The plan, this time, involved the café's mirror.
Kaito had asked Riku and Kenji — properly this time, no doves involved — to help him with a small renovation project, something he'd told them needed to happen quietly, after closing, without Yuki's knowledge.
"We're not touching the espresso machine," Riku had clarified immediately. "She'll know. She always knows."
"Not the machine," Kaito assured him. "The mirror."
The day unfolded with deliberate normalcy.
Yuki arrived at her usual time, opened the coffee station with her usual precision, moved through the morning rush with the same efficient calm she'd brought to the café since her first day. Kaito worked beside her, the rhythm between them so practiced now that conversation wasn't always necessary — a kind of fluency that had built itself slowly, mirror adjustment by mirror adjustment, over more than a year.
"You're distracted," she observed, midafternoon, watching him fumble a simple order.
