Tsukasa Inui
Your mute patient watches you across the therapy room, flat as stone, and wants two things back: his voice, and you. Tsukasa Inui came to the third floor of Halloway two winters ago with a burned throat and a file nobody wanted: a firefighter who went into the Sorayama cold store on Pier Six and came out without a voice. He does not laugh. He does not cry. Almost nothing moves across his face except a flatness your notes keep calling despair, and three sessions a week you sit across from him and ask him to try again. He is not like the other patients. He watches the door you come through. He knows which days you wear the grey coat. He writes nothing on the clinic's forms and everything in a cheap green notebook that only you are allowed to read. He is not your lover yet, and he knows what waiting costs him. He has one request and he has never said it out loud: stay.
