## Chapter 436 - The Week Resumes Tuesday, 25 April, began with Thomas looking for a reason not to ask how Monday had been. He had already received the useful version. Isha and Kanno had returned safely. The meeting had lasted most of the afternoon. Aelira and Lethira had both seemed well, and nobody had wanted to leave early. Isha had come home pleased and tired, eaten a late dinner, told him that the afternoon had been good, and refused to turn somebody else's private conversation into his report. Thomas agreed with the rule. It did not stop him being curious. By Tuesday morning curiosity had survived sleep and acquired breakfast. Thomas buttered toast while Isha stood at the kitchen counter in an old T-shirt and loose trousers, waiting for the kettle. Her hair was still uncombed from bed. The sapphire and wedding band caught briefly against the handle when she lifted her mug. Thomas put the toast on the table. "I am going to work," he said. Isha looked at him. "Yes." "This is relevant because I have approximately twenty minutes in which I am capable of asking questions and then eight hours in which I am not." "You are capable of sending messages." "That weakens my argument." She carried her tea to the table and sat. Thomas took the chair opposite rather than continuing to manufacture breakfast tasks. Isha tore one piece of toast in half. "You can ask how I am." "How are you?" "Still glad I went." That answer reached farther than the previous evening's summary. Thomas waited. Isha ate part of the toast before deciding what else belonged to him. "I told Lethira about the bridge." Thomas's hand stopped near his mug. He knew immediately which bridge. There had not been another one in their recent lives capable of making Isha say the word that way. "Ian choosing it?" "Yes. And that he knew on the train and didn't tell me because he thought I might cut contact with him." Thomas sat back. He had watched Ian make that confession on the recording. He had held Isha's hand while Ian said he had wanted a good story, had chosen Isha's death as pressure on Thomas, and had later hidden the full truth because honesty might have cost him the connection he wanted. Months had passed. The anger no longer arrived with the same physical force. It had not become approval. "Did you want to tell her before you went?" he asked. "No." "What changed?" Isha looked down at the torn toast. "She told us more about them. Enough that keeping it from her began to feel wrong." Thomas did not ask what *more* meant. Isha noticed the effort anyway. "Some of it is hers," she said. "I can tell you what changed for me." "Please." "She is very happy." Thomas smiled faintly. "That part I hoped." "I knew it from the letter. Yesterday I could see it. She is choosing him." Isha's voice had softened, though her expression stayed thoughtful. "I was already happy for them. Yesterday made it real in a different way." Thomas considered the two people separately before trying to fit them together. Lethira had once been a B-rank adventurer who could make a road camp feel like a defended position, tease Isha through a bad morning and turn practical competence into something warmer simply by sharing it. Ian had entered Thomas's present life as a man outside both worlds who knew too much, wanted connection too badly and possessed enough power to make every mistake more dangerous than it should have been. The relationship still sounded improbable when reduced to categories. The people made more sense. "I think Lethira choosing him reassures me more than Ian choosing Lethira," Thomas said. Isha's eyes lifted. "Why?" "Because I already know Ian can want people." Thomas rubbed a thumb along the edge of his mug. "Lethira knows what wanting costs. She is not easily impressed by somebody being powerful, and she has had enough people try to decide things for her. If she has looked at him closely and still wants him, that tells me something about what is actually happening between them." He paused. "It doesn't tell me Ian is safe in every direction." "No." Thomas rubbed his thumb once over the mug. "Or that the bridge matters less." "No." He looked towards the window. Morning light had reached the balcony rail but not the floor of the LDK. "I think I'm glad he isn't lonely," he said. The admission surprised him by being easy once spoken. Isha held his gaze. "So am I." Thomas gave a small, helpless movement of one shoulder. "I am still angry with him." "So am I." "That seems inconvenient." "Most people are." He laughed. Isha finished the first half of her toast and reached for the second. "I told Lethira something else." Thomas waited. "That hearing about them made me glad and hurt a little." His expression changed before he could stop it. Isha saw the question forming and spared him the wrong one. "Not because I want Ian." "I know." "Good." She brushed crumbs from one fingertip. "When he asked me on the train if there could be any place for him in my life, he was very lonely. I gave him a small one because I wanted to. Yesterday I heard Lethira talk about loving him, and those things touched in my head." Thomas understood enough that he did not try to improve it. He thought of Ian in the neutral café, asking clumsy questions about friendship as though there might be a correct administrative definition. He thought of the family recordings, of Ian's apologies, of the moments when a man with impossible reach had looked more like somebody standing outside a lit window and hoping not to be sent away. "I don't want us to have been his punishment," Thomas said. Isha's brow tightened slightly. "What do you mean?" "That because he hurt us, loneliness becomes something he is supposed to keep forever." Thomas shook his head. "I don't want that. I want him to stop doing harmful things. I want him to understand what he did. I don't need him to be miserable in order for the harm to stay real." Isha sat with that for a few seconds. Then she nodded once. Thomas checked the time and discovered that his twenty minutes had become twelve. "I should leave before I become late because I spent breakfast discussing Ian's love life." "That would be difficult to explain to Mori." Thomas stood. "Then I will avoid trying." He carried his mug to the sink, kissed Isha on the way past and left for work with enough time to catch his normal train. Isha remained at the table after the door closed. She finished her toast, drank the rest of her tea and let Ian remain unresolved until she had some reason to think about him again. --- Kanno spent Tuesday morning correcting photographs of furniture she had never seen. The catalogue client had supplied new images for six items. Three were usable, two had colour casts inconsistent with the rest of the range, and one chair had been photographed against a background whose grey was close enough to the approved grey to be dangerous. By eleven, Kanno had sent a note asking which source file the client wanted treated as authoritative and had resisted the temptation to make the six photographs agree through personal intervention. Thomas would have approved. The thought annoyed her enough that she went for coffee. Monday's meeting had not followed her into work as dramatically as she had expected. Aelira had not appeared in every careful client phrase. Lethira did not intrude whenever somebody used the word *home*. Ian's name remained absent from the morning entirely until Kanno found herself standing by the office machine waiting for a paper cup to fill and remembered a pale-grey house she had never seen. Two names. That had been the part which caught. Not the declaration that Ian and Lethira were lovers. By the time Lethira said it, Kanno had already adjusted to the larger fact that the two of them loved one another. Sex altered the picture less than property paperwork had. *They have both our names.* Kanno had felt something at that sentence on Monday. She had said as much eventually, because the whole point of the afternoon had become allowing difficult facts to stay difficult without pretending they had disappeared. She still had no satisfying noun for the feeling. Tuesday did not supply one. That was acceptable. She took the coffee back to her desk. At lunch, instead of opening the Mercury directory, Kanno opened a folder labelled only **walls**. The project had been neglected during the days around Small Works, Venus, Mercury and meetings with people from another reality. It had not punished her for the neglect. The photographs waited exactly as photographs did: files with dates, contact sheets, print notes and no obligation to become important merely because more spectacular images now existed on the same drives. Kanno scrolled slowly. The series had begun with surfaces left behind after use changed. Paint fading around removed fixtures. Rows of plugged screw holes. Cable clips surviving after the cable was gone. Newer repair compound sitting pale inside older concrete. A rectangle of cleaner wall where something had protected it from years of dust until removal created an image by subtraction. She had too many of some things and almost none of others. More importantly, she had several photographs she liked because they resembled photographs she had already made successfully. Kanno marked two of those for removal from the next proof set. One was simply weaker. The other was too pleased with itself. She closed the folder at the end of lunch and returned to the catalogue. After work, the light remained good enough to make going home immediately feel wasteful. Kanno had her camera with her because Tuesday was an Earth workday and nobody had forbidden it from existing. She walked twelve minutes out of her normal route to a wall she had photographed twice before. It belonged to the side of a small commercial building whose ground-floor tenant had changed during winter. A narrow sign had once been fixed beside the service entrance. The sign was gone now. Four holes remained in a vertical line, each filled with a different shade of repair material because somebody had apparently solved them at different times. The surrounding wall had faded unevenly. A pale strip showed where the sign itself had protected the surface. Since Kanno's previous visit, somebody had painted over the lowest patch. Only the lowest. The new paint was close to the wall colour and failed by enough to be visible. Kanno stood across the narrow service lane and looked before raising the camera. Monday entered her mind again, inconveniently. The pale strip made her think of the house Lethira had described, then of Ian, and for a few seconds Kanno found herself trying to make the repaired surface carry an argument it had never volunteered for. She lowered the camera. A minute later the light shifted across the lowest patch. Its newer paint reflected differently from the weathered material around it, and the wall became interesting again for its own reasons. Kanno moved two steps left, crouched slightly, changed focal length and made one frame. She checked the back screen only for exposure and focus, then made four more from positions that changed the relation between the repaired holes and the pale vertical strip. On the sixth attempt a delivery bicycle entered the lane and stopped exactly where she needed to stand. Kanno lowered the camera. The rider apologised despite having more right to the service lane than she did. Kanno told him he was fine and waited while he carried two boxes through the door. When he came back out, the cloud that had been softening the light had moved. The wall looked worse. Kanno went home. --- Thomas's Tuesday offered no comparable visual problem. The faculty office had finally answered the address question from the previous week. Two Japanese source terms genuinely referred to separate records. The third survived from an older procedure nobody currently owned with confidence. Thomas entered the confirmed meanings into the working group's terminology table, proposed two English labels for the active terms and attached the obsolete one to a comment for the source office. Then he stopped. At two twenty, another member of the group sent him a scholarship-status page with three highlighted phrases and the message: **Can you make these consistent with the central guide?** Thomas opened both documents. The phrases were inconsistent. The underlying decisions might also have been inconsistent, which was a different problem and not one he could solve by choosing better English. He wrote back asking the scholarship office to confirm whether the three phrases described the same status or three separate administrative stages. He copied the relevant owner named in the group's responsibility sheet, then returned to his normal case work. Nobody praised him. This was becoming easier to tolerate. By five-thirty, the unanswered scholarship question was still unanswered. Thomas left it that way and went home. Isha had spent the afternoon on the paper hanging. She had changed one loop, disliked the result, changed it back and then moved the entire hanging fifteen centimetres to the left because the light from the balcony made one side look heavier in the afternoon. Thomas stood in the flexible-room doorway after she showed him. Thomas studied the hanging again. "Better?" "At three o'clock, yes." He glanced towards the balcony light. "And now?" "I am less certain." He studied the cream, green and smoky-blue paper for longer than his competence justified. "Would you like my opinion?" "No." "Excellent." They made dinner. Monday returned only once, while Thomas was washing rice and Isha cut mushrooms. "Kanno was glad too," Isha said. Thomas looked over. "About Ian and Lethira?" "Yes. She had more to think about than she expected." Thomas knew better than to ask what that meant. Kanno's relationship with Ian had developed beyond what she routinely reported to either of them. If Kanno wanted him to know how she understood that feeling, she could tell him. "Did she work out why?" "Not exactly." "That sounds like Kanno being unusually generous with uncertainty." Isha put the mushrooms into a bowl. "She has had practice." Thomas thought of Mercury, Venus, Ian and the fact that Kanno's camera bag now contained photographs which could not be shown honestly to most of the people who knew her work. "Fair." The mushrooms went into the pan. Monday left the kitchen again. --- Wednesday was Isha's only normal climbing-centre shift that week. The fact that Coach 1 had occupied sixteen paid hours over the weekend did not make the building look different when she arrived. The same rental shoes waited behind reception. The same chalk found its way beyond the mats. One route card near the beginner wall had begun curling at the lower corner and somebody had already added a small strip of tape to keep it flat until replacement. Isha changed into work clothes, secured her hair and left both rings in the place she used for shifts. Ishikawa found her beside the staff board before opening. "Congratulations," she said. Isha looked at the sheet pinned beneath the week's roster. Her course completion had been added to the training record. Nothing else about her name had changed. "Thank you." Ishikawa handed her a single-page internal note. "Read that when you have time." It described the immediate practical change in less than half a page. Isha could now be rostered for the centre's beginner coaching blocks as qualified staff within her existing hours. The first few would still be placed where another experienced coach was present on the floor, because the centre did that with newly qualified staff and because a two-day course did not make anybody familiar with every customer problem in the building. There was no new title. There was no fourth shift. The note said nothing about management. Isha liked it. "Today?" she asked. Ishikawa pointed at the afternoon board. "One introduction block at three. Two adults, both first visit. Forty-five minutes. Yoshida is on floor coverage nearby. You own the session. She owns stopping you if you do something foolish." Isha read the line again. "Reasonable." "Try to remain interesting enough that they come back." "That was not in the course." "Then the course was incomplete." Ishikawa left her with the note. The morning gave Isha little time to think about qualification. A child cried because his harness felt wrong and stopped crying after a different size actually fitted. A regular customer asked about a route reset scheduled for Friday. Two students returned rental shoes without their tags and then discovered the tags in their pockets. Isha cleaned, checked, answered, demonstrated and moved through work she had already known how to do before anybody paid her to spend a weekend talking about coaching. At three, the beginner pair arrived. They were a man and woman in their thirties who had booked together. The woman said immediately that she had climbed once at university and remembered almost nothing. The man had never climbed indoors and had watched enough online video to arrive with several pieces of vocabulary unconnected to experience. Isha introduced the space, fitted equipment and covered the safety material the centre required. She did not make the session a test of Coach 1. It was forty-five paid minutes with two people who wanted to climb. The first problem appeared on an easy slab. The man reached a position from which the next hold looked obvious and then stopped. His right foot was high enough to block the movement he kept trying with his hips. Isha could see three corrections immediately. She began to give two of them. "Move your right—" She stopped. The man looked down. Isha changed the question instead. "What feels stuck?" He considered for longer than she expected. "My leg. I think. I can't get closer without pushing myself away." "Good. Change one foot and try again. You choose which." He moved the wrong foot first. Nothing improved. Isha nearly told him why. He frowned, put it back, then moved the other one lower. His hips came closer to the wall almost by accident. "Oh." Isha smiled. "Yes." He completed the move. That was all. The woman failed a different route because she was trying to maintain three points of contact even when the movement required her to let one hand become briefly useless. Isha gave one instruction, then another after the first had actually been attempted. The result was still untidy. The woman reached the finish laughing at herself. At the end of forty-five minutes, both booked nothing and promised nothing. They returned their shoes, said they had enjoyed it and left with the centre's beginner information. Yoshida came past carrying a bucket of holds for a maintenance task. "How did it go?" "They left alive." Yoshida shifted the bucket against her hip. "High standard." "They also enjoyed it." "Dangerously close to coaching." Isha took the bucket from her because they were going in the same direction. That was the whole review. Later, Ishikawa asked whether Isha wanted another beginner block on one of the following week's existing shifts. Isha said yes. Ishikawa put a mark on the planning sheet. The qualification became work in pencil. --- Kanno returned to Tuesday's wall photographs on Wednesday evening. Six frames had become five after she deleted one made while she was still adjusting exposure. Of the remaining five, two were nearly identical, one leaned too heavily on the vertical strip, and one made the different repairs look so balanced that the wall acquired an elegance it had never possessed in person. She rejected that one first. The final two were less decisive. Kanno printed both small on office paper at home, not because office paper was good enough for a final print but because it was cheap enough to dislike without ceremony. She set them beside several older wall proofs on the table. The new photographs did not solve the series. One might belong. That was sufficient reason to keep it. Her phone buzzed while she was writing the date on the back of the better proof. Thomas had sent a photograph to the three-person thread. It showed Kanno's umbrella open in the middle of flat 202's LDK. **I believe I have defeated it.** Kanno zoomed in. The rib which had bent twice now sat straight enough that the canopy no longer collapsed on one side. Thomas had replaced one tiny retaining piece with something visually different from the others. Kanno typed: **You changed a part.** Thomas replied: **The previous part was broken.** Isha added: **He has been waiting for you to notice.** Kanno looked at the time. **I can collect it after work tomorrow.** A pause. Then: **Or tonight if you are home.** Isha responded first. **Home. I finished at six. Come if you want tea.** Kanno looked at the wall proof, the umbrella on her screen and the camera still on the table from importing Tuesday's files. She put the proof into a sleeve, left the camera at home and went to flat 202. --- The umbrella was waiting by the genkan when Kanno arrived. Thomas had closed it again. "You could have left it open," she said while taking off her shoes. Thomas glanced at the folded umbrella. "It occupies most of the entrance when open." Kanno straightened. "That is what umbrellas do." "Usually outside." Kanno picked it up and tested the mechanism once. It opened cleanly. The canopy held. She inspected the repaired rib. Thomas waited with the expression of somebody pretending not to wait. "It works," Kanno said. Thomas's shoulders eased. "Thank you." "That was not praise." He took the correction badly. "I am accepting it anyway." Isha called from the LDK that tea was getting cold. Kanno closed the umbrella and carried it inside. The visit had no agenda. That helped. Isha was still in a loose sweatshirt and training trousers after showering from work. Her hair, washed and damp, lay over one shoulder. Thomas had cleared dinner but left three mugs and a plate of convenience-store biscuits on the table. Kanno sat with them and put the sleeved wall proof beside her bag without presenting it. Thomas noticed it and did not ask immediately. Kanno noticed that too. "New photograph," she said. Isha reached for the sleeve only after Kanno pushed it towards the centre. The print was small and the paper mediocre. Four repaired holes ran beside the pale ghost of a removed sign. The bottom patch was visibly newer than the others. Isha looked at it for several seconds. "Yesterday?" "Yes." "I like the bottom one." Kanno almost asked why and stopped. She did not need every response converted into artist feedback. Thomas leaned in after Isha passed him the print. "I can see what it is," he said. Kanno's mouth moved slightly. "Progress." Thomas held the print at arm's length. "I didn't say I understand why you photographed it." "Too much progress would be suspicious." He returned the sleeve. Kanno drank tea. Isha told them about the beginner block. She kept the account short enough that the two first-time climbers remained people rather than examples from a course manual. The man had moved the wrong foot, discovered it himself and then moved the useful one. The woman had laughed at the top of a route. Both had left apparently willing to return. Thomas asked whether the qualification now changed Isha's shifts. "No. It changes what I can be assigned inside them. Ishikawa asked whether I wanted another beginner block next week." "And?" "Yes." Kanno lifted her mug. "So you slept and still wanted to coach." Isha looked at her. "Apparently." Thomas's working-group update required even less time. One obsolete term was still obsolete. One scholarship question now belonged to the scholarship office. He had left work with both facts unresolved in ways he could tolerate. Kanno listened, then said, "You are becoming less useful." "Professionally, I hope not." "Administratively." "Then yes." The three mugs emptied slowly. Monday returned because Kanno brought it back. She had not intended to. For several minutes she looked through messages on her phone while Isha examined the wall print again and Thomas took the empty biscuit plate to the kitchen. Then she said, "I thought I might feel worse afterwards." Isha looked up. Thomas stopped at the sink but did not turn around immediately. Kanno rested both hands around the mug though it was nearly empty. "After the afternoon. After hearing Lethira talk about Ian. I don't know exactly which." Isha's expression stayed open. "Do you?" Kanno shook her head. "No. That's still the problem." Thomas came back to the table. Kanno looked at him once, deciding whether his presence changed what she wanted to say. It did, but not enough to stop. "When I heard they were together last week, I was glad she was happy. I was also surprised by how much I had to think about it. Yesterday made that easier." Kanno looked down at her mug. "I saw Lethira talking about him as a person in her life. Not as the reason I have photographs from Venus, or the man who can make doors open onto impossible places, or somebody whose messages arrive where they shouldn't. She was happy, annoyed with him in small ways, amused by him in others." Her mouth moved slightly. "It made the relationship annoyingly convincing." Isha smiled. "Yes." Kanno looked towards her. "You felt better too." "Somewhat." "After telling her about the bridge?" Thomas's eyes moved to Isha. He already knew she had done it; Kanno saw that and continued without waiting for an explanation. Isha nodded. "I was afraid the information would become a test for her. That she would think I was asking her to prove something by leaving him, or defending him, or promising to watch him for me." "Did she?" Thomas asked. "No." Isha folded her hands loosely on the table. "She listened. I don't think she mistook it for an instruction." Thomas looked down at the repaired umbrella leaning near Kanno's chair. "I have been trying to decide what I think about them," he said. Kanno raised an eyebrow. "Dangerous." "I know." He ignored her. "I think I'm glad. I think Lethira is good for him. I also think saying that sounds like I've assigned her a rehabilitation project, which I absolutely do not mean." Isha's eyes narrowed with amusement. "Then stop before you explain it worse." Thomas obeyed for perhaps three seconds. "I mean I like the person he seems to be with her." Kanno looked at him. That formulation was better. Thomas continued, more carefully. "And I like that she seems happy with him. I still don't know what Ian is to me. Friend is sometimes right and sometimes too easy. I'm angry with him. I trust him in some directions and not in others. None of that makes me want Lethira to be less happy." Kanno nodded once. Isha reached for Thomas's hand and rested her fingers over it. No one improved the conclusion. After a while, Kanno said, "He is going to be insufferable if he ever learns three people sat in Sendai assessing his suitability as a boyfriend." Isha looked at her. "Then don't tell him." "I had not planned to." Thomas considered the two of them. "I appreciate finally being on the side protected by your privacy rules." "Do not become comfortable," Kanno said. That ended the subject. Kanno left a little before ten. At the genkan she opened the repaired umbrella once more, despite being indoors and despite Thomas's visible discomfort with the practice. The mechanism moved cleanly. Every rib held. She closed it. "Acceptable." Thomas folded his arms. "That is praise." "It is a specification." Kanno stepped into the corridor before he could answer. Isha leaned against the door frame beside him. "The new piece is a different colour," Kanno added from near the lift. Thomas looked offended. "It was the correct size." The lift doors opened. "Goodnight." She disappeared inside with the umbrella before he could take it back apart.