighbourly conversation. Neither invitation needed to stand in for a floor of the building. “If we chose a room and Miyake wasn't in it, I think I would notice for reasons that have nothing to do with 204.”

“So would I,” Isha said. Both ticks stayed where they were. The rest of the building remained a later meal instead of becoming a ranking exercise conducted before breakfast.

Thomas turned to a fresh page, wrote **VENUE** at the top and immediately began becoming himself.

**Sendai. Easy seating. No necessary stairs. Toilet accessible without stairs. Private or small room. Meal possible nearby.**

He paused with the pen still above the paper, searching for the next constraint. Isha refilled both coffees and watched him long enough that he looked up.

“Thomas,” she said, “where do you actually want to marry me?”

The list stopped.

His first answers were categories borrowed from other people's weddings: a chapel attached to a hotel, a restaurant room, a municipal hall, a garden arranged for photographs, a banquet space made artificially smaller with partitions. None answered Isha's question. He leaned back and closed his eyes for a few seconds.

The living bough appeared first because it always would. Green overhead, witnesses within a few steps, no microphone and no long aisle turning the walk towards one another into theatre. He did not want to reproduce that rite in Sendai. When he removed the tree and the old words from the memory, some preferences remained.

“Daylight,” he said at last. “I want to be able to see you properly. I think I want the room to feel like one room, not a small piece cut out of somewhere designed for a hundred people.”

Isha's expression softened. “Good.”

“Green outside would be nice. A garden, trees, even just windows onto something living.” Thomas glanced towards the balcony, where late-August leaves filled part of the gap between buildings. “That may be me smuggling the bough back in through a window.”

“You are allowed plants. I have told you this before.” Isha did not mind the old promise influencing the new day; she minded only the idea of rebuilding it as though the first one required replacement. Thomas wanting leaves somewhere in sight was a preference, not a reconstruction.

“I remember.” He thought a little longer. “I don't care whether it is a chapel. I don't want us pretending to a religion we don't practise. And if there is an outdoor part, the indoor room has to work by itself. I do not want rain to turn the day into the failed version.”

Isha considered that and nodded. “Outside possible. Not required.”

Thomas wrote **daylight / greenery visible if possible / indoor room works on its own**. The new lines felt more like them than the heading did.

Isha turned the notebook slightly and asked for the pen. Beneath his notes she added **no long room**.

Thomas read it twice. “What is a long room?”

“One where Kanno is twenty metres away because someone sold us an aisle.”

Thomas pictured the four names on their list distributed across ceremonial rows designed to look populated in photographs. The scale was wrong before aesthetics entered it. “Many wedding spaces contain aisles,” he said.

“They may contain a short one.” Isha gave the pen back, and he accepted the specification without attempting to define the maximum permissible length.

The guest count came next because rooms required some estimate. Four invited people plus the two of them made six, but neither wanted the number to become a cap chosen for visual neatness. They both had colleagues and activity friends who mattered; neither yet knew which of those relationships belonged inside the ceremony itself. The absence of Sereth, Mira, Rowan, Kelda and everyone else across the closed road made every Earth invitation feel too much like substitution if they approached it carelessly.

“I don't want to invite people because the room looks empty with four guests,” Isha said. “I also don't want to exclude someone we genuinely want because we decided six chairs was aesthetically correct.”

Thomas wrote **guest count follows people, not package**. Isha read the line and made a face at the institutional phrasing. “That sounds like work.”

“It remains true.” The sentence was ugly, but it prevented a venue's minimum package from deciding which people belonged in the room.

“Keep it,” she said.

For searching purposes they settled on roughly six to twelve people in the room, explicitly as a range rather than a promise. The range excluded most conventional large spaces while leaving room for one or two future decisions.

Thomas looked at the four names once more before reaching for his laptop. “Do you already know about anyone from work?”

Isha knew whom he meant without needing a list. Ishikawa had trusted her with the regular position, training and increasingly substantive safety work; other climbing-centre colleagues had become familiar through shifts rather than inherited records. “I like Ishikawa. I would be glad to celebrate with her. I do not yet know that I want her in the ceremony.” She considered the difference before adding, “That may change once the day is less imaginary.”

“That is roughly where I am with Mori and Sugiyama.” Thomas had shared more of his daily life with both than with most of the people in the supplied university photographs. That did not automatically make the wedding room the correct measure of the friendship. “I don't want to decide that work colleagues belong there because weddings are supposed to contain colleagues.”

Isha nodded. “Then leave space. If one of us starts imagining someone in the room and would be sad when they are missing, we ask again.”

Thomas did not turn that into another rule in the notebook. He reached for the laptop instead.

Isha watched his hand settle on the trackpad. “How many tabs?”

“I am looking at categories.” Thomas's first click opened a search page rather than a venue, which did not improve her confidence.

“That answer contains danger.”

“Fewer than thirty.” He smiled, and Isha let him proceed under supervision because preventing the search entirely would only cause him to conduct it later with more tabs.

Earth, they discovered, had already monetised every version of uncertainty they possessed. Small-wedding packages assumed combinations of clothing, photography, flowers, cakes, music, officiants, changing rooms and meals. Some genuinely used small rooms. Others offered reduced guest counts inside spaces still designed to make fifty people feel properly distributed. A few tied the ceremony so tightly to a banquet that changing one meant purchasing the other.

Thomas began a comparison table with columns for ceremony, meal and access. Isha allowed three rows before moving the laptop several centimetres away from him.

“Do we need a table before we know what kind of place we want?”

Thomas looked at the screen, then at the handwritten page. “No.”

“What do we need?”

Thomas looked back at the handwritten page. The useful decisions were already there in imperfect language; the table merely made them look as though a procurement committee had requested them. “A brief,” he said.

“That is also a work word.”

“It is a better work word.” He closed the spreadsheet before defending it further.

They reduced the morning's planning to a single handwritten page. Sendai, or close enough that Saitō would not have to turn travel into an endurance exercise. Easy taxi access even if rail was nearby. Seating throughout. No stairs anyone had to use. A toilet on the same level or reachable by lift. A room small enough that a handful of people did not disappear inside it. Natural light. Greenery or an outdoor place they could use if weather allowed, with an indoor space they would still choose if rain made the outside irrelevant. A short ceremony whose words they could shape themselves. Food in the same place or close enough that moving everyone did not become the main event.

Thomas added **no requirement to buy things we do not want**.

Isha read the line. “Is that about cake?”

“It is about packages.”

Isha read the line again, then looked at him with deliberate suspicion. “You like cake.”

“I object to compulsory cake becoming a principle.” The absurdity of having reached a principled position on cake before choosing a date made Isha laugh, and she left the line untouched.

Money arrived only after the shape of the day existed. Their household was more stable than it had been a year earlier: two continuing jobs, a real emergency reserve, and the gold-sale money separated rather than quietly absorbed into ordinary spending. They could afford to choose. They could also spend enough to discover afterward that a wedding had displaced travel, training, savings and everything else they wanted the first year of marriage to contain.

“We need a ceiling before we visit anywhere,” Thomas said.

“Yes. But we only need a search range today if that changes what we look at.” Isha had no objection to spending money on the wedding; she objected to a large number becoming self-justifying once it existed.

“It probably does.” Thomas reached for the household budget, and Isha nodded towards the screen. “Then show me what the upper end would stop us doing.”

Thomas opened the household budget rather than explaining from memory. The exact numbers stayed between them. He showed Isha what they could spend without touching the emergency reserve, what a higher figure would do to savings over the following year, and which one-off expenses were already likely. Isha lowered the top of his first range slightly. Thomas looked at the consequences, agreed, and wrote the broader search limit in the notebook without treating the revision as a referendum on how much she valued the wedding.

They returned to photographs of places rather than package descriptions. Isha rejected one because its chairs stood in long rows and the windows were behind the couple. Thomas rejected another because the route from the ceremony room to the meal space appeared to require a staircase despite a lift elsewhere. A third had enough greenery to satisfy both of them and enough empty floor that six guests would have spent the day hearing their own footsteps.

Then a different shape appeared among the search results: small restaurant or guesthouse spaces willing to host a brief private ceremony before a meal, sometimes with a courtyard or terrace available when weather permitted.

The first specific example was wrong. The furniture was too formal for Isha, and Thomas disliked how the outdoor space required a change of floor. They closed it. The category remained.

“One room,” Isha said, leaning closer to the laptop as they looked at another example.

“Food already belongs there,” Thomas said. “Chairs already belong there. If the weather is bad, we have not lost the reason for using the place.”

Isha touched the screen edge, not the image. “That. Not this exact place. That kind of place.”

Thomas closed the listing before either of them could mistake an example for a decision. In the notebook he wrote **small restaurant / guesthouse private space worth looking at**.

Isha stayed leaning over the page. “What actually happens in the ceremony?”

Thomas looked at her. They had spent more time deciding what the room should not force them to do than what they would do once everyone sat inside it. “We make promises to each other,” he said. “Out loud. That is the part I care about.”

“New ones?”

“I don't think they have to pretend the old promises stopped counting.” Thomas turned the pen between his fingers. “But I don't want to recite the living-bough words in translation either. We are not the people who stood outside Larchmeet then.”

Isha's thumb brushed the engagement ring. “Good. I want to promise you as I am now.”

That sentence stayed with him for a moment before he answered. “Me too. Someone can lead the ceremony if the place needs that—tell people when to stand, when we speak, whatever shape keeps six nervous people from wondering what happens next. I don't want that person to provide the important words for us.”

“We can write our own.”

Thomas made a small face. “That sounds terrifying.”

“You have written letters to kings.”

“I had more practice being afraid of kings.”

Isha laughed, then settled again. “Rings?”

“We haven't even discussed wedding rings.”

“No.” She looked at the sapphire on her hand. “Later. I only want the ceremony to be recognisable as us marrying. It does not need every object other weddings use.”

Thomas added **our words / simple structure / someone may lead, not speak for us** beneath the venue category. He left rings unwritten. They had finally found a subject that could wait without becoming another category.

Her foot found his ankle beneath the table and remained there while they considered the part they had deliberately avoided turning romantic: legal registration. Both knew it would bring documents, translations and timing of its own. Neither wanted that machinery to determine which day felt like the wedding.

“I want the ceremony to be the day we think of as our wedding,” Thomas said. “If the legal filing can happen the same day without turning half of it into an office visit, fine. If it has to happen before or after for practical reasons, I don't think that changes the day for me.”

Isha took longer over this than she had over Miyake. “It does not change it for me either. I know which day I mean.”

Thomas wrote **ceremony = our wedding day; registration timing practical**.

Isha took the pen from his hand, crossed out the equals sign and replaced it with a small arrow.

He stared at the correction. “Why?”

“Less administrative.”

Thomas studied the arrow now occupying the place where his equals sign had been. “You corrected my notation.”

“Yes.” Isha returned the pen and drank her coffee, entirely untroubled by the offence.

“After everything we have been through.”

“You survived.” The line now read **ceremony → our wedding day; registration timing practical**. Thomas decided it was better and declined to reward her immediately by saying so.

The next page contained earlier headings for surnames and clothing. He turned past both. Photographs held them a little longer because Kanno's name sat on the guest list, and they simultaneously imagined asking her to document a wedding she was supposed to attend as a friend.

“We are not making Kanno work,” Isha said.

“No. If she takes photographs because she wants to, fine. If we want someone responsible for photographs, that should be someone else.” Thomas wrote **photographer separate if wanted** and drew a line under the morning's planning.

They had spent almost two hours on a wedding and still possessed no date, venue, outfits, menu, surname decision or legal filing day. Isha looked at the clock and then at the notebook.

“That appears inefficient.”

Thomas read the page of constraints and preferences. “I disagree.”

She smiled and let him keep the conclusion.

The peach in Sereth's bowl had softened on one side. Thomas picked it up, inspected the bruise and took it to the kitchen before it could become a different problem. Isha followed with the empty coffee cups.

“What do we do about Kanno and Matsuda?” she asked while Thomas rinsed the first cup.

“Tell them they are definitely on the list?” Thomas passed her the cup and watched her dry it. Their delay had been sensible when the only missing information was a date. After Thursday, Kanno's position had become stranger: she had spent hours at their table absorbing impossible evidence while still not knowing that the same table contained a private decision about her place at the wedding.

“We decided that weeks ago and have not told either of them,” Isha said. Saitō had found this funny before there was anything awkward about the delay.

“Saitō has already criticised us for secret guest decisions,” Thomas said. “In my defence, Kanno was in this room while we were discussing whether an English man outside reality can read our thoughts. It felt like a poor moment to add that she is also required at a future ceremony of unknown date.”

Isha dried the cup. “Required?”

“Strongly requested.” Thomas corrected himself before the word could become another accidental piece of administrative language. Isha accepted the revision with a small nod.

“Matsuda is easier once there is a date,” he continued. “He is in Tokyo. Asking him now only gives him an obligation he cannot schedule.” The distance made waiting practical in a way it was not for Kanno.

“Kanno lives here,” Isha said. Thomas agreed, and she put the cup away before looking back at him. “So we can tell her before we have one. I want to.”

Thomas dried his hands and reached for his phone. Isha caught his wrist before he unlocked it.

“Not by message.”

He looked at her hand and then at her face. “Why?”

“We went next door to ask Saitō. Kanno should at least get lunch.”

Thomas considered the emerging hierarchy of invitations. “That seems fair.”

She released him, and they returned to the table. The wedding notebook remained open beside Sereth's old bowl. Thomas added **Kanno — tell in person** beneath the four names, **Matsuda — ask when date exists**, and the same later-date note beside Miyake.

Isha read over his shoulder. “You have created three different stages of invitation.”

“Four. Saitō has already accepted.” Thomas seemed pleased by the accuracy of the classification, which was precisely the problem.

“That is worse.”

“It is accurate,” he said, and Isha took the pen away from him.

She took the pen and moved to the venue page. Beneath the final requirement, she wrote one more line in larger letters than Thomas had used for anything else that morning.

**Find places before inventing more categories.**

Thomas read it, then looked at her. “Is that an instruction?”

“Yes.”

He closed the notebook.