Chapter 21

It was a Wednesday in late March.

The table had become a regular thing — not every day, but often enough that Reese saved them space without being asked and the conversation folded around the three of them with the easy familiarity of people who had found their frequency and stayed on it.

Sandy Billings was always there.

She had been at the table since before Komiko and Katie arrived that first Tuesday, which meant she had been watching from the beginning. Komiko had noted her immediately — the small quiet girl with the observant eyes who had asked her question and said she’s lucky and then retreated back into careful watchfulness. She sat at the edge of the group the way people sit when they’re not entirely sure they belong somewhere, present but not fully landed, taking up minimum space.

Komiko watched her watch Katie.

Not with envy exactly. With longing that had no clean name — the specific expression of someone looking at a thing they want so badly they’ve already decided they can’t have it. Katie’s ease. The pendant at her throat. The way she moved in Komiko’s orbit with complete peace, the old guardedness completely gone, someone who had been found and kept and knew it.

Sandy watched all of it with those careful eyes and said little and wanted everything.

Komiko let it sit for two weeks before she did anything about it.

She was not going to mishandle this.

She talked to Yuki on a Thursday evening while Katie was in the shower.

Yuki was at the kitchen table with her homework, more present and more consistent than she had been at any point in the last two years — the collar at her throat, the gradual rebuilding of a self that had been taken apart piece by piece, the specific quality of someone who was beginning to trust the ground under her feet.

Komiko sat across from her.

“I want to tell you about someone,” she said.

Yuki looked up.

Komiko told her about Sandy. Not everything — not the longing she’d observed, not her own assessment of what Sandy needed. Just the facts. Small. Quiet. Fifteen. Observant. At the LGBT table since before they arrived. Bullied, she suspected, though Sandy hadn’t said so. Something in her bearing that spoke of being used and dismissed and made to feel invisible for long enough that invisible had become her default setting.