The rain had not stopped since morning.
It streaked across the windows of the small tea shop, each drop joining the next, as if the sky were trying to hold its own endless conversation.
Inside, warmth gathered in the corners—the sharp scent of black tea, the quiet hiss of water being poured, the mutedhum of low voices from other tables.
I sat at the far end, fingers curled around a cup that had long gone lukewarm,
-eyes fixed on the girl across from her.
Kaze
-Or the girl who now called herself that.
She sat as though her presence was accidental—shoulders slightly turned away, hair falling to one side in a soft veil, her gaze lowered.
There was nothing dramatic about her return, and yet everything about her presence unsettled my chest.
It had been years since that day, the day she had disappeared like a sudden gust of wind, leaving silence where laughter used to be. And now here she was, sipping tea as though she had neverleft.
I sipped the tea,
Words pressed at the back of the throat, but before I could choose one,
Kaze spoke.
"I'm sorry."
The words barely stirred the air, fragile, almost swallowed by the hiss of the kettle behind the counter.
But to me, they rang louder than the rain.
I stared.
Sorry? -That single word, after years of absence, after nights of wondering, after unanswered letters folded away in drawers? The syllables felt too light , too easy, as though an apology could stitch the years back together.
"I'm sorry if my disappearance… if it left a weight on you—if it made you question yourself—I'm sorry.
That was never what I wanted."
Her voice trembles slightly.
"Back then, I wasn't trying to hurt anyone. I just… couldn't keep performing.
I wasn't strong.
I wasn't brave.
I was exhausted"
My fingers tightened her hold on the cup. -voice came, soft and steady but edged:
"You disappear for years, and all you have is sorry?"
Kaze flinched—not visibly,
not enough for anyone else to notice, but I clearly saw it -the way her breath caught. She had always been attuned to the small things in her, the hidden tremors beneath her calm.
"I didn't know how to come back,"
Kaze murmured.
Her fingers traced the rim of her cup as though seekingdirection.
"It was easier to stay gone. Easier than facing what I left behind."
My chest tightened yet again-
Memories flickered— of them chatting under a tree in autumn, yellow leaves falling around them;
Kaze laughing, that rare sound she gave only when she felt safe;
the way I had caught glimpses of her carrying invisible weight, even back then.
I had noticed, but I had been too young, too blind, too content in their little world to ask the rightquestions.
And then came the day by the river.
---
(Flashback)
(Kaze's pov)
The water was high that spring.
I remembered-
standing near the bank, the air thick with the smell of wet earth and willow.
slip—vanish into the river's dark mouth—
A slow river, moonlight washing over her face.
Cold water clinging like fingers.
My body weightless.
Silence-
Peace.
"Maybe this is the ending I was meant to write for myself." I thought
-arms thrashing.
Then—hands pulling me out.
Someone had grabbed my wrist, pulled with every desperate ounce of strength, until the two of them lay coughing on the sand with their clothes drenched.
Rough voices-
Warm blankets,
Waking up by a hearth fire in a village unfamiliar.
"They kept asking me who I was. Where I came from."
"I lied. I said I didn't remember. And maybe… in some ways, that was true."
---
Now, across the table, Ashpen saw the same silence in her eyes.
Kaze lifted her gaze slowly. Her eyes, dark and unreadable,
carried shadows I couldn't name.
"The river didn't take me,"
She said, her voice soft.
"I thought if I disappeared, I could breathe again. I thought… you'd forget me."
Forget? Ashpen wanted to laugh, but the sound that left her was closer to a choke. Forgetting had never been an option.
Every year I carried yourv absence like a bruise, touched by accident whenever someone mentioned poetry, or when the ginkgo leaves fell just right, or when the rain pressed against her window at night.
I said in a voice low.
"Do you know how many times I looked for you?
Do you know what it felt like, not knowing if you were alive?"
I clenches my fists under the table.
My eyes sting—but she forces herself to stay composed.
"Do you know what it was like?"
she finally whispers.
"Walking into that empty art room… again and again… pretending I didn't notice you were missing?
Laughing with people who didn't even ask where you'd gone?"
My voice cracks.
"I waited.
Every day-
For a message-
A sign-
Even a rumor."
Kaze flinches.
I tried to breathe, but the ache that had been buried since that day breaks through.
Her shoulders tremble.
"You left, Kaze. You left
-and the world didn't even pause.
But Idid.
I paused.
I froze.
-And I smiled through it."
Tears finally slip past her guard.
"You made me feel like I'd imagined you."
Kaze's lips parted, but no words came. Only silence, the kind that carried its own confessions.
---
The shop's bell jingled as someone entered, shaking off an umbrella. The sound pulled me briefly back to the present. I noticed how Kaze's hand trembled as she lifted her cup again.
It wasn't much, but it was enough—I had seen that tremor before , years ago, in the moments when Kaze tried to hide the cracks in her calm.
"I'm not asking you to forgive me,"
Kaze finally said.
"I just needed you to know I regret it
Every day.
But I couldn't come back with my old name. She's gone.
The girl you knew… she drowned, even if the river didn't take her."
My throat ached.
I wanted to argue, to tell her she was wrong, that she was still here, still the same. But when I looked at her—the lowered gaze, the fragile way she held herself—she realized Kaze was right , in her own way.
Something had died that day, something I had never seen clearly until now.
Still, I reached across the table. Slowly, hesitantly, brushed Kaze's hand. The touch was light , almost accidental, but it carried all the words I couldn't manage to say.
Kaze did not pull away.
For the first time since she returned, her eyes lifted fully to mine, and in them, I saw both a stranger and the same girl she had once let go in the river.
The rain kept falling, soft and endless.
And for a moment, it felt as though time had folded , carrying them back to the banks of the river, to promises unspoken, to wounds still waiting to heal.