Chapter 16: The Finest Silk

It was a Tuesday.

Of course it was a Tuesday.

Miyu was in the garden when he came through the gate. Not at the koi pond this time — she was at the small planting bed along the south wall where she had been coaxing a late autumn garden into something that had no business being as alive as it was given the fog and the season. She had dirt on her hands and her sleeves rolled and her hair escaped from its pins in the way that Midori had given up commenting on because it was simply the natural state of Miyu’s hair and always had been.

She heard the gate and looked up.

Nakayima stood on the garden path.

He was not in his usual Tuesday manner.

The usual Tuesday manner was contained, purposeful, the bearing of a man arriving with specific business to conduct. This was different. He was standing very still with a large wrapped parcel under one arm and the expression of a man who had rehearsed something extensively and was now discovering that the rehearsal and the moment were entirely different experiences.

Miyu looked at him. At the parcel. Back at him.

She stood up slowly and wiped her hands on the small cloth she kept in her sleeve.

“Nakayima-san,” she said.

“Miyu,” he said. Just her name. The way he’d been saying it for months now, natural and direct, the formality gone between them the same way it had gone between Midori and Eleanor — quietly, without ceremony, until one day it was simply true.

“Midori and Reggie are inside,” she said.

“I know,” he said. He didn’t move toward the door.

She looked at him. “You’re not here for them.”

“No,” he said. “I am not.”

The garden was very quiet. The fog had lifted that morning for the first time in a week and the light was doing something particular to the late chrysanthemums along the wall, finding the gold in them, making the garden look more itself than usual.

Nakayima looked at the chrysanthemums. Then at Miyu. Then at the parcel under his arm as though he had temporarily forgotten it was there and was now remembering.

He crossed the garden to where she stood.

He set the parcel on the garden bench beside her. It was wrapped in plain cloth, tied with a simple cord, the wrapping itself precise and careful the way everything he did was precise and careful. He looked at it for a moment. Then he looked at her.

“I have been trying to say something for six months,” he said. “I have said it many times in my shop. Alone. Where it came out correctly.” A pause. “I find that here, with you standing in front of me, correctly is more difficult.”