Chapter 23

Meimi noticed the distance before she could have named it, the way one notices a draft in a room before locating the open window that causes it — a subtle coolness that had crept into her mornings with Hikari across the weeks since the executions, nothing so obvious as an argument or a withdrawn word, only a quiet thinning of the closeness that had once felt as natural between them as breathing. Their practice sessions continued, disciplined and exacting as ever, but the easy conversation that had once filled every pause between forms had grown sparser, replaced by a companionable silence that Meimi realized, turning it over one morning, no longer felt entirely comfortable.

She thought back over the weeks since the attack, trying to locate the moment the distance had first begun, and found instead a gradual accretion too slow to mark by any single day — Hikari arriving at the yard a few minutes earlier than usual, finishing her forms a few minutes later than she once had, the two of them exchanging fewer of the small confidences that had once filled every idle moment between training and household business. She had told herself, in the early days of noticing it, that both of them were simply tired, that grief made poor company for easy conversation, and had let the explanation stand unexamined for longer than she now suspected either of them could afford.

She raised it first with herself, in the private hours before the household woke, turning over every recent exchange for some offense she might have given without realizing it, some careless word that had wedged itself between them during weeks when both women had been consumed by grief and processing and the slow work of rebuilding a household around so much violence. She found no single moment she could point to, no argument or slight, only the gradual accumulation of two women each retreating, in their own private ways, into the separate work of surviving what they had survived, until the retreat itself had become its own quiet distance.

She found Hikari in the practice yard earlier than usual one morning, working through a form alone in the pale grey light before dawn had fully broken, her movements carrying a controlled intensity that reminded Meimi, watching from the yard’s edge, of the very first morning she had discovered her sister-in-law training in secret, months before either of them had imagined the closeness that would eventually grow between them.

“You are training earlier than usual,” Meimi said, stepping into the yard rather than continuing to watch from its threshold.

Hikari’s form did not break, though something in her shoulders tightened at the sound of Meimi’s voice. “I find I sleep poorly these days. I thought I might as well put the wakeful hours to some use, rather than simply lying in the dark waiting for a rest that does not come.”

“I know the feeling.” Meimi settled onto the low step at the yard’s edge, watching her sister-in-law complete the form with the same discipline as always, though something in the execution felt, to Meimi’s now-practiced eye, subtly hollowed of the joy that had once accompanied even the most demanding sessions between them. “Hikari. Have I done something to trouble you? I do not think I have imagined the distance that has grown between us these past weeks, however much neither of us has spoken of it directly.”

Hikari lowered her bokken slowly, and for a long moment said nothing at all, her back still turned, some private struggle visible in the tension of her shoulders before she finally turned to face Meimi fully. “You have done nothing. I want you to understand that plainly, before I say anything else. Whatever distance you have felt, it is not a fault of yours.”

“Then whose fault is it? Or does fault even belong in the accounting, if neither of us caused it deliberately?”