It was evening when they reached the house.
An old house with a garden, chosen by her mother. The house was older than Mitsuki. When she unlocked the sliding door, the smell of the late-summer garden drifted out faintly. A single plum tree spread its branches. Her father had told her many times that her mother had planted it.
"I almost want to say 'Sorry to intrude.'"
Riko gave a wry smile in the entryway. She had come all the way home with her.
"Do you want to come in?"
"No, I'll pass today. I'll come by again tomorrow."
Riko really was good at keeping that kind of distance. Mitsuki nodded, and they said a short goodbye at the door. The sound of the door closing carried through the house more than she had expected.
She stood in front of her father's study and breathed in, just once and deeply, the smell that seeped through the gap in the door, the smell of a room someone had been living in until yesterday. Then, without touching the knob, she went back to the living room.
She opened the refrigerator. There was a boxed lunch Riko had put in for her earlier in the day. She didn't have the energy to heat it in the microwave, so she ate half of it cold with chopsticks. The rice was hard.
What had her father eaten on the day her mother died? Mitsuki had been five when her mother passed. She barely remembered anything about the table that day. All she remembered was that her father had been silent the whole night, and that he hadn't cried.
For some reason, she did remember that she had called out "Papa" that night. She had called him that less and less after that, until at some point it stopped coming out at all.
She closed the lid of the boxed lunch. She put it back in the refrigerator.
She opened her tablet and booked a meeting for tomorrow with the company handling the return gifts for the condolence offerings. She submitted a bereavement leave form through the high school's system. In seventeen years, it was the first time she had ever filed something like this herself. In the reason field, she wrote only "Death of father." The first time, the conversion gave her "slowly, slowly." Even after she retyped it and got "father," she couldn't press the send button for a while.
In the margin of her student page, headlines for related articles scrolled past. "The Era When Chefs Are No Longer Needed—Cooking AI Roti Smart and Ryo Kiryu's Provocation." It was a name she had come across now and then lately in the cooking world. A young cook who went around installing AI in the kitchens of chain restaurants, and the name of the service behind him. Mitsuki scrolled on without reading to the end.
She didn't go to her bedroom. With the envelope on her lap, she stayed in the living room chair, and she couldn't sleep until morning. She tried not to look at the clock. She felt that if she looked at the clock, the fact that her father was no longer in this world at that hour would become something concrete.