He walked slowly.
There was no particular reason for it.
His next class was in the building ahead, five minutes away, and he had ten minutes.
He passed a vending machine and didn't stop.
He passed a bench where two students were sharing notes and arguing about something quietly.
He went through a set of double doors and into a stairwell and up one floor and into the corridor where his classroom was.
He found a seat in the middle row and set his bag down.
Students filtered in around him.
He pulled out his notebook and uncapped his pen.
He sat with his chin in his hand and thought about the cafeteria. Them eating lunch together, with casual chit-chat.
Wait.
He sat up slightly.
Was that a date?
No. No, it was lunch.
People had lunch. It was the cafeteria. There were trays.
His ears felt warm.
He picked up his pen and glanced at his notebook.
The page was still blank.
The professor walked in and began writing across the board, the scratch of chalk filling the room.
Kaito sensed someone approaching.
The chair didn't scrap as they sat down.
He glanced sideways.
An old man.
Grey jacket, white hair, a face that was still and settled.
The lines in it were deep but unhurried, the kind that came from years of thinking rather than worrying.
He was looking at the board with mild interest. His hands were folded on the desk in front of him.
His hands were not quite solid.
Kaito looked back at the board.
"I know you can see me, boy," the old man said.
Kaito said nothing.
"Exorcist, are you?" the old man said. "I can tell."
Kaito glanced at him sideways. "Yes."
"Unusual. Most of you study at home." The old man tilted his head slightly. "Are you special?"
"No." Kaito kept his voice low, eyes on the board. "I didn't want to be an exorcist. So I left."
The old man was quiet for a moment.
Then he laughed, a small sound, warm and surprised.
"Good." He nodded slowly.
"It's good to choose your own destiny."
A pause.
"I am proud of you for that."
Kaito blinked. "You don't know me."
"No." The old man smiled. "But I mean it anyway."
Kaito looked at him for a moment.
"What are you doing here?" he asked him in a low voice.
The old man's eyes moved to the front of the room.
To the professor, mid-sentence, chalk in hand, turning to face the class.
"Watching my son," the old man said.
Kaito looked at the professor.
Thirties, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.
He moved through the front of the room with easy steps, called on students by name, listened to their questions with his full attention.
The class was paying attention to him.
Not because they had to.
Because he made it easy to.
"He wanted to be a teacher," the old man said.
"Since he was small. He used to line up his toys and stand in front of them and explain things." A quiet breath.
"I thought it was a phase. Something he would grow out of."
The professor wrote a date on the board. A student in the back raised her hand.
"I wanted him to be a doctor. Like me." The old man's voice stayed even.
"I told him teaching was not a real career. That he was wasting his mind. That I had worked too hard and sacrificed too much for him to stand in front of children for the rest of his life." He paused. "I said things a father should not say."
Kaito was looking at the professor now and not the board.
"We fought the night of his graduation. He packed a bag and left. He didn't tell me where he was going." The old man folded his hands more tightly together.
"I told myself he would come back when he came to his senses. That I would wait." Another pause. "I waited for years."
The professor laughed at something a student said.
Genuine, easy.
He leaned back against the desk and shook his head and the class laughed with him.
"Years passed without any contact between us. And then on my birthday few years ago," the old man said, "I received a letter."
He stopped.
Kaito waited.
"It was from my grandson." His voice was quieter now, stripped down to just the words.
"A boy I had never met. Seven years old. He had drawn a picture on the front of the envelope. A house and two stick figures. One tall, one very small." The old man looked at his hands.
"He wrote that his father had told him about me. That I was the best doctor in the country. He wanted to know if I would come and meet him."
The classroom continued around them.
Pens moving, pages turning, the professor walking slowly between the rows.
"I was in my car as soon as I finished reading it," the old man said. "All those years and I just— left. I drove to his address. I didn't tell my wife. I didn't call ahead. I didn't know what I was going to say." He gave a small laugh.
"I stood outside his door for ten minutes before I knocked."
A pause.
"He opened the door." The old man stopped.
Kaito waited.
"He had gotten older. Of course he had. Years had passed. But I still saw the boy who used to line up his toys." The old man's voice was quieter now, something careful in it, the way someone speaks when they are choosing each word because the wrong one might break something.
"He looked at me for a long time. I didn't know what to say. I had rehearsed things in the car. I had prepared. And standing there I forgot all of it." A breath.
"I just said his name."
The classroom around them continued.
A pen moving.
A page turning.
"He didn't say anything. His jaw moved but nothing came out. And then—" The old man stopped again. His folded hands tightened slightly.
"He put his head down. Just for a moment. His shoulders moved. And I understood that he had been waiting too. That all those years he had been waiting just as I had." The old man's voice held.
Steady.
"I stepped forward and I held him. Right there in the doorway. He didn't pull away. He held on."
Kaito was not moving.
"His wife found us like that. She didn't say a word. She just went to the kitchen and put the kettle on." The old man gave a small sound, something between a laugh and something else entirely.
"My grandson came running down the stairs in his pajamas because he heard the door. He stopped at the bottom step and stared at me with very large eyes. Then he asked if I was the doctor grandfather."
A long pause.
"I said yes. He sprinted towards me yelling cheerfully. He had a question about why his knee hurt when it rained."
The old man looked at his hands.
"We sat in that kitchen until midnight. My grandson fell asleep on my lap at some point and nobody moved him. His father and I talked until there was nothing left to say and then we just sat there." He was quiet.
"It was the best night of my life."
Kaito had stopped pretending to look at the board entirely.
"Two years later I had a heart attack." The old man looked around the classroom slowly, at the students bent over their notebooks, at the afternoon light coming through the windows, at his son at the front of the room.
"It was fast. I didn't have time to say anything to anyone." He was quiet for a moment. "I didn't even get to finish my tea that morning."
Kaito said nothing.
"I still regret it," the old man said.
"Not the end. The years before. All that time I spent being right." He looked at his son.
"I was right about nothing. He is happy. His students love him. His family is adorable." His hands unfolded and folded again. "I was so sure I knew what a good life looked like. I never once asked him what he wanted his to look like."
The professor paused in his walk between the rows.
He turned and looked toward the back of the classroom, at nothing in particular, his eyes moving slowly across the empty faces.
Then he turned back and kept walking.
"But I have made my peace with it," the old man said quietly.
The professor laughed again at the front of the room.
"He is a very good teacher," the old man said.
"Yes," Kaito said. "He is."
The old man looked at him for a long moment.
Then he gave a small nod, slow and satisfied, the kind that came from somewhere deep.
"I should go check on my grandson now." He stood up.
"He has football practice today. He never remembers to bring enough water." A small smile. "He gets that from his father."
"Take care," Kaito said.
The old man smiled. Then he was gone.
The chair beside Kaito was just a chair again.
Kaito looked at it for a moment.
Then he looked at the professor.
The professor had stopped writing.
His hand was still raised toward the board, chalk in it, but he wasn't moving.
He was standing very still with his back to the class, looking at the board, and then he lowered his arm slowly and set the chalk down on the tray.
He stood there with both hands on the board's edge, head slightly down.
A few students looked up.
Then he straightened, turned around, and picked the chalk back up.
"Sorry," he said to the class. "Lost my train of thought."
He went back to teaching.
His voice was the same.
His hands were steady.
But his eyes, when they moved across the room, were somewhere else for just a second before they came back.
Kaito watched him.
He thought about his own father.
About a birthday that had passed without a call, without a message, without anything at all.
If Kaito had a child someday. If he gave his father a grandchild.
Would that be enough?
He sat with that question for the rest of the class and didn't write a single note.