## Chapter 379 — Clear Sunday

Sunday, 19 December, began with exactly the weather Isha had asked for.

The sky over Sendai was clear enough that the low winter sun reached deep into flat 202. There was little wind. The balcony rail shone where the light caught it, and the buildings beyond looked unusually sharp against the pale blue. It was still December; opening the balcony door proved that immediately. Cold air moved through the LDK, carrying the dry smell of winter and making Thomas retreat from the doorway in his socks.

Isha remained there for another few seconds.

“This is good.”

Thomas, halfway through putting the kettle on, looked over his shoulder. “You specified normal temperature.”

“I did.”

“You could have specified warmer.”

“That would have been suspicious.”

Thomas considered the bright rectangle of sunlight across the floor. After yesterday, suspicion seemed a rather weak objection to anything. He had watched a planet turn above a man's hand and then eaten the remainder of a fruit scone several miles over Larchmeet.

“I'm not certain weather has much work left to do on the suspiciousness problem.”

Isha smiled and closed the balcony door.

They had slept late. Neither had planned to, but Saturday had exhausted them more completely than its physical demands justified. Thomas had woken once shortly after seven, registered pale light around the curtains and Isha warm against his back, then gone to sleep again. By the time they properly emerged from the bedroom it was nearly ten.

Breakfast followed the same lack of ambition. Thomas made eggs and toast, cut an apple between them and ignored the part of himself that could have turned a free Sunday into an opportunity to prove something with pastry. Isha took her tea to the sofa. Thomas brought coffee and joined her with his feet tucked beneath the low table.

Their phones stayed on the sideboard.

The strange nameless group conversation had already acquired more activity that morning than either of them had expected when they accepted it. After that, it had gone quiet. Thomas found the silence reassuring. The existence of a route did not oblige anyone to use it continuously.

Isha drew the throw across both their legs and leaned into him.

For a while they did nothing more intellectually demanding than decide whether the sunlight made the television difficult to see. It did. They left the television off.

Thomas eventually said, “He was much more normal than I expected.”

Isha made a small sound of agreement.

“I know I said that yesterday. I keep coming back to it.”

“You expected something else?”

“I don't know what.” Thomas rested his cup against his knee. “Someone calmer, perhaps. More certain. If a person can make a door into another reality, part of me apparently thinks he should also know what he's doing.”

Isha turned enough to look at him. “That would be more reassuring.”

“Yes.”

“And possibly more dangerous.”

Thomas thought about that.

Ian's nervousness had made him easier to understand. His uncertainty had also made the impossible power around him less comfortable. A careful, all-knowing being with a plan could at least be imagined as internally consistent. Ian had cried, forgotten which of Thomas's relatives had asked him a question, admitted to being distracted by Isha's attractiveness while designing events, and then placed an entire inhabited planet over his palm because he had wondered whether he could.

“You're right,” Thomas said.

“I know.”

He gave her a look.

Isha settled more comfortably against him. “I did not say it to win.”

“You sounded pleased.”

“I can be correct and pleased.”

Thomas drank his coffee.

The old ending plan still existed on his phone. So did the six prompts from the recycling bin. He had not reopened either after Kanno left on Saturday night.

Isha had.

She told him so without much ceremony.

“I read the hospital prompts once more before we slept.”

Thomas lowered his cup. “Why?”

“I wanted to know whether I had remembered them accurately.”

“And?”

“I had.”

Her voice stayed even, but her fingers had found the edge of the throw and were working the seam between thumb and forefinger.

Thomas waited.

Isha looked towards the bright window rather than at him. “I am still angry about that one.”

“I know.”

“I think I am more angry now that I have slept.”

Thomas let that sit.

The previous afternoon had demanded response after response: listen to Ian, ask a question, read a document, decide whether to accept an apology, work out whether something was claim or evidence, then be distracted by scones and omnipotence. Anger had shared the room with curiosity, pity, humour and the sheer strangeness of finally seeing the man himself. Morning had fewer competitors.

“He asked for you to be unconscious for longer,” Isha said. “That is the part I keep returning to. Not the machine producing an unexpectedly severe version. He wanted longer.”

Thomas nodded.

“And then he was already thinking about us being home afterward. About Cleanse. About me looking after you.”

“About nurse-Isha-dom.”

She turned her head.

Thomas immediately regretted helping.

“I am trying not to make this funny.”

“Sorry.”

Isha's expression softened, though she did not smile. “It *is* a little funny. That is inconvenient.”

Thomas put his coffee down and shifted closer until their shoulders fitted more comfortably together.

“What bothers you most?”

She considered the question seriously.

“That he could think about my fear as part of the shape of the chapter and not notice it as fear.” She paused. “I believe him when he says that is one of his weaknesses. The prompts support it. He was thinking about systems and pacing and what would happen next. I don't think he sat there wanting me frightened.”

Her hand left the seam of the throw and settled on Thomas's thigh.

“But I was frightened.”

“I know.”

“I don't need him to be cruel for me to dislike what he did.”

Thomas covered her hand with his.

“No.”

The conversation stayed there for a while. Thomas had no urge to make Ian easier for Isha to forgive, or harder. Yesterday had done something useful by giving them specifics. The hospital was no longer an event vaguely attributed to the System while Ian hovered somewhere outside it. There was a prompt. It contained intent. It also contained uncertainty and things the generated chapter later handled differently.

Specific responsibility was less comfortable than mystery. It was also easier to argue with.

Isha rested her cheek against Thomas's shoulder.

“The attraction part doesn't bother me much,” she said eventually.

Thomas glanced down at her.

“I know he finds me attractive. Many people do.”

“Thank you for the modest framing.”

“It would be strange to pretend otherwise.”

Thomas could not dispute that either.

Isha continued. “What bothered me was the sequence. He notices something he finds attractive, then begins arranging a situation around it and forgets that the people inside the situation will experience all the other parts too.”

Thomas remembered Ian's embarrassment when he had admitted it. He also remembered how quickly his own discomfort had shifted from jealousy—which had barely existed—to something closer to concern about authorship becoming appetite.

“I thought I'd mind the attraction more,” he admitted.

“You didn't?”

“Not really. The swan policy helped.”

Isha's shoulders moved with a short laugh.

Thomas smiled. “More seriously, he didn't behave as though being attracted to you entitled him to anything. That part was straightforward. I minded him using it as an ingredient.”

“Yes.”

“Which is a very strange sentence.”

“It has been a strange weekend.”

The sun crept farther across the floor.

At eleven they moved only because Thomas wanted another coffee and Isha wanted to sit where the sunlight had reached the rug. They took the cushions down and ended up on the floor, backs against the sofa, their earlier plan to have a productive Sunday disappearing without resistance.

Thomas brought his phone this time.

He did not open the prompts.

Instead he found the photograph Ian had shown them of the filenames.

There it was.

**long-range-seal-ending-arc-plan.md**

Below that, later:

**earth_arc.md**

And then:

**marriage_arc.md**

Thomas handed the phone to Isha.

“I didn't really process that one yesterday.”

She knew which one immediately.

“Marriage.”

“Yes.”

Isha enlarged the photograph unnecessarily, as though the extra size might reveal what the filename itself did not.

The file's date came well before their wedding. That was unsurprising. Ian had said he planned arcs. They had already read a document which mapped out their deaths, hospital waking and Earth life long before those events occurred.

Still, *marriage_arc.md* felt different.

Isha handed the phone back.

“I don't want to read it.”

Thomas had been about to say the same thing and felt a small, disproportionate relief.

“No.”

“If he offers?”

“I'd say no.”

She looked at him. “Even if it explains something?”

“What would I want it to explain?”

Isha's wedding band caught a line of sunlight as she moved her hand.

Thomas looked at it.

He remembered the proposal clearly: the green sapphire, his planning, the trouble of making the words come out when the moment finally arrived. He remembered the paperwork months later, the witness boxes, Tokyo, the legal notification and the restaurant courtyard. If Ian had made notes around those things, Thomas could imagine reading them. He could also imagine every subsequent memory acquiring an unwanted second version: what they had lived beside what somebody outside had hoped they would live.

“I know why I proposed,” he said. “At least I know why I experienced proposing.”

Isha's eyes narrowed slightly at the qualification.

Thomas noticed.

“Sorry. That sounded worse than I meant it.”

“It sounded like you were about to argue yourself out of your own proposal.”

“I wasn't.”

“Good.”

He looked down at the filename again and locked the screen.

“I don't need the notes.”

Isha reached across and took the phone from him, placing it face down on the low table.

“Neither do I.”

That decision proved surprisingly easy.

The harder subject came later, when the angle of the sun changed and Isha looked through the window at a sky almost painfully similar in colour to the atmosphere they had descended through the day before.

“I keep thinking about Larchmeet.”

Thomas had been thinking about it too.

He shifted until he was sitting beside her rather than behind.

“I couldn't see the houses properly.”

“No.”

“I knew where they were.”

“So did I.”

The view had not given them what a photograph from the village would have given. There had been no faces, no voices, no details of Kelda's workshop or Thomas's family farm. That was part of why it had stayed bearable. Larchmeet had existed below them in scale: roads, roofs, smoke, fields, the shape of remembered country.

Isha drew one knee up.

“I wanted to go down.”

Thomas nodded.

“I knew I would before he even said we could.”

“So did I.”

She looked at him. “Would you have?”

“If you'd said yes?”

“No. If you were alone.”

Thomas took longer over that.

Yesterday he had been able to tell Ian he wanted to descend while also agreeing they should not. Today the question felt more personal.

“I don't think so,” he said. “I would have wanted to. I think I would have been afraid that once I could see Mum or Dad or Tessa, I wouldn't be able to leave cleanly.”

Isha nodded.

“And it would have been their day too.”

“Yes.”

“They had not asked for us to appear.”

Thomas leaned his head back against the sofa.

The possibility itself was difficult. Ian had made distance look trivial. They had spent months treating one page each way as precious, dangerous and astonishingly expensive to whatever System still reached between worlds. Yesterday, a café table had descended from space to within a few miles of the village because Ian decided it could.

The old limitations still mattered because Thomas and Isha had lived under them. Ian's mechanism did not make those months foolish. It simply existed beside them, obeying different rules.

“Do you want to see it again?” Thomas asked.

“Not soon.”

He turned his head.

Isha's answer had come quickly.

“I am glad I saw it. Very glad.” She paused, searching for the next part. “If we do it often, I think I would begin looking for more. The village, then the houses, then Kelda, then my mother. Eventually I would be watching people who don't know I am there.”

Thomas thought of Ian refusing their request for sound.

“We got close to that yesterday.”

“Yes.”

“I was glad he stopped us.”

“So was I.”

Isha moved her foot until it touched his.

“Maybe one day, if we can ask them.”

Thomas considered the next correspondence page, the effort required to explain a floating observation point to people whose experience of Earth terms was already being stretched by photographs and recorded voices.

“Kelda would ask how the load works.”

“She would.”

“And then say the table has no honest support.”

“She would be correct.”

The imagined complaint pulled a smile from both of them.

Thomas let the thought of the next passage remain where it was. They did not need to add another question yet. The correspondence already carried enough weight.

Near noon, Isha stood and stretched.

Thomas looked up.

The movement drew her full height against the window, pale hair catching the sun and one fading remnant of the Naruse bout still faintly visible where the light found it.

“What?”

“You're very tall.”

She looked down at him.

“You discovered this yesterday?”

“No. I'm changing the subject.”

“Poorly.”

“I thought so.”

Isha held out a hand.

Thomas took it and let her pull him to his feet.

They had asked for good weather. Staying inside all day now seemed perversely literal, so they dressed for the cold and went out with no destination beyond walking for a while.

The air was sharper than the view from the window had suggested. Isha approved. Thomas zipped his coat higher.

They avoided the station and the busier streets, following local roads until the buildings opened enough for sunlight to reach them cleanly. Winter had stripped most of the deciduous trees. The remaining leaves were brown, curled and stubborn. A cyclist passed. Somewhere behind a wall, somebody was beating dust from bedding. Nothing in the neighbourhood behaved as though its weather had been commissioned from outside reality.

Isha walked with her hands in her coat pockets.

“This is what I wanted.”

Thomas looked around.

“The road?”

“The day.”

There was no planned photograph, no impossible doorway, no family waiting at the end of it. They stopped at a vending machine because Thomas wanted coffee and Isha wanted warm corn soup, then sat for a while on a bench that was cold despite the sun.

Thomas held his can between both hands.

“Do you think we'll become friends with him?”

Isha drank from the soup can before answering.

“Possibly.”

“That sounded cautious.”

“It is cautious.”

Thomas waited.

Isha watched a pair of sparrows working around the edge of a hedge.

“I like him more now. I believe he cares about us. I also think caring about us has caused some of the problems.”

Thomas nodded.

“He knows too much.”

“Yes. And he can do too much.”

“We could cause the opposite problem.”

She looked at him.

Thomas turned the warm can slowly between his palms.

“If we start thinking of him as the person who can fix things. Weather. Money. Work. Someone being ill. Something we want from the other world.”

Isha's expression changed slightly.

“The kilogram of gold.”

“That was his example, but yes.”

“He already knows the gold was a bad idea.”

“I know. I mean us.”

The thought had been building since Ian asked what tired omnipotence could give them. Yesterday, Isha had chosen weather precisely because it was small. The request had felt almost ceremonial: proof that they could ask him for something and still determine how they used it.

The danger was obvious once Thomas imagined a second request, then a tenth.

Isha looked down at her soup.

“I don't want our friendship with him to become requests.”

“Neither do I.”

“That does not mean never asking.”

“No.”

“Good. I don't want another constitution.”

Thomas smiled. “We do have a tendency.”

“You do.”

“We.”

Isha conceded that with a small tilt of her head.

They finished their drinks and walked home by a different route.

By the time they reached 202, Thomas had decided he wanted to cook something slow enough to occupy the later afternoon without turning dinner into a project. He took stock of the refrigerator, found chicken thighs, mushrooms, onions and enough root vegetables to make a simple braise, then looked towards Isha.

“Kanno?”

Isha understood immediately.

“Yes.”

Thomas sent an ordinary message.

`Dinner here? Around six thirty. I am cooking. We would like to talk about yesterday if you want to.`

The reply came several minutes later.

`Yes. I was planning to eat something less good.`

Thomas showed Isha.

“She has healthy expectations.”

“She knows you.”

Thomas chose not to investigate whether that was praise.

They spent the first half of the afternoon doing almost nothing. Isha lay lengthways on the sofa with her feet across Thomas's lap and read. Thomas started a book, read six pages, realised he had retained none of them and put it aside. At some point he fell asleep with one hand resting around Isha's ankle.

When he woke, she had covered him with the throw and moved only far enough to reach her own book more comfortably.

The weather outside remained clear.

---

Kanno had intended to spend Sunday sorting photographs.

By one o'clock she had sorted twelve.

The rest remained spread across her monitor in groups she had changed twice without improving. Walls, painted concrete, old tile, plywood, exterior render, a metal shutter. Rectangles where signs had once been fixed. Cleaner patches protected from years of weather. Screw holes. Adhesive shadows. A strip of paint whose colour made sense only because something had covered it.

Forty-three photographs had seemed like a substantial body of work when she told Thomas and Isha the number after the wedding.

Today it looked like forty-three photographs.

Kanno sat back from the monitor.

The clear light outside was excellent for exactly the sort of thing she photographed. It was also, if Ian's claim was true, partly there because Isha had asked for it.

That thought irritated her.

Not because she objected to the weather. It was objectively useful. What irritated her was the way the explanation tried to attach itself to everything. Sunlight on a wall had been simple on Friday. Now there was a second possible sentence behind it.

*The man outside reality made the light better.*

Kanno refused the sentence.

She put on her coat and went out.

Her camera came with her because that had been the plan before any of this happened.

She walked for just under an hour. The light was clean, low and directional, good at showing texture. She photographed the pale ghost of a removed notice board beside a service entrance, then a wall where three old fixing holes formed a shape too obvious to interest her. A painted rectangle behind a vending-machine space was better. She took four frames, disliked three, and kept one provisionally.

Nobody opened another reality.

Nobody held the Earth above a hand.

Kanno found this productive.

Back home, she transferred the photographs and made tea. Thomas's dinner invitation was waiting. She accepted, then returned to the contact sheets.

Yesterday had placed her in a position she had chosen and still did not entirely know how to name.

She had stayed in flat 202 while Thomas and Isha walked through the flexible-room door. That had been deliberate. She had wanted an Earth-side point that continued normally, a person who knew when they left and could confirm when they returned. She had also wanted them to know somebody was there.

She had repeatedly said she was not their supervisor.

The fact that she had needed to say it repeatedly was beginning to bother her.

Kanno turned away from the monitor.

She was their friend. Sometimes friendship meant waiting in someone's apartment while they visited a tired omnipotent Englishman in an artificial café. Apparently.

It did not follow that she should wait every time.

She did not want a permanent chair outside the impossible door. She did not want passage dates, Ian contacts or strange objects quietly becoming part of her obligations. Her work already contained enough clients who mistook reliability for infinite availability.

At the same time, the thought of Thomas and Isha deciding that they should protect her from the strange parts annoyed her almost as much.

Kanno had asked to know.

She had stayed after the first disclosure. She had looked at Tessa's arrow, Thomas's wooden bird, Isha's ribbon and the photographs Ian claimed came from outside their world. She had listened to the train account. She had chosen to remain in 202 yesterday. She had joined the group conversation that should not have been technically possible.

Those were her decisions.

Her phone lay beside the keyboard.

The nameless group chat was quiet.

Kanno did not open it.

She thought instead about what Thomas and Isha had told her after coming home: Ian crying; Ian showing them the unedited hospital prompts; Ian appearing far less certain than his power suggested; Ian refusing to let them listen to Larchmeet from above; Ian accepting their refusal when he proposed following them back through the door.

The last two mattered to her more than the planet.

Power was evidence of capability. Refusal was evidence of behaviour.

She disliked how neatly that sentence formed and did not write it down.

Her earlier answer to Ian returned to her.

*Maybe it would be nice to meet one day. Not tomorrow.*

She had meant it.

Kanno looked at the forty-three photographs again.

She thought she might want to meet him eventually.

Not because Thomas and Isha had done it. Not because an omnipotent man was intrinsically interesting. The omnipotence, if anything, made the idea less attractive.

She wanted to know the person who had acquired a route into her friends' lives and, now, a small route into hers.

But not yet.

She wanted the idea to become boring first.

That seemed like a useful condition.

Kanno reopened the contact sheet and moved one photograph from the third group to the second.

Then she kept working until it was time to leave.

---

Thomas's dinner smelled ready before Kanno reached the door.

He had browned the chicken, then let it cook slowly with onions, mushrooms, carrot and turnip in a light stock sharpened with mustard and a little vinegar. Potatoes had been mashed with butter rather than transformed into anything ambitious. Isha had made a green salad and had been explicitly instructed that tearing leaves counted as sufficient participation.

Kanno entered 202 at six twenty-eight.

“You are early,” Thomas said.

“Two minutes.”

“Exactly.”

“Yes.”

She removed her coat.

Isha appeared from the LDK and accepted the bottle of sparkling water Kanno had brought.

“No biscuits?”

“I have reviewed yesterday's consumption.”

Thomas looked past her towards the genkan. “You ate most of them.”

“I was abandoned in another reality's waiting room.”

“You chose to stay.”

“I still required supplies.”

The conversation survived into the LDK but did not become an argument. Thomas served dinner before the food could acquire symbolic importance.

Kanno took one bite, then another.

“This is very good.”

“Thank you.”

Thomas made no attempt to explain the stock.

Isha noticed and smiled.

They ate for several minutes before yesterday returned.

Kanno was the one who brought it back.

“I have decided something.”

Thomas looked up from his plate.

“I don't want to be the person who waits here every time you meet Ian.”

Isha's fork stopped briefly, then continued.

“Good.”

Kanno glanced at her. “That was fast.”

“We don't want you to be.”

Thomas nodded. “Yesterday was useful because it was the first time and because you wanted to be here. I don't think it needs to become a procedure.”

“Exactly.”

Kanno cut a piece of chicken.

“If you meet him again, I might stay here. I might come with you. I might be at home working and expect a message afterward. I don't want my friendship with you to become a control room.”

Thomas's expression changed at the wording.

“I like that.”

“It was not designed for publication.”

“I still like it.”

Kanno ignored him.

“I also think I want to meet him someday.”

That surprised them more.

Isha leaned back slightly. “Really?”

“Yes. Probably.”

Thomas waited rather than filling in the reason.

Kanno appreciated that.

“I don't want you two to be my permanent translators for him. If he is allowed to message me, and I am going to remain part of the people who know about this, I would rather eventually form my own opinion.”

Isha nodded slowly.

“That makes sense.”

“Not soon,” Kanno added. “I want to stop being curious first.”

Thomas frowned. “Why?”

“Because curiosity is a poor reason to enter a place controlled by somebody who can remove the floor and take you into orbit.”

Thomas accepted that after a moment.

Isha looked more amused. “The floor was not necessary.”

“I know. Your description was clear.”

“It was very cool.”

“You have said.”

Thomas took another mouthful of mashed potato.

Kanno looked between them. “You both look better than last night.”

“We slept,” Isha said.

“And discussed it for most of the morning.”

“Most?”

Thomas glanced at her. “We also went for a walk.”

“The weather?”

“Perfect,” Isha said.

Kanno's eyes narrowed very slightly.

“Do you find that comforting?”

Thomas answered first.

“Somewhat. Less than I did before seeing what he could do.”

Isha nodded. “I asked for something small. He did the small thing.”

“And now?”

“We enjoyed it.”

Kanno waited for the rest.

There wasn't one.

She returned to dinner.

Thomas eventually told her about the **marriage_arc.md** filename.

Kanno put down her fork.

“You did not read that.”

“No.”

“Good.”

Isha smiled. “That was also my answer.”

Thomas looked mildly outnumbered. “I agreed.”

“I know. I am reinforcing correct behaviour.”

He gave her a look which suggested Kanno and Isha had become briefly too similar.

Kanno continued. “If you read it, you will spend months wondering whether every decision you remember was in the file.”

“That was roughly my concern.”

“And you already know you married each other.”

Isha touched her ring against the side of her glass.

“Yes.”

Kanno left it there.

The hospital prompts took longer.

Isha described her anger from the morning. Thomas added that the specificity helped him, even when he disliked what it showed. Kanno listened without trying to arbitrate between them or improve Ian's apology.

When they finished, she pushed a mushroom through the remaining sauce on her plate.

“I think showing you the prompts was probably the most useful thing he did.”

Isha looked at her.

“More useful than showing us Larchmeet?”

“For trust? Yes.”

Thomas considered that.

Kanno continued before either could turn the statement into a larger theory.

“He could have shown you pretty things all afternoon. Instead he showed you evidence that made him look careless.”

“That was how I felt,” Isha said.

Thomas nodded. “He was very exposed.”

“I don't especially care whether he felt exposed.”

The bluntness made Thomas pause.

Kanno looked at him. “I care that he showed you the thing anyway.”

Thomas smiled faintly.

“That is very Kanno.”

“I hope so.”

They cleared the main plates together. Thomas tried to wave Kanno back towards the table, but she took two plates from him and continued into the kitchen.

“I am a guest, not furniture.”

“I was going to bring out fruit.”

“You can do both.”

Isha followed with the glasses.

By the time they sat again, three peeled mandarins occupied a plate in the centre of the table. Thomas had divided them badly enough that one pile was visibly larger.

Isha took the larger share.

Kanno noticed and said nothing.

Thomas resumed the conversation from a different direction.

“We also talked about whether we could become too dependent on him.”

“That seems possible.”

“Not emotionally. Well, perhaps emotionally too. I meant practically.”

Isha separated two mandarin segments.

“If we begin asking him to solve everything because he can.”

Kanno nodded. “Gold.”

“Gold. Weather. Work. Illness. Problems with documents. Anything.”

Thomas peeled away a strip of white pith.

“I don't think we need a rule that says never ask. Yesterday worked partly because we did ask.”

“Then don't make a rule.”

Thomas looked at Kanno.

She ate a mandarin segment.

“You three appear to enjoy constitutions.”

Isha laughed.

Thomas pointed at her. “She said almost exactly that earlier.”

“Then listen to your wife.”

“I frequently do.”

“Frequently?”

Isha looked pleased by the opening.

Thomas abandoned the argument before it became structurally unsound.

Kanno took another piece of fruit.

“For what it is worth, I think you should notice when you are asking him because he is your friend and when you are asking because he is useful.”

Thomas's hand stopped.

Isha's eyes moved to him as well.

Kanno saw both reactions.

“That sounded more polished than I intended.”

“No,” Thomas said. “It was useful.”

“Do not become attached to it.”

He smiled.

The thought stayed with him nevertheless.

Ian had told them what trust would look like from his side: being asked for an opinion or a small intervention because they valued him, not merely because he was incompetently omnipotent.

Thomas had understood the sentence yesterday.

He understood it better over mandarins.

Isha reached across and stole one of his segments.

“That was mine.”

“You were thinking.”

“That doesn't transfer ownership.”

“You took the larger pile.”

“I chose quickly.”

Kanno sat back.

“I am pleased the marriage survived the external authorship discussion.”

Thomas looked at her. “It was close.”

Isha ate the stolen segment.

The serious conversation had mostly exhausted itself by then. Kanno told them she had spent the afternoon working on the wall photographs, and the subject changed with much less resistance than it would have a few months earlier.

“How many now?” Isha asked.

“Forty-five, technically. Two from today may survive.”

Thomas stood to fetch Kanno's phone from the sideboard where she had left it charging.

She stopped him.

“I can get it.”

Thomas sat down again.

Kanno retrieved the phone herself, opened her contact sheet and pulled her chair closer between them.

The first new photograph showed a service wall with a pale rectangular trace where something had been removed.

Thomas enlarged it.

“This one is obvious.”

“Yes. I probably won't use it.”

The second was less clear: painted concrete, three faint fixing points, a shift in colour that only gradually resolved into the former edge of something rectangular.

Isha looked longer.

“I like this one.”

“Why?”

“I did not understand it immediately.”

Kanno nodded.

“That is why I kept it.”

Thomas leaned closer to the screen.

For the next twenty minutes, the impossible world outside their phones received no attention at all. Kanno showed them walls. Isha rejected one because the shadow looked too deliberate. Thomas preferred another because the repair paint had aged differently around the old fixing holes. Kanno disagreed with both of them twice and moved one photograph into a new group anyway.

Dinner plates waited in the kitchen.

Outside, the promised clear Sunday darkened into a cold December evening while the three of them argued about a photograph of an unremarkable wall.