## Chapter 360 — The Right Size Kanno arrived for Sunday lunch expecting, in her words, either wedding planning or another impossible problem. Thomas had not told her which. That had been Isha’s suggestion: **come to lunch, we want to ask you something** had produced three dots in the group chat and then Kanno’s reply, **Is everyone physically all right?** Thomas had answered yes. Kanno had responded, **Then I can wait until tomorrow.** The restaurant was a small place several streets from Sendai Station, busy enough at noon that their English would not become the room’s main sound and quiet enough that they did not have to lean over the table. Thomas and Isha arrived first. Isha wore the engagement ring because the day contained no climbing, lifting, fighting or bowstring likely to object to it. Thomas had noticed her putting it on after breakfast and had managed not to make the observation into an event. Kanno reached them two minutes after the reservation time, sat down, put her phone face-down beside the menu and looked at both of them. “No new messages from outside reality?” “No,” Isha said. “No unexplained objects?” “No.” “Good.” Kanno opened the menu. “Then why am I being fed?” Thomas looked at Isha. They had discussed whether there was a correct point in a meal to ask a close friend to attend their wedding. Before ordering seemed abrupt. After dessert seemed theatrical. Somewhere between soup and rice implied a formal schedule neither wanted. Isha had eventually told him that if he spent longer deciding, she would ask Kanno while taking off her shoes in the genkan. Thomas chose now. “We want you at our wedding.” Kanno’s hand stopped halfway down the menu. The restaurant continued without her. A plate touched a counter. Someone near the entrance laughed. A server called an order into the kitchen. Kanno looked first at Thomas, then at Isha. “As a guest,” Thomas added. Isha turned her head towards him. “We had not reached the part where she assumed otherwise.” “I was preventing ambiguity.” “You were creating it.” Kanno closed the menu. “Yes,” she said. Thomas stopped preparing the next sentence. Kanno’s expression had changed very little, but the answer had come without the dry delay she usually allowed herself when something mattered. “Yes,” she repeated, quieter. “I would like to be there.” Isha reached across the table and touched the back of Kanno’s hand. She did not hold it for long. Kanno turned her hand beneath the contact anyway, briefly catching Isha’s fingers before letting go. Thomas felt the words he had rehearsed become unnecessary. Kanno looked at the joined hands. “You were going to ask me before Thursday?” “Yes,” Isha said. “You were already definite.” “Good. I would prefer not to discover that an external-reality incident improved my social rank.” “It did not,” Thomas said. “You were already annoyingly important.” Kanno’s mouth shifted. “That is a poor invitation speech.” “The invitation speech finished at yes.” “Also good.” She let Isha’s hand go and looked at Thomas. “And I am not the photographer.” “There,” Thomas said to Isha. “The ambiguity existed.” “I own a camera,” Kanno continued. “I may use the camera. If you give me a shot list, I will put it through production and return it with comments.” Thomas smiled. “We had already written that if we want someone responsible for photographs, it should be someone else.” “What do you want me to do?” Kanno asked. Isha answered before Thomas could construct a role. “Come. Sit with us. Eat. Complain if something deserves it.” “That is dangerously close to my normal social function.” “Yes.” Kanno considered this. “Acceptable.” Kanno’s gaze sharpened. “You have written this down.” “We have a notebook,” Thomas admitted. “Of course you have a notebook.” Kanno looked at Isha. “The wedding does not explain Thomas.” The server arrived before Thomas could defend himself. They ordered, and the conversation had to wait through water, small dishes and the ordinary negotiations of lunch. Kanno did not ask to see the notebook immediately. That pleased Isha more than she expected. For the first ten minutes after accepting, Kanno spoke about a client who had changed one headline four times and then returned to the second version without admitting it. Thomas described a university form whose date field now belonged to the office that actually observed the date. Isha reported that a beginner at work had managed to put both feet into the same side of a harness and then, correctly, asked for help before doing anything else. Only after the first dishes had been cleared did Kanno return to the wedding. “Who else knows?” “Saitō accepted,” Isha said. “Kanno, Matsuda, Saitō. Miyake we want there but have not asked yet.” Kanno counted on her fingers without making the gesture obvious. “Matsuda does not know because you have no date.” “Yes,” Thomas said. “Miyake can also wait until there is a date. Saitō knows because we asked her in person and she said yes before we had solved anything.” “She also said no necessary stairs,” Isha added. “That sounds like Saitō.” Kanno hesitated, then asked, “Are you doing anything for the people who cannot be here?” Isha knew which people she meant. “Not empty chairs.” Thomas nodded. “We talked about it. Mira, Rowan, Sereth, Kelda and everyone else are not absent because they failed to attend. I do not want a room full of symbols pretending they could have.” “We may carry something small,” Isha said. “Or say names privately. We have not decided.” Kanno looked down at the table for a moment. “All right. I was not suggesting the chairs. I wanted to know whether you had already been forced into that question.” “We have,” Thomas said. “We stopped before solving more than we needed.” “That may be your most convincing evidence of personal growth.” Thomas took out his phone rather than the notebook and opened a photograph of the venue page from Saturday. He had learned enough from Kanno not to bring a physical planning folder to lunch with a publishing professional who might mistake it for an invitation to work. The handwritten list contained daylight, a genuinely small room, easy seating, no necessary stairs, accessible toilet and taxi route, greenery if possible, an indoor room that still worked in rain, food in the same place or close by and a short ceremony whose important words would be theirs. At the bottom, in Isha’s larger handwriting, was: **Find places before inventing more categories.** Kanno read the page. “How many people?” “Six to twelve as a search range,” Thomas said. “Not a cap.” “We have four people we definitely want apart from us,” Isha said. “Perhaps more. We do not want the room deciding that.” Kanno enlarged the photograph and read it again. “Have you visited anywhere?” “No.” “Then at present you have designed a hypothetical room with unusually good toilets.” Thomas looked offended. Isha laughed into her water. Kanno returned the phone. “Go and see one of the conventional places you think you may not want.” Thomas frowned. “Why that first?” “Because photographs are good at hiding scale. And because you are comparing every venue to a room that does not yet exist.” She took another bite of lunch, apparently finished with advice. Isha looked at Thomas. “That is sensible.” “I had already shortlisted categories.” “That is not the same as seeing one.” Thomas admitted it was not. Kanno’s acceptance sat differently in the conversation after that. It did not turn lunch solemn. She wanted to know whether their ceremony needed a legal officiant; Thomas said the legal registration and ceremony did not have to be the same act, and they were still keeping the administrative filing practical rather than making the ceremony imitate municipal procedure. She asked whether they wanted wedding clothes. They did not know. Rings? Also later. Cake? Thomas said there was no need to establish a position on compulsory cake before visiting a venue, then looked at Isha as if expecting praise for having learned something. “You are improving,” Isha said. “Slowly.” Kanno looked between them. “This may be the first wedding planned partly through corrective feedback from a paper hanging.” Isha’s second hanging had not yet earned that level of responsibility, but she accepted the association. When they left, the afternoon was still hot. Late-August sunlight reflected harshly from pavement beyond the shade of the shopping streets. They walked together as far as Kanno’s route towards the station. At the corner, Kanno stopped. “Tell me when there is a date,” she said. “Not because I need to approve it.” “We know,” Isha said. “And if there is a small-press event that day, I will not attend the small-press event.” Thomas smiled. “That was the intention of inviting you.” Kanno adjusted the strap on her bag and looked at them both. “I am glad you asked.” The sentence came without her usual dry protection. Isha stepped forward and hugged her. Kanno accepted the hug with one arm, then the other, holding her for a few seconds before looking past Isha at Thomas. “You too, apparently.” Thomas joined them awkwardly enough that Kanno complained about being crushed by engaged people in public. The complaint restored the proportions of the afternoon. They separated at the crossing. Thomas and Isha walked home by a longer route because neither had anywhere else to be. --- Monday morning put Thomas back in front of the four-date pilot. No one congratulated it for surviving the weekend. That was one of the reasons he liked it. An enrolment-completion date had appeared in the shared view at 09:12, entered by the office that completed enrolment. A separate student’s first-university-contact date remained blank because no one had yet made that contact. Two cases sat in the exception view because the dates disagreed in ways that actually required human attention. Sugiyama stood beside Thomas’s desk for less than a minute. “Student affairs entered this one themselves.” “I saw.” “They did not email us first.” Thomas looked at the screen. “Should we send them a thank-you card?” “No. They may stop.” She returned to her desk. Thomas opened the first exception and spent twelve minutes on a problem whose solution involved asking a colleague whether a student had actually arrived on the date in the imported travel record or merely changed flights. No one needed him to claim the date in order to be useful. At the climbing centre, Isha’s Monday shift contained two beginner sessions, a rental-shoe sizing problem and no emergency at all. The First Aid Provider certificate remained copied in the staff file. Nobody bled simply because she had qualified to deal with bleeding. Ishikawa asked her to review the incident kit after lunch, and the only discrepancy was a packet approaching its replacement date. Isha found this satisfying. By six, she was home first. A long plain cardboard box had arrived that afternoon. It lay on the LDK floor when Thomas came in. He stopped at the genkan. “That looks ominous.” “It is the arrow box.” “Oh.” The tone change made Isha smile. They had chosen nothing elaborate: a long rigid lidded storage box, deep enough that the fletching would not touch the top and plain enough that it did not turn Tessa’s arrow into a display object. Isha lined the base with unbleached cotton. Thomas brought the arrow from the flexible room still wrapped in the temporary cloth. They checked the point, binding, fletching and ash mark once because moving it was a reason to check, not because every evening now required evidence work. Isha laid the shaft into the box. It fitted with several centimetres to spare. Thomas looked at the empty space beside it. “No second arrow.” “No.” He had not meant the comment as a request. The missing first arrow belonged to another old road, already used and gone. The surviving one needed no companion invented for symmetry. Isha folded another strip of cotton near the point so it could not shift if the box moved, put on the lid and slid it onto the high shelf they had cleared for it. “Better,” she said. Thomas checked that the box sat fully on the shelf and left it there. Sereth’s bowl held onions that evening. Neither of them mentioned the hierarchy this implied. --- By Wednesday, Kanno had sold two more copies of *Until Replaced* through orders that had arrived after the small-press event. She sent the fact to the group chat with a photograph of two addressed envelopes and the message: **The long tail of a small table.** Thomas replied that this was not a statistically defensible sales model. Kanno sent back: **I am not asking international support to validate my business plan.** Isha read the exchange during a break between kyūdō ends and did not contribute. When she returned to the line, the bow required enough attention that publishing disappeared from her mind. That evening, the second paper hanging acquired another grey strip. The first grey strip had been too long. Isha had shortened it, disliked the cleaner line and tied the removed piece back into the lower loop at a different angle. The result now depended aggressively on where a person stood. Thomas entered the LDK, looked at it from the kitchen and changed direction before giving an opinion. “You may look,” Isha said from the floor. “I am looking. I also needed water.” Isha glanced towards the kitchen behind him. “The water is behind you.” Thomas stopped, caught with enough dignity to avoid pretending otherwise. Isha’s engagement ring rested in its case beside her because she had come home from kyūdō and not yet put it back on. Paper, thread, clips and a small pair of scissors covered the low table. Thomas considered the hanging again. “The grey piece looks better from here.” “That is not where it hangs.” “I am giving location-specific evidence.” Isha looked up at him, then at the hanging. “Come here.” He sat beside her. She took his wrist, not his hand, and moved his arm until his pointing finger lined up with the lower loop. “This part.” “It twists.” “Yes. I do not know whether I want it to.” Thomas considered the strip from her angle before answering. “Then I think it is allowed to keep twisting until you know.” Isha released his wrist. That, apparently, was the correct answer. After dinner, Isha put the ring back on. --- The first venue replies arrived on Thursday. Thomas had sent four short enquiries after lunch with Kanno. Two had responded with standard information and links. One was unavailable for private ceremony use below twenty guests. Another required the ceremony to be purchased as part of a package large enough that Thomas stopped reading before the flower options. The remaining two were worth seeing. The first was a central hotel with a dedicated wedding floor, lifts, accessible toilets, taxi access and several ceremony/meal configurations. Its smallest advertised plan began above their expected guest count, but the coordinator had replied that rooms could be adjusted and that a nonreligious guest-witnessed ceremony was possible. The second was not primarily a wedding venue at all. It was a small restaurant in a low modern building a little west of central Sendai, with a private room facing a courtyard garden. The manager had hosted family celebrations and a handful of very small weddings. They could close the room for a short ceremony before lunch or dinner, move furniture within limits and leave the outdoor courtyard entirely optional. Isha read both replies on Thomas’s phone at the dining table. “The first one knows how weddings work. The second one knows how food works.” Thomas leaned closer to the screen. “That is approximately my classification.” “Which worries you more?” He considered. “The first one may sell us a wedding we do not want. The second one may require us to organise parts we have not thought about.” “Good.” Thomas looked at her. “Good?” “Different problems.” He smiled. “Saturday?” Isha checked her calendar. No work, no training, no commitment Kanno had quietly inserted into their lives. “Both.” Thomas booked the hotel for late morning and the restaurant for mid-afternoon. He did not create a comparison table. Isha noticed. --- Friday evening, they finally moved Thomas’s birthday and the passage onto the same visible calendar. His twenty-fifth Earth birthday fell on Wednesday, 15 September. The thirty-cycle estimate from the 16 August passage put the next opening around the same date. They had known that in the abstract for nearly two weeks. Seeing the two items share one square made the overlap feel unnecessarily crowded. Isha stood at the refrigerator with the marker in her hand. “We are not sending on your birthday.” Thomas was at the sink washing rice. “The window does not require immediate use.” “I know.” “We can wait.” “I know.” Thomas looked over his shoulder. Isha had already drawn a small arrow from the uncertain passage note on the fifteenth to the next day. **16 — passage: send arrow question** Thomas dried one hand and came over to look. “You decided that quickly.” “Yes.” He waited. Months earlier that might have been the opening of a different conversation. Now Isha looked at the marker, then at him. “Do you disagree?” “No. I was about to suggest the sixteenth.” “Good.” Thomas took the marker and added a question mark after **passage** because the System still controlled whether the opening actually existed when expected. Isha permitted the punctuation. His birthday remained alone on the fifteenth, and they went back to dinner. --- The hotel wedding floor smelled faintly of flowers and new carpet. Saturday had turned bright and humid after overnight rain. Thomas and Isha arrived early enough to stand outside for five minutes before the appointment, looking at guests from another wedding moving through the lobby in formal clothes. Nothing about the sight made either of them reject the place. The families looked happy. A small child in polished shoes tried to climb onto a luggage trolley and was retrieved by an aunt before the experiment developed. “They are having a wedding,” Isha said. “That was my interpretation.” “They look as if they are having a good one.” Thomas followed her gaze. “Probably.” Isha looked at him. “That means if we dislike this place, it does not mean the place is wrong.” “No.” “Good.” The coordinator met them in a consultation area rather than at the ceremony room. She was professionally cheerful without becoming intrusive, asked their approximate guest count, accessibility needs, whether they wanted a religious, shrine or guest-witnessed ceremony, and whether they expected the meal to be on site. “Do you have a preferred season or date?” she asked. “Not yet,” Thomas said. “We wanted to understand what kind of place we were choosing before asking people to hold dates.” Isha added, “If the room is wrong, an available Saturday does not help.” The coordinator nodded and closed the calendar page she had been ready to show them. “Then today we can treat this as scale and structure. Dates can come later.” “That would help,” Thomas said. He answered the guest count next. “Probably six to twelve, but we do not want to set the final list from the room.” The coordinator did not react to the small number beyond shifting to a different brochure. “For that size, we could use the smaller banquet room after a guest-witnessed ceremony, or arrange the ceremony in the banquet room itself. The chapel seats more, but we do not need to fill it.” Isha watched the pages turn. “We would write our own promises. And I do not think I want a long entrance.” “That is easy to avoid,” the coordinator said. “You can enter together, use a side entrance, or simply begin in the room with your guests. There is no requirement to process down an aisle.” Thomas glanced at Isha. “That is useful.” “And the wording?” Isha asked. “We can give you a structure and timing. The promises can be yours.” This was the first thing the hotel did that both of them liked immediately. The second was access. The lift reached the wedding floor directly. The accessible toilet was on the same corridor. There was seating near every point where guests might wait. A taxi could stop under cover at the main entrance. Saitō could arrive, sit down and move through the whole event without meeting a stair unless she deliberately went looking for one. Thomas wrote **access very good** in the notebook. The coordinator showed them the smallest banquet room first. It was not enormous. Thomas had feared enormous. Instead it was simply larger than their imagination had been. Round tables stood beneath a ceiling high enough to carry recessed lights and decorative panels. The room could be divided with a wall, and the coordinator showed how one half might be arranged for twelve guests. Even divided, the space still expected more people. The carpet pattern repeated too many times before reaching the far wall. Isha walked to the place the coordinator suggested for the ceremony. Thomas stayed near the first row of chairs. “Could you move six chairs closer?” Isha asked. “Certainly.” The coordinator did. Two rows of three became a shallow arc. It improved the arrangement immediately, though the room still carried more empty space than either Thomas or Isha had imagined. Isha stood where she and Thomas would speak. Thomas sat in the chair nearest the aisle and looked back towards the entrance. The room between door and vows was perhaps fifteen metres. Not a cathedral. Not absurd. Longer than she wanted. She walked it anyway. Seven steps became twelve, then more. The soft carpet made almost no sound beneath her shoes. By the time she reached Thomas, she had become aware of the empty room around the chairs instead of the people imagined in them. “Kanno would be far away,” she said. Thomas looked at the nearest chair, which was less than three metres from them. “She would be there.” “I know. The room would still be around her.” The coordinator heard and did not attempt to persuade them out of the reaction. “Would you like to see the smaller chapel? It is more visually contained, although the fixed seating means the aisle is longer.” Thomas and Isha looked at each other. “Yes,” Thomas said. “We should see it.” Kanno had told them to visit a conventional place partly because photographs lied about scale. Refusing to see the conventional room once they were already there would only preserve the theory. The chapel was beautiful, which was inconvenient. White stone-coloured walls, pale wood, daylight through tall glass and greenery visible beyond it. Nothing about it was gaudy. The aisle ran straight between fixed seating to a simple raised front. There was no religious symbol dominating the room, though the space still carried the architecture of a Western chapel. Isha stood at the back and looked towards Thomas. At the other end he looked unusually small—not physically; the distance arranged him that way. She walked halfway down the aisle and stopped. “No.” Thomas nodded. The coordinator, still professional, said, “The banquet-room ceremony may suit your scale better.” “I think so,” Thomas said. “The chapel is very nice.” “It is just not ours,” Isha added. They saw the meal package next. This was where Thomas began accumulating objections faster than he could politely express them. Flowers were optional, but several arrangements assumed them. Photography could be removed. Cake could be reduced. Clothing packages were separate. Sound equipment, ceremony staff, printed place cards, decorative menus, a changing room and a series of small services appeared in combinations that were individually reasonable and collectively made Thomas feel as if he were dismantling a prepared machine to reach the small event underneath. The coordinator noticed. “You do not need most of these,” she said. “The package examples are designed for people who want the venue to provide everything. We can quote only the room, meal, ceremony support and accessibility you need.” Thomas relaxed by a degree. Isha watched him. “That is better.” “It is.” They took the information and thanked the coordinator. Booking never became a serious question before they left. Outside the hotel, the humidity had risen enough that Thomas’s shirt began sticking to his back within a minute. They walked two blocks before finding shade and stopped beneath the overhang of a closed office entrance. Isha took the notebook. Under the hotel name, Thomas had written: **access excellent** **staff flexible** **can use own words** **room still large** **chapel wrong scale** **packages removable** Isha added: **not impossible** Thomas read it. “That is more positive than I expected.” “I did not dislike it.” “Neither did I.” She handed the notebook back. “I do not want to marry you there.” “That seems decisive.” “It is.” Thomas closed the notebook. They went to lunch. The meal was noodles in a small place with eight tables, no private room and no relationship to weddings whatsoever. It did not become a comparison object. Thomas ate too quickly because he had spent the hotel visit being attentive. Isha stole one piece of his tempura and denied theft because they shared finances. By two, they were walking west towards the second appointment. The restaurant looked almost too ordinary from the road. A low building sat back behind a short paved forecourt with three young trees and a narrow planted strip. No wedding sign stood outside. The main entrance was flat from the pavement. Through the front windows they could see a normal dining room preparing for evening service. The manager met them near the entrance and led them past the main room to the private space at the back. Thomas stopped at the threshold. The room was smaller than the hotel consultation lounge, which was immediately promising. Two rectangular tables currently stood end-to-end with fourteen chairs. One wall was plain pale plaster, broken only by a narrow shelf and a simple ceramic piece. The opposite side was mostly glass, opening the view onto a small courtyard where rain-dark stone, low shrubs and two young maples occupied more space than decoration required. The courtyard was green enough to matter and modest enough not to pretend it was a garden estate. The manager slid one of the doors partly open. “This can be used if the weather is good. For photographs, drinks before the meal, or just air. But if it rains, nothing depends on going outside.” Isha looked at Thomas. He had already noticed. The room itself worked before the courtyard was considered. The greenery was additional rather than the part that had to rescue it. The manager continued. “For a ceremony, we normally move the tables to the side or remove one. We can put eight or ten chairs here, or keep the tables if you prefer everyone seated as they will be for the meal. Then we reset during drinks.” Thomas looked from the door to the blank wall. “How long is the room?” The manager gave him an approximate answer and then, seeing the way he looked at the floor, added, “Short.” Isha laughed. Thomas looked betrayed. “I was not going to measure an aisle,” Thomas said. “You were going to count steps.” “That is observation.” The manager, who had met engaged couples before, did not participate. They tried the room with chairs. Not ceremonially. The manager moved two chairs near the pale wall and told them to stand where they thought they would want to speak. Isha chose a place slightly off-centre because the garden looked better from there. Thomas moved beside her, then walked back to the entrance. Seven ordinary steps took Thomas to the entrance; eight if he deliberately slowed. When he turned, Isha was still close enough for him to see the green of her eyes clearly. The chairs they imagined for Kanno, Matsuda, Saitō and Miyake would be close enough that a lowered voice still belonged to the room. Thomas walked back. “Better.” “Yes.” They sat. The manager explained the practical limits. They could have the private room for several hours around lunch or dinner. The restaurant would provide the meal and ordinary room service. They could bring simple flowers or none. They could arrange an outside photographer or let guests take photographs. The restaurant did not provide formal wedding clothes, an officiant or a large ceremony package. They had hosted a few small family weddings where a friend or hired celebrant kept the sequence moving. “Would you require us to use a celebrant?” Thomas asked. “No. We require a contact person and a schedule so the kitchen knows when the meal begins. What you say before that is yours. Some couples ask a friend to guide the order; some hire someone.” Isha shook her head slightly. “Kanno is coming as a guest.” The manager did not know Kanno and therefore accepted the information at face value. “Then you can arrange someone else, or keep the ceremony simple enough that you do not need much guidance.” “That is fine,” Isha said. Thomas, who had been expecting another hidden package requirement, added, “Very fine.” The accessible toilet was on the same level. The route from the entrance was flat. A taxi could pull close to a side entrance if Saitō preferred less walking. The courtyard had one shallow change in level at the threshold, which meant Saitō could ignore it entirely if it was uncomfortable; no ceremony function required crossing it. “Could we all eat at one table?” Isha asked. “For twelve, yes,” the manager said. “Fourteen is still comfortable in this room. If you remain smaller, I would use one long arrangement or two tables close together rather than separate rounds.” “I do not want separate islands of guests,” Isha said. Thomas looked around the room. “One table sounds right.” The manager nodded. “Then we would set the meal that way and work backward from it.” Thomas wrote notes. Isha took the notebook away after the seventh line. “You are here.” “I am recording.” “You can record after.” Thomas allowed the notebook to be confiscated. The manager left them alone for several minutes to look at the room. Without another person speaking, the space changed. It became less like a venue and more like a room in which a thing might happen. Isha walked to the glass. Rain from the night before still darkened the lower stones in the courtyard. A maple leaf moved in a faint current of air. Thomas joined her and looked back across the room. “If we had six people, it would not feel empty. If we had twelve, I do not think it would feel crowded.” Isha followed his gaze. “And no long aisle.” Thomas looked towards the seven or eight steps to the door. “Tragically.” Isha nudged him with her shoulder. They stood there for a while. Nothing in the room resembled the living bough. That pleased Thomas more than a closer imitation might have. There was wood, because rooms contained wood. Green beyond glass, because they liked seeing green. No attempt to rebuild a forest rite from another world in a restaurant in Sendai. Isha touched the engagement ring with her thumb. “Could you marry me here?” Thomas asked. She turned to look at him. “I already said yes.” “I know.” His ears had coloured slightly. Isha saw it and took mercy by not smiling immediately. “I mean the ceremony.” She looked around the room again. At the pale wall where they might stand. At the garden. At the chairs close enough that Saitō could complain without raising her voice. At the tables where Thomas would probably spend part of the meal noticing whether everyone had eaten, even if someone else cooked it. “Yes,” she said. “I could say it here.” Thomas’s shoulders eased. “So could I.” That was all. They did not kiss in the empty private room while the manager was somewhere beyond a partly closed door. Isha did take his hand. Thomas threaded his fingers through hers and remained beside her until the manager returned. The venue had available weekends later in autumn and early winter. The manager offered to email current openings rather than asking them to choose in the room. Thomas accepted gratefully. They still needed to ask Matsuda and Miyake once there was a real date, and they wanted to make sure Saitō could manage the journey comfortably before any deposit made the choice heavier than it needed to be. At the entrance, the manager gave them one sheet containing the private-room terms and a sample menu: no wedding binder, flower catalogue or diagram explaining compulsory cake. Thomas liked the paper more than was reasonable. They stepped outside into late-afternoon light. The heat had begun to weaken. Water still sat in the joint between two paving stones. Isha looked back at the building once, then at Thomas. “Second visit?” Isha asked. “Yes.” “No spreadsheet yet.” Thomas considered pretending offence. “Maybe a very small one.” Isha took the folded information sheet from his hand. “No. You can have it back after you stop trying to turn a second visit into data entry.” “You confiscated the notebook too.” “And returned it,” she said, handing the sheet back. “Eventually.” She kissed his cheek on the pavement. “Second visit first.” Thomas accepted the sequence. On the train home, they sent Kanno one photograph: not of themselves, only the private room with the courtyard visible through the glass. Her reply arrived before the next station. **It contains chairs. Strong start.** Thomas typed: **We may go back.** Three dots appeared. **Then go back before you design it from memory.** Isha leaned against his shoulder while reading. “She knows you.” “This is becoming a problem.” “No.” Thomas put the phone away. At 202, Sereth’s bowl held two plums and one peach. Thomas’s wooden bird remained on the shelf, still badly made. The long box in the flexible room stayed closed. Thomas opened the wedding notebook at the dining table. Beside Kanno’s name he wrote: **accepted** Beneath the second venue he started to write **candidate**. Isha took the pen. She crossed out the word before he completed it and wrote: **visit again** Thomas looked at the page. Then he closed the notebook.