## Chapter 386 - The Week Between

Monday, 10 January arrived without metaphysics.

Thomas woke to the alarm, turned it off before the second vibration and lay still long enough to remember why Saturday felt much farther away than two days. The group chat contained Ian's good-night message and the replies beneath it. Nothing had arrived after them: no photograph, impossible object or unsigned line waiting on either phone. Beside him, Isha was already awake and looking at the ceiling.

“Work,” Thomas said.

“Yes.” She stayed where she was for another few seconds, then pushed the quilt away and stood. “If omnipotence has made you late for the university, I will not write the explanation.”

Thomas sat up. “I was going to blame Berlin.”

“You did not go to Berlin.” Isha left him with the weakness in his defence and went to wash.

Breakfast required less imagination than the weekend had. Thomas made toast, eggs and coffee; Isha packed the lunch boxes they had prepared the previous night, checked that her climbing-centre shirt was in her bag and removed her wedding and engagement rings before putting them into the small ring case in her work bag. By seven forty-five they were in coats and shoes, the last two days reduced to something that had happened while the trains continued running.

At the station they separated where their routes diverged. Isha kissed him, told him not to solve Europe before dinner, and went towards her platform.

Thomas reached the international-support office to find twenty-three unread messages, two New Year sweets on his desk and a printed sheet from Sugiyama with **10:00? / 10:30?** written across the top in red pen.

“Good morning,” she said. “You have been selected by fate.”

“I have recently become cautious about that sentence.” Thomas put his bag down and read the page.

A January-arrival orientation notice had gone out with two start times: the faculty's latest email said ten, while the international office PDF still said ten thirty. Three students had already asked which was correct. One had apparently decided to arrive at nine forty-five and let the university fight itself.

Thomas opened the shared folder, found the old PDF, then stopped before turning the inconsistency into a project. The room booking showed ten. The faculty contact confirmed ten. Sugiyama replaced the PDF and sent the correction from the office account while Thomas answered the student already standing at the counter. By nine twelve, the problem was over.

Mori passed his desk carrying tea and noticed the closed folder on his screen. “You seem disappointed.”

“I had prepared to identify a systemic cause.”

“The systemic cause was that somebody forgot to replace a PDF. Eat the sweet.”

Thomas looked at the wrapped square beside his keyboard. “That is still a system.”

Mori had already continued walking. He ate the sweet anyway.

The rest of the morning was less coherent and therefore more normal. A student wanted to know which office had received a document. Another had forgotten the password to an account Thomas could not reset and needed directions to the people who could. A visiting researcher arrived with the correct form and the wrong expectation about where to submit it. Thomas translated, redirected, checked one piece of guidance against its owner and left two other problems where they belonged.

At lunch he went to the campus gym and discovered that two weeks of holiday schedules had not improved his enthusiasm for split squats. Nothing supernatural assisted him. The last repetition on his left side was slower than the others and remained slow despite his opinion of it. He returned to his desk with tired legs and no new messages in the group chat.

Across the city, Isha's first hour at the climbing centre involved a missing water bottle, a child who had put both shoes into the same cubby and a delivery box whose contents did not match its label. The wall itself presented no philosophical problem. Routes stayed where the setters had left them. Harnesses still required inspection. Chalk still reached surfaces it had never been invited to occupy.

She spent part of the late morning on the beginner floor, then covered reception while another member of staff took a break. Just before lunch, Ishikawa came from the office carrying the booking tablet and asked whether Isha was working Thursday afternoon. Isha checked the rota before confirming that she was there until six.

“Good. Nishimura asked for you,” Ishikawa said. “She came to one of the December beginner sessions. Short hair, red glasses, kept trying to pull herself up before she trusted her feet.”

The second detail brought the woman back clearly. Nishimura had been one of four adults in a mixed introductory group, capable enough to make the easy wall frustrating because she expected understanding to arrive before practice.

“Did something happen?” Isha asked.

“No. She wants another session.” Ishikawa turned the tablet so Isha could see the note entered by reception. “She asked whether you were available specifically. I told them we would check before confirming the instructor.”

Isha read it twice. “Why me?”

“You can ask her on Thursday.”

Ishikawa took the tablet back and continued towards the equipment desk before the question could be promoted into a meeting. The request remained with Isha for the next hour in an irritatingly pleasant way. Being selected for climbing because she climbed well was obvious and increasingly uninteresting. Being selected because somebody wanted her to explain something again was different enough that she had not yet decided what to do with it.

At home that evening, Thomas listened while cutting spring onion over reheated curry. “Requested by name. Your fame begins.”

Isha leaned against the counter and stole one piece of spring onion from the board. “If my fame begins with a Thursday beginner booking, I will survive it.”

“There may be merchandise.”

“You are not making merchandise.” She watched his expression. “You had already reached design emotionally.”

Thomas accepted that with the knife safely pointed at the board. Their conversation moved to the university's duplicated start time, then to whether the curry needed more rice. Saturday surfaced only when Isha's phone vibrated and both of them looked at it too quickly. The message was from Kanno: **Wednesday after work? I have Berlin prints.**

Isha replied before Thomas could read over her shoulder. Kanno proposed a café near Sendai Station, and they settled the time in three messages. Thomas returned to the curry. The group chat itself stayed quiet.

---

On Wednesday evening Kanno arrived carrying a grey paper envelope that looked far too deliberate for six photographs.

Isha had chosen a small café one level above the station concourse, quiet enough after the dinner rush that nobody needed to compete with music. She had come directly from kyūdō and still carried the long, narrow bag that made strangers give her slightly more clearance than usual. Kanno put the envelope on the table between their drinks and slid out six small prints.

“You printed them already,” Isha said.

“I work with print. Waiting would have been professionally embarrassing.”

The first showed a patched elevation with the former Wall route outside the frame. The second held paving and a cyclist. The third was the one Kanno had shown Ian in the café: a woman pushing a pram across the old boundary while the building edge crowded the right side more than Kanno would normally have permitted. Two others were quieter studies of surfaces and later construction. The last was almost entirely pavement, the historic line visible only because someone had marked it.

Isha picked up the photograph with the pram. “This is the one. The building is too close to the edge.”

Kanno looked at her over the rim of her cup. “I know.”

Isha smiled and turned the print once between her fingers. “I like it.”

“I know that too.”

They spent several minutes on the photographs before either mentioned Ian. Kanno had already told Thomas and Isha the parts of Saturday that affected them: the die, the options sheet, the passport mistake, the Berlin trip, the proposed record falsification that had never happened. There was no need to reconstruct the meeting in sequence again.

Isha turned another print under the café light. “You said there were things you were keeping for yourself. I am curious. I do not need them.”

Kanno's eyes lifted from the photographs. “Good.”

She moved the empty sugar packet away from the prints before continuing. “Some of what he told me was about his life. Family, work, things he worries about, things he likes. He said I could tell you anything I wanted, but I do not want to repeat a private conversation as an inventory. There were also questions I asked because I wanted his answer, not because I was investigating him for you. I am keeping some of those.”

Isha nodded and left the space where Kanno had put it. “I would not want you reporting everything either.”

“I did tell you what I thought changed the situation for all three of us,” Kanno said. “How his steering seems to work. What he admitted he cannot know. The die. The options. The boundary I gave him about not choosing a decision whose substance is *Kanno chooses this*.”

“And the passport.”

“Unfortunately.”

The word made Isha smile again. Kanno took a drink, then added that she had also told them she wanted to speak to Ian again because she wanted Thomas and Isha to know what she was doing. That part had been hers to disclose as well.

“Do you want me to be pleased?” Isha asked.

Kanno considered the question with more seriousness than Isha had expected. “A little. I do not need approval.”

“I know.”

“That is why pleased is acceptable.”

The conversation moved away from Ian by degrees. Kanno had checked what a conventional Berlin trip might cost, recoiled from the flight options and closed the browser before planning could become a booking. Isha told her thirty minutes had been an excellent demonstration of why thirty minutes was useless. Kanno agreed and said she now had a list of places she had not visited, which was exactly what she had been trying to avoid.

“You could go for a week,” Isha said. “Paying rent and visiting Germany may both be possible.”

Kanno looked at her. “This is why I did not invite Thomas.”

Isha laughed loudly enough that the man at the next table looked over before returning to his laptop.

When they were ready to leave, Kanno gathered five photographs back into the envelope and left the pram image on the table. “Keep that one.”

Isha looked at it. “Why?”

“Because you chose it first, and I printed two.”

Isha slid the photograph carefully into the inner pocket of her kyūdō bag where it would remain flat. At the station gates Kanno turned towards her line and Isha towards hers. Kanno's phone contained the same group chat it had contained all week.

“Tell Thomas I did not complain about him for the entire evening,” Kanno said.

“That sounds unlikely.”

“Then tell him nothing.”

Isha went home with the Berlin photograph beside her bow.

---

Nishimura arrived at the climbing centre on Thursday at fourteen twenty-three, seven minutes early and already apologising for it.

Isha remembered the red glasses before the short hair. Nishimura wore hired shoes and the expression of someone who had spent several days wondering whether paying to be bad at something was a sensible use of money. After they exchanged greetings, she said reception had told her she could ask for Isha and added that she was happy to work with someone else if the request had caused trouble.

“It is fine,” Isha said. “I wanted to know why you asked.”

Nishimura blinked, then laughed. “Immediately? All right.” She tightened the strap on one shoe and considered the floor. “Last time I kept trying to pull with my arms. You told me what my feet were doing wrong without saying I needed to be stronger. I remembered that.”

The specificity pleased Isha more than praise would have. “Then we can work on feet.”

The first fifteen minutes confirmed that memory was kinder than skill. Nishimura understood the instruction from December and still abandoned it as soon as the wall became interesting. Her hands tightened, her shoulders rose, and her feet became hurried after every uncertain move. Isha brought her down from an easy slab and chose a short section with generous holds.

“Watch once,” she said.

She climbed three moves, placing one foot high and shifting her hips across before reaching for the next hold. The movement felt obvious in her body. She stepped down and looked at Nishimura, who looked back with visible doubt.

“You did not have to do the difficult part,” Nishimura said.

Isha replayed the movement and saw it immediately. Her reach had allowed her to take the next handhold before the weight transfer became necessary. She had demonstrated the answer while bypassing the reason for it.

“Correct. That was a bad demonstration.”

Nishimura smiled. “Good. I thought I had misunderstood again.”

Isha climbed the first two moves a second time and deliberately stopped before the reach, but the geometry still belonged to her body. She came down instead of manufacturing a lesson from it. They moved to the low traverse.

“I cannot make my legs your length,” Isha said. “So I will stop showing you my solution for a while. Put your right foot there. Do not move your hands yet. Find a position where you could take one hand away and stay on the wall.”

Nishimura tried. The first position failed immediately. The second held for half a second before her left arm tightened. On the third, her weight settled over the right foot and her left hand became almost decorative.

“That,” Isha said. “Remember how that feels.”

The rest of the session became less photogenic and more useful. Isha gave one cue, then waited long enough for Nishimura to discover whether it helped. Some did not. A suggestion to turn the knee outward made one move worse and was discarded. A lower foot worked better than the higher one Isha had first expected. Twice Nishimura chose to come down before her grip failed, and the session shrank around what remained effective.

Near the end they returned to the slab. Nishimura reached the move that had stopped her in December, placed her right foot where she had before, paused, then moved it lower without being told. Her hips shifted across and the next handhold came within reach. She caught it, laughed once and immediately looked down.

“I am stopping there. My arms are finished.”

“Then come down.”

On the mat, Nishimura flexed her fingers and looked up at the unfinished route without disappointment. “Can I ask for you again?”

The question felt different after an hour of trying to teach around Isha's own body. “Yes, if I am on shift and available. But I am going to write down what worked today. Another instructor can use it too.”

Nishimura considered that. “I would still prefer you next time.”

“You can say that too.”

After she left, Isha completed the customer note while the details were fresh: lower foot on the slab, balance before hand movement, fewer demonstrations from taller staff, stop before forearm fatigue turned every move into pulling. She deleted the phrase *needs confidence* before saving. It explained very little.

Ishikawa read the note later while standing at the desk. “How was it?”

“Good. My first demonstration was useless because I am too tall.”

“Useful discovery.”

“For her or me?”

Ishikawa tapped the booking screen. “You were the one being paid.” Before Isha could answer, she added, “The operator sent the preliminary spring training calendar. The Coach 1 information is in it. No application deadline yet. I'll forward it to you.”

Isha glanced towards the beginner wall, where another instructor was helping two teenagers adjust harnesses. “Please do.”

Her shift ended at six. She changed shoes, put her rings back on after leaving the staff area and checked her phone before starting home. Thomas had sent a photograph of a supermarket basket containing mushrooms, tofu and a packet of noodles with the message: **This is dinner unless you object.**

Isha replied: **Approved. I taught badly and then better.**

His answer arrived before she reached the station: **That sounds suspiciously like teaching.** She put the phone away without rewarding him further.

At home, the Berlin photograph was still where she had left it the previous night, propped temporarily against the side of the bookshelf until she decided whether it belonged anywhere more permanent. Thomas had not moved it. The group chat had not changed.

Over noodles, Isha told him about Nishimura and the useless demonstration. Thomas laughed at exactly the part she expected, then asked what she had done instead.

“Stopped demonstrating for a while. I asked her to find balance and watched what her body could actually do.”

Thomas lifted a mushroom with his chopsticks. “Did you like being requested?”

Isha considered the question longer than she had on Monday. “Yes. I liked that she remembered something I taught her. I did not like the idea that I should become the only person who can teach her.”

Thomas nodded. “Hence the notes. And Coach 1?”

“Ishikawa is sending the spring information. I will read it.”

Thomas let the answer stay at that size.

After dinner they washed the bowls, checked Friday's work times and looked once at the private calendar entry they both knew was there. The next passage window was expected the following day. Thomas plugged both phones in before bed.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

Isha checked that the alarm was set and put her phone face down. “Tomorrow.”