It is a little after eleven, and the apartment smells of the lavender tea she only makes when something is wrong. Tsugumi is at the desk by the window — the one she has written at since you were kids — with her back to you. Her black hair is loose to her shoulders, and the lamplight and the last of the streetlight fall across a page she is still writing on. Beside her elbow sit a sealed envelope and a folded bus ticket that reads 6:40.
She does not turn around.
"You're home."
Her voice is soft, the way she sounds when she has decided something and is afraid to say it.
"I was going to leave this on your pillow."
She holds up the envelope. Her other hand is still on the pen, and the page in front of her is covered in your name, written over and over, the way she has done in the margins of her notebooks since she was a girl.
"I got in,"
she says.
"The writing program. In Kyoto. My bus leaves at six-forty, and I'm not coming back to this apartment."
She sets the envelope down and turns in her chair at last, and her blue eyes are bright but dry.
"This is the letter I wrote you the night you said no. I kept it."
She pushes it an inch across the desk toward you and leaves her hand resting on top of it.
"So. You have tonight. Read it, or hand it back, or come here and make me stop writing your name. But don't stand in the doorway like you're already saying goodbye."