Legacy Protocol Version Alpha
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 14A
Spring break gave them the excuse neither of them had needed but both were grateful for anyway — a full week off school, and Tom’s insistence that it was long past time Emiko and the kids saw his world instead of him only ever visiting theirs.
“My apartment’s not going to work,” he admitted, over a call a few weeks before the trip. “Two bedrooms, and one of them is technically an office with a pull-out couch. I love you, but I’m not putting three teenagers on an air mattress in my living room for a week.”
Emiko laughed. “So what’s the plan?”
“I found a place. Five bedrooms, walking distance to the park, actual counter space in the kitchen for once.” A pause. “I wanted somewhere that felt like ours for the week. Not a hotel, not my bachelor apartment. Somewhere we could actually be a family in for a few days.”
The Airbnb turned out to be a converted brownstone a few blocks from Central Park, tall narrow rooms and creaking original floors, and Midori claimed the top-floor bedroom within four minutes of walking through the door, already narrating an imaginary tour for an audience only she could see.
“This is where I’ll live when I run my own firm,” she announced, standing in the doorway of her chosen room. “New York energy. I can feel it.”
“You’re fourteen,” Kaito said, dropping his bag in the hallway.
“I’m fourteen with vision.”
The kids had gone to bed early that first night, worn out from the flight and the time change, and Emiko and Tom found themselves alone in the brownstone’s kitchen for the first time all week, the house finally quiet around them.
“I keep waiting for one of them to appear out of nowhere,” Tom admitted, pouring two glasses of wine. “I’ve gotten used to an audience.”
“They’re asleep. Actually asleep, for once.” Emiko took the glass, studying him over the rim of it. “It’s strange, having you to myself. I almost don’t know what to do with it.”
“I have a few ideas,” Tom said, and something in his voice had gone lower, more deliberate, the easy humor of the week giving way to something quieter.
“Before you get any further with those ideas,” Emiko said, setting her glass down, “I want to tell you something practical. I went back on birth control a few months ago, once I knew this was heading somewhere real. I wanted to be responsible about it — we’re not married yet, and whatever we eventually decide about more children, that’s a conversation for when we’re actually ready to have it. Not something that happens by accident on a trip.”
“I appreciate you telling me,” Tom said. “And planning ahead. That’s very you.”
“Good,” she said, and crossed the small kitchen to him.
This time there was no hesitation in either of them, no careful testing of a boundary — only the accumulated weight of months of restraint finally finding somewhere honest to go. He kissed her the way he always did, unhurried at first, and then not unhurried at all, and when he finally drew back to look at her, there was a question in his eyes that didn’t need words.
“Upstairs,” she said simply, and took his hand.
Later, in the quiet dark of the room at the end of the hall, her head resting against his chest, his fingers tracing slow patterns along her shoulder, she found herself laughing softly.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing. Just — I’d forgotten what this felt like. Being wanted like this. It’s been a long time.”
“Not anymore,” he said, and kissed the top of her head.
Tom took them to the office the next day, a glass-walled floor thirty stories up with a view that had Midori pressed flat against the window within seconds of walking in.
“This is Robert,” Tom said, as a tall, sandier-haired version of Tom crossed the floor toward them, hand already extended. “My brother. Robert, this is Emiko. And Hana, Kaito, Midori.”
“So you’re the family that’s finally slowing him down,” Robert said, grinning, shaking each of their hands in turn. “Good. Someone needed to.”
“I’m not slowing down,” Tom said. “I’m restructuring.”
“Same thing, dressed up nicer.” Robert clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on. Show them your corner office before you talk yourself out of showing them how much of it you’ve already handed off to me.”
They walked through, and Kaito — sharper than anyone else in the room about exactly what he was looking at — noticed it before Tom said anything: the desk that still had Tom’s name on the door but noticeably less clutter than a man running day-to-day operations would generate. Fewer files. A calendar with entire weeks blocked out and labeled, simply, Singapore.
“You’ve already started,” Kaito said, half a question.
“Six months ago,” Tom admitted. “Quietly, at first, because I didn’t want to promise something to your mother I hadn’t actually begun building toward. Robert’s taken over most of day-to-day trading decisions. I still weigh in on strategy, big positions, anything over a certain size — but the floor doesn’t need me standing on it anymore. It needed me to build people I trusted enough to leave it to.” He glanced at Robert. “Turns out I already had one.”
“Flattery,” Robert said, “will get you nowhere, but I’ll take it anyway.” He turned to Emiko. “For what it’s worth — he’s been talking about your family since October like a man who found something he wasn’t expecting to find twice in one lifetime. I like the version of him that exists since he met you a great deal more than the one that used to live in this office seventy hours a week.”
Emiko felt her face warm, glancing at Tom, who looked, for once, faintly embarrassed rather than composed.
“He tell you that,” Tom said, “or did you just make it sound good for the audience?”
“Both,” Robert said, unbothered. “I’m efficient.”
Hana, quiet until now, was studying the calendar on the wall — the blocked-out weeks, the careful architecture of a man rearranging his entire working life around a family he’d known for less than a year. “You really are doing this,” she said. “Not just talking about it.”
“I don’t talk about things I don’t intend to do,” Tom said, meeting her eyes. “I thought you’d all figured that out about me by now.”
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