The kitchen seemed to tilt on its axis. Nobu couldn't pull oxygen into his lungs. The image she was painting—the eighteen-year-old girl he had left crying at the lockers, lying on a floor waiting to die—was a nightmare he couldn't comprehend.
"My mother came home early," Sari said, her voice completely hollow now, devoid of anger, stating the facts with the clinical detachment of a medical report. "She found me an hour later. My lips were blue. I wasn't breathing. The ER visit is just a blur of lights and screaming, but the medical report was very simple. I died, Nobu. I flatlined on the table. Twice. They had to use the defibrillator to shock my heart back into a rhythm."
Nobu stumbled backward, his hip hitting the edge of the granite counter. His legs felt like they were made of water. He tried to speak, to form a word, an apology, anything, but his throat was completely paralyzed.
"I spent the next month in an inpatient psychiatric facility," she whispered, a solitary tear tracking down her pale cheek. "I spent the next four years in intense therapy just to figure out how to wake up in the morning without wanting to swallow another bottle of pills. I pulled myself out of that grave. I went to MIT, I built my career, and I learned how to lock down every single vulnerability I had so that no one could ever dismantle me like that again."
She swiped the tear away with the back of her sleeve, her posture stiffening as the Tech Queen violently reasserted control over the traumatized girl.
"Then my father signed a contract, and I was forced to marry the weapon that almost killed me," she said, her voice turning to pure ice. "In Hokkaido, I forgot. I let the isolation trick me into feeling safe. But we aren't in Hokkaido anymore. We are in the real world. And in the real world, being vulnerable with you is a lethal risk."
Sari took a step back, the distance between them feeling permanent and insurmountable.
"So, I am sorry if my need for personal space is hurting your feelings right now," she stated, her tone final and absolute. "But I am protecting my mental health. I cannot handle playing the devoted wife to you right now. I need a door that locks."
She turned her back on him and walked down the short hallway. The heavy wooden door of the master suite clicked shut, followed immediately by the sharp, definitive slide of the deadbolt sliding into place.
In the kitchen, Nobu stood perfectly still. The silence of the house crashed back in, but the roaring in his ears completely drowned it out.
She died. The words echoed in his skull, repeating over and over again like a corrupted line of code. His fifty-dollar bet. His desperate, cowardly need to save face in front of a group of teenagers he didn't even care about. He hadn't just broken her heart; he had stopped it. He had pushed the only person who had ever truly loved him into a darkness so deep she had tried to erase her own existence.
A violent wave of nausea hit him. Nobu gripped the edge of the counter, his knuckles turning stark white as his legs finally gave out. He dropped to his knees on the hardwood floor, the air tearing out of his lungs in a ragged, suffocating gasp. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, his broad shoulders shaking violently as the sheer magnitude of his guilt buried him alive.
He had brought her into his house, into his bed, completely ignorant of the fact that he was the ghost that haunted her nightmares. He sat on the floor of the empty kitchen, the perfectly cooked steak turning cold on the table above him, staring at the locked door of the master suite. He had absolutely no idea what to do, because for the first time in his life, he realized there was no amount of time, no amount of money, and no apology in the world that could fix what he had broken.
The wall clock in the kitchen ticked with a steady, mechanical indifference.
It was the only sound in the house. The deadbolt on the master suite hadn't moved. Sari hadn't made a single sound since the door clicked shut.
Nobu remained on his knees on the hardwood floor for a long time. The violent, ragged gasps that had initially torn from his chest had subsided into a hollow, shallow breathing that barely filled his lungs. The adrenaline of the argument was completely gone, leaving behind a crushing, paralyzing gravity that made it impossible to stand.
I died, Nobu.
The words were branded into the inside of his skull. He pressed his palms flat against the cold floorboards, staring blankly at the grain of the wood.
For the last eight years, he had carried the guilt of a broken friendship. He had berated himself for being a cowardly, stupid teenager who sold out the girl he loved for the approval of a locker room. He had thought the worst consequence of his actions was her hatred and her absence.
He hadn't known she was fighting to survive her own mind. He hadn't known about the hospital, the defibrillator, or the four years of intensive therapy she had endured to learn how to breathe again.
And he had forced her to marry him. He and his father had cornered her, leveraged her family's company, and dragged her to the altar to save the Zeigler steel mills. He had trapped her in a legal, binding contract with the trigger of her suicide attempt.
The sheer magnitude of his arrogance made him physically sick. In Hokkaido, he had actually started to believe he could fix it. He had thought that chopping wood, maintaining the irori, and a profound physical connection could somehow overwrite the past. He had brought her back to this house—the house she had run from—expecting her to slide into domestic bliss.
Slowly, painfully, Nobu forced himself up from the floor. His joints ached, stiff from the cold and the awkward angle.
He stood in the center of the kitchen and looked at the dining table. The two plates sat exactly where they had been abandoned. The garlic butter on the perfect, medium-rare ribeye had congealed into a thick, white paste. The spinach salad was wilted. It was a pathetic, domestic monument to a war he had already lost eight years ago.
He moved mechanically. He picked up the plates, carried them to the sink, and scraped the meticulously prepared food directly into the garbage disposal. He didn't save the leftovers. He washed the plates, dried them, and put them away in the cupboards, moving with silent, deliberate precision. He wiped down the granite counters until they were spotless.
It was an entirely useless gesture, but he needed something to do. He needed to put something in order, because the foundation of his entire reality had just been annihilated.
When the kitchen was immaculate, Nobu turned off the overhead lights, plunging the room into shadow.
He walked down the short hallway, his footsteps silent on the wood. He stopped outside the closed door of the master suite. He didn't reach for the handle. He didn't knock. He just stood there in the dark, resting his forehead against the solid wood of the door frame. He could feel the cold radiating from the barrier she had put between them.
He closed his eyes, his chest tightening as he silently stood guard over the room for an hour, making sure she didn't need anything, making sure she was breathing.
When he finally pulled himself away, he walked into the cramped, dark office at the front of the house.
He didn't turn on a lamp. He didn't unpack his duffel bag. He collapsed onto the narrow daybed, staring up at the ceiling. The mattress was stiff, the room smelled like old paper and dust, and the silence of the Oregon woods outside his window was completely different from the comforting isolation of Hokkaido.
Nobu didn't close his eyes. He lay in the dark, watching the shadows stretch and shift across the ceiling as the hours dragged by, waiting for the sun to come up on a marriage he had no idea how to save.