Tokyo's skyline glinted with metal, cold light. Inside a high-rise apartment complex, Haruka sat in a room too clean, too still. The windows refused to move. The curtains were not hers. The bed was too hard, the desk too polished. It was not a prison, not in the literal sense—but the walls knew how to shut in around her without ever touching.
Her phone had been taken the moment she arrived. "Just a few days," her mother had told her, smiling too widely. "Until you get settled in."
But days passed. And her silence multiplied.
Every hour of her day was precisely scheduled: morning study time, afternoon graduate school preparation course, nighttime tutoring with a retired professor. All for the future they had planned for her—a Master's, then a teaching position. A secure life, heritage, and expectations in tidy little packages and sealed.
Haruka's brain, however, wouldn't remain in its place. It drifted on—back to the icy lake, to the heat of arms that had once held her without asking her to be someone else. To the boy with the soft smile who had been her refuge.
Kaito.
She couldn't call him. She couldn't say it.
So she wrote.
On the back of paper used, in the margins of textbooks, on the inside of worn-out envelopes. She wrote letters that she could not send, all to someone who waited far away.
"I didn't get to say goodbye. I didn't choose to leave."
"I keep hearing your voice in the quiet parts of the day."
"Do you still go to the lake?"
"I miss the snow."
Meanwhile, in the tiny southern town where winter lingered like a memory, Kaito stood outside her old rental.
Again.
The landlord smiled politely, apologetically. "No, she hasn't come back. I haven't heard anything."
He nodded reluctantly. "Okay. Thanks."
His stride was slower this time as he turned to go. The bag of melon bread he carried remained untouched.
Each day, he came back. Each day he waited.
The bakery where she once helped had a peaceful corner now. She was missed in the way the light fell differently on the counter, the quietness behind the register.
"Still nothing?" his grandmother Natsumi, asked one night, setting a bowl of miso soup in front of him.
He nodded his head.
She didn't prod. But she watched him closely. There was this kind of understanding in her eyes—the kind that comes from loving someone who's lost something they can't quite put their finger on.
In Tokyo, Haruka stood by her window, high above the city hum. The stars were too dim here. The snow never fell quite so perfectly. She pressed her fingers against the frozen glass, acting as if it were the lake.
In silence, she had whispered his name.
Once.
Kaito.
Far away, under a grayer sky, Kaito sat by the lake again, a crumpled piece of paper in his coat pocket.
He had not read it.
Not yet.
Because hope, no matter how bitter, was preferable to the end.