Night.
Rui, fresh off her deadline, wandered into the kitchen. The dark circles under her eyes had faded. One of her pretty-face days.
"Mr. Kashiwagi. There's something I want you to hear."
Mr. Kashiwagi. At some point, Rui had started calling me that.
When I set out a minced-meat cutlet sandwich, she picked it up with one hand and held out her pen display with the other. It was a new storyboard, from her sketchbook.
"It looks like my next series is going to be approved. So I've been thinking about it a lot."
Biting into the sandwich, juices dripping, Rui scrolled the screen.
"All my manga up to now has been flashy battles, or crazy superpowers, that kind of thing. Even drawing under a pen name—it's because that sells better."
"I see."
"But this next one is a story about nothing special. Just an everyday story, about someone who cooks in an old house, and the people who come home there."
I peered at the screen. What was drawn there was—someone in an apron, standing in a kitchen.
"This is..."
"Don't say it."
Rui cut me off sharply. Her cheeks were turning red before my eyes.
"It's not like there's a model or anything. It just happened. It just happened that I felt like drawing a plain old middle-aged guy like this."
"Uh-huh."
"Anyway. I'm still anonymous, but for the first time, I'm going to draw what 'the real me' wants to draw. Not battles. A story like this, with steam rising off it."
Rui hugged the pen display tight and spoke fast.
"...It's scary. What if it doesn't sell, you know. But I want to draw it."
"I think that's wonderful," I said quietly.
"A manga where you drew what you wanted to draw is bound to become a place for someone to come home to."
Rui stopped mid-bite. Then she started to say something, stopped, and hid the lower half of her face behind the pen display.
"...You've got juice dripping, you know."
"I said don't say it!"
That night, the four of them were gathered in the living room.
I was tidying up, half-listening without meaning to, when Rei said quietly:
"We've changed, since we came here, haven't we."
After a short silence, Mahiru shook her head.
"No. We haven't changed, you know. Any of us."
"Huh?"
"I mean, I'm still scared of the phone. Yume still sulks at the drop of a hat. And Rui still gets wrecked every deadline, same as ever."
Yume laughed, "How rude," and Rui nodded, "True, though."
"It's just—"
Mahiru glanced toward the kitchen. I pretended not to notice and kept drying the plates.
"We've got a place to come home to now. That's all."
The four of them laughed quietly.
The sparks, the possessiveness—they'd all become part of a heartwarming everyday life. Puffing out cheeks over "He used to be my Mr. Manager," glaring at each other over "No sneaking ahead"—all of it was just the usual nighttime scenery of this house.
Watching their backs, I thought:
None of them had changed dramatically. Each of them had just moved forward, only a little.
And that's enough.
The steam from the tea swayed quietly in the light.
The cherry blossoms bloomed.
An old tree that stood in the middle of the courtyard. An old cherry tree that Tomi had always treasured, I'd heard. This year, too, it bloomed like a soft, pale cloud.
"Shall we have a cherry-blossom picnic today?"
When I said that, the four of them lit up.
From the morning on, the kitchen was a battlefield. I had a two-tiered lunch box spread out across the whole table.
Bamboo shoot rice. Freshly dug bamboo shoots, their bitterness drawn out with rice bran, then cooked into the rice with dashi. When I lifted the lid, a faintly bitter spring fragrance drifted up.
"Whoa, that smells good."
Yume peeked into the kitchen, her nose twitching.
"No sneaking bites."
"Aww."
For the sakura shrimp kakiage, I judged the oil temperature and fried them quickly. They sizzled, the pale pink shrimp popping inside the batter. A toasty smell filled the kitchen.
Keep the batter thin. Don't overfry; let the shrimp's aroma come through. The moment that pale pink bursts vividly into bloom in the oil is when it tastes best. You can't miss it.
Sakura shrimp have more aroma raw than boiled.
Even as I murmured that in my head, my hands were already moving on to the next dish.
The dashi omelet, sweeter than usual. Butterbur sprout tempura, the bitterness softened by frying. Simmered vegetables, rapeseed greens in dashi, sea bream cured in kombu. And pale pink rice balls scattered with salt-pickled cherry blossoms.
"Did you make all of this by yourself?"
Mahiru peered into the lunch box, her eyes round.
"Well, I'm used to it."
"This is way beyond 'used to it'..."