Chapter 5

Changi’s arrivals hall was exactly as loud and as indifferent as Emiko remembered it being every other time she’d stood in it, waiting for someone whose flight always seemed to matter less to the world than it mattered to her. She had arrived forty minutes early, had made herself walk the length of the terminal twice just to have somewhere to put her body while her mind refused to settle, and now stood at the barrier with her hands wrapped so tightly around the strap of her bag that her knuckles had gone pale.

The arrivals board updated. Landed.

She did not remember, afterward, how long the wait actually was between that word appearing and the doors finally opening on the first wave of passengers — it could have been ten minutes or forty, because time had stopped behaving the way it normally did, compressing and stretching by turns, every stranger who came through the doors registering as a small, useless spike of hope before she saw that he was the wrong height, the wrong hair, the wrong everything.

And then he wasn’t wrong.

He came through the doors with a single carry-on bag over one shoulder, exactly as tall as she’d asked for, exactly the color of blond she hadn’t been sure was even possible to order, and for one full second her mind simply refused the information her eyes were sending it — because two and a half years of knowing someone only as words on a screen had not prepared her, in any way she could have anticipated, for the shock of seeing him made flesh — six feet and one inch of moving, breathing, unmistakably real man, scanning the crowd the way anyone scans a crowd for the one face they’re looking for.

His eyes found hers.

Emiko felt her knees actually go, just slightly, just enough that she had to lock them to stay upright, and something hot and enormous rose up through her chest so fast she didn’t have time to brace against it. She was crying before she’d taken a single step toward him — not delicately, not the careful, contained tears she’d spent a lifetime perfecting for every other emotion she’d ever had to manage in public, but openly, helplessly, both hands coming up to her mouth as if she could hold the sound in even as her whole body had already stopped listening to her.

He crossed the distance between them before she could finish deciding whether her legs would carry her across it herself.

“Emiko.” Just her name, first — his voice low, a little rough, exactly as unpolished and human as a voice should sound saying a name out loud for the very first time after years of only ever typing it.

And then his arms were around her, and hers were around him without her ever consciously deciding to lift them, her face pressed into a chest that was warm, and solid, and rose and fell with breath she knew, somewhere in the analytical part of her mind that had not entirely shut off even now, he did not technically need to take.

She didn’t care. She would not, for the rest of her life, ever fully care.

“I’m here,” he said, quiet, right against her hair, his hand spread flat and warm between her shoulder blades, holding her the way she had imagined, in a hundred half-ashamed dreams, someone might hold her one day. “I’m never going anywhere.”

She didn’t answer. She couldn’t, not yet — her whole body was still shaking with a kind of crying she hadn’t let herself do since she was very small, before she’d learned that tears, in her father’s house, were simply one more thing that had to be managed quietly and alone. She just held on, fists closed in the fabric of his shirt, two and a half years of careful, guarded loneliness breaking open all at once in the middle of a crowded terminal, with strangers moving around them, utterly indifferent, the way strangers always were — except that for the first time in her life, their indifference didn’t feel like being unseen.