Chapter 29

Summer came into the house the way good things did — gradually, without announcement, until one morning you noticed it had arrived and couldn’t remember exactly when.

The school year was done. The exams were behind them. The 3.63 had been celebrated and absorbed and filed into the household’s quiet running record of things that had gone as they should. Sandy’s room held her things. Yuki’s room held Sandy.

The days had a different texture now. Slower. The desk sessions gave way to mornings in the kitchen with nowhere to be, Yoko making breakfast while Katie sat on the counter eating fruit directly from the bowl in the way Yoko pretended to disapprove of, Komiko at the table with a book, the particular ease of a house that had nothing to prove to anyone.

Sandy moved through it like someone still occasionally surprised to find herself there.

She was learning, slowly, to stop being surprised.

It was a Wednesday night in late June.

The house had gone quiet early. Yoko to bed at ten. Komiko and Katie down the hall behind a closed door, the household respecting the closed door the way it always did.

Yuki and Sandy lay in the dark the way they always lay — Sandy’s back against Yuki’s front, Yuki’s arm across her, the window open to the warm night. Somewhere outside something was making the small rhythmic sound that summer made. The room smelled like the candle Yuki had burned earlier and let go out.

They had been quiet for a while.

Sandy was not asleep. Yuki knew she was not asleep the way she knew most things about Sandy now — without needing to ask, without needing confirmation. She could feel it in the quality of her breathing, the slight wakefulness in how she held herself.

Yuki pressed her lips to the back of Sandy’s neck. Warm. Slow. Without agenda — the same way she did everything.