Komiko and Katie
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 28
It came out on a Sunday.
Four days after the phone call. The household had absorbed it the way it absorbed everything — steadily, without drama, closing around Sandy the way water closes around a hand. Meals happened. The desk sessions continued. Life moved forward the way life did in a house that had learned not to be derailed by hard things.
Sandy had been quiet. Not the old quiet — not the invisibility quiet, the making-herself-small quiet. Just thoughtful. Processing.
Yuki had been watching her do it and waiting.
Sunday morning, dishes done, Yoko out running errands, Komiko and Katie somewhere in the house. Sandy sat on the bed with her knees pulled up and Yuki beside her and finally said the thing she’d been carrying.
“I think something is wrong with me.”
Yuki looked at her. “Tell me.”
“My parents died four days ago.” She said it flatly, not for effect. Just stating the fact so she could examine it. “I cried once. For about an hour. And then it stopped and I went back to studying and I slept fine and I ate breakfast the next morning and I — “ She stopped. “What kind of person does that?”
Yuki was quiet for a moment.
“The kind who was never given enough to grieve,” she said.
Sandy looked at her.
“You can’t mourn what you never had,” Yuki said. “You didn’t lose parents when they died. You lost the last possibility of ever having them. That’s a different thing. And it comes out differently.” She paused. “I didn’t cry when Tenska died either. I felt the house get lighter. I felt my mother start to breathe.” She held Sandy’s gaze. “I spent two years asking myself what was wrong with me for that. There was nothing wrong with me. I was just being honest.”
Sandy was quiet.
“The hour you cried,” Yuki said. “What was that for?”
Sandy thought about it. “The parents they never were.”
“That’s the real grief. You already did it. It just didn’t look the way you thought it was supposed to.”
Sandy leaned her head back against the wall. Some of the tension in her shoulders released, slow and visible.
“I still feel like I should feel worse,” she said.
“I know.” Yuki took her hand. “That part takes longer. But it’s not evidence of something broken in you. It’s evidence of something honest.”
They sat like that for a while. The house was quiet and Sunday-morning slow around them.
“Talk to Komiko,” Yuki said eventually.
“You think she’d understand?”
Yuki almost smiled. “She’ll understand it better than anyone.”
Komiko listened without interrupting.
Sandy sat across from her at the kitchen table and said the whole thing — the absence of grief, the guilt about the absence, the feeling that her emotional response was somehow a moral failing. She said it plainly, the way she’d learned to say things in this house, without cushioning or performance.
Komiko listened. Then she was quiet for a moment in the way that meant she was choosing words carefully rather than assembling them.
“You’re doing something very common,” she said, “and very wrong. You’re measuring your response against a standard built for people who had something to lose. You didn’t have that. So the standard doesn’t apply.”
Sandy looked at her.
“Grief is proportional to what existed,” Komiko said. “Your parents provided shelter and food and consistent absence. When they died, the shelter and food became Yoko’s responsibility and the absence became permanent. That is a real loss. It is not the same loss as losing people who knew your name and chose to be in the room with you.” She paused. “Your one hour of crying was not insufficient. It was accurate.”
Sandy sat with that.
“The guilt you’re feeling right now,” Komiko continued, “is the last thing they gave you. The message they sent every day for sixteen years — that your responses were insufficient, that you didn’t matter enough to be noticed — is still running. You’re applying it to your own grief.” She looked at Sandy directly. “That’s the thing to be angry about. Not the crying. The fact that their voice is still in your head telling you that you’re doing it wrong.”
Sandy’s jaw tightened. Not against tears. Against something older and harder.
“How do I make it stop?” she said.
“You’re already doing it,” Komiko said. “Every day you sit at that desk and do the work, every day you take up space at this table, every day you let Yuki hold you — you’re doing it. It doesn’t stop all at once. It stops the way it started. Gradually. Without you noticing until one day you realize it’s been quiet for a while.”
Sandy looked at the table. Nodded once.
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