Five weeks into her first year at university, Haru Okumura sold the penthouse apartment she had inherited from her late father.
She can still remember how it felt to step into each of the empty rooms for that final time. Her footsteps had been like a kind of echolocation. They carried throughout the apartment as her father's raised voice once did. His words used to travel through floors and walls. Through every kind of shut door. The past echoed back to her with every footfall. Returned to Haru what a part of her had always known: that she was not welcome there.
Yet something in her still ached when she handed the keys over to the new owner.
The apartment Haru had rented near her university barely pushed seven hundred fifty square feet. It was smaller than she should have been used to. But a childhood spent under her father's roof had taught her how to live in small spaces. For the first time, she could unapologetically fill a room with her presence and belongings. Could think without fear of being discovered doing so.
After graduation, Haru moved to the other end of the city where she found a two-story building with only the air of dilapidation. Not the symptoms. Her coffee shop now occupies the main floor. She is aware enough to recognize just how strongly Le Blanc had influenced her preferences. These streets are familiar to her when they should not be. It is not like she has lived on them before now. But they are narrow and warm with the sounds of domesticity: the distant rumble of washing machines. The excited barking of dogs. The names of children thrown by their friends to the sky. The familiarity envelopes her.
The name of her shop is most definitely on the nose: La Liberté Café. Futaba has occasionally poked fun at her for it. But it feels like something clammy is being peeled off the surface of her lungs whenever Haru hears it said aloud.
She loves it most of all whenever Yusuke says its name.
While she attended a university in Tokyo, Yusuke Kitagawa had gone to another prefecture to study. They kept in contact with each other nearly every day. The group chat established in high school is still active even now. As is their own private text conversation. The oldest messages of this thread have been automatically deleted as the conversation lengthened with the years. Even still, Haru can remember one of the texts she received from Yusuke in the early hours of the morning following her father's death: I'm so sorry. Don't hesitate to call if you need someone to listen.
Haru spoke with Yusuke the most thereafter. It is plain to her now that there had been something like in nature between Madarame and her father. She thinks they were similar weapons bearing different names. Suspects neither she nor Yusuke had consciously known that the lacerations on their hearts had been dealt by the same instrument. The honesty she would need to see how her heartbreak could be twin to his came only after she overcame her hesitation to call on him.
They had done their best to visit each other between semesters and over holiday breaks. Unfortunately, Yusuke's paychecks did not always afford him enough to cover the fare to Tokyo. She often offered to pay for both his transportation and his meals. But Yusuke told her that he worried he took too much advantage of her generosity.
Now that they live under the same roof, Haru has discovered just how imperative it is to him that they fairly predetermine who will pay for what.
They live in a two-bedroom apartment on the floor above La Liberté Café. The Sayuri still hangs in Le Blanc. But many of Yusuke's own works hang in her shop. The long wall opposite the pastry display cases and the cash register is crown molding-to-baseboard Yusuke Kitagawa originals. A small number of them are monochrome sketches. One half of them are studies painted in oil and watercolour. The remainder are full-colour paintings smaller than the hours he put into them. Haru recognizes many of the shapes in his works. Makes out the sloping cheek of a Shadow in a stroke of ink. Notices the colour palette of another in a neighbouring portrait. They transfix her now just as they did then.
She has always adored to watch Yusuke paint. To be near his passion for creation. There is a painting of a fantastical stream that hangs over the second booth from the door. Its waters look as though they move more like a wind than as a liquid. Haru remembers finding the secluded riverbank he used as his model. As he had prepared his easel, she sprawled herself out on the grass. Watched upside-down as he began to paint.
A study of shapes in frost is taped to the spot on the wall nearest the storefront window. She remembers leaving him swaddled up in three blankets in their shared apartment as she went to pick up cough medicine. Remembers returning to find him bent over his desk with those blankets around his middle. Yusuke had been so fascinated by the aureate frost on his studio's window that it compelled him to paint.
Then there are the paintings she does not recognize but loves regardless. They are the ones he made in his time away from her. The ones of models she has never met. Places she has never seen. Ones born from the parts of him she can never truly know. But they are his. That alone is enough to make her lungs go soft.
The shop is filled with pieces of herself too. On all fifteen tables sits lightly fragrant potted plants. Lantana and sweet alyssum flowers are suspended in baskets overhead. The customers do not see the vegetables she nurtures in the tiny basement below them. Or the ones that grow even further above their heads on the rooftop. The garden beds up there are a great improvement over the ones on the roof of Shujin Academy. There is even a tiny green house installed beside them for her temperamental peppers to grow in. Next she thinks she will invest in an apiary. She just needs to finish the stack of beekeeping books that sit on her nightstand first.
Yusuke likes to paint up on the roof when the weather is cooperative. More often, he can be found inside his studio. The room is smaller than even his own in Madarame's shack. Yet Yusuke never complains. One side of the room is ceiling-to-floor window. It overlooks one of those slender streets. Laundry hangs on a wire eye-level from the balcony of a house across the way. Haru has caught him looking out of the window many times. Only she is not always sure that she sees what he does. Sometimes she tries to follow his gaze. It leads her to the twisting shadow of a shirt hung out to dry in the wind. The clear reflections of the buildings and sky in puddles. To the stray cats that streak through the alleyway below. But sight is a kind of echolocation. It is hard for her to say what each of these things might echo back to him.
A part of her hopes it returns to him what it does to her: that they are welcome here.
Haru owns the building outright. Yusuke pays rent. It is a reasonable arrangement. But she wishes he would not use that word. Whenever she hears him say it, the walls of her throat press in against each other. Haru cannot help but wonder if he is planning on leaving this place behind someday. On leaving her. Others before him have done so in their own way.
Maybe that is why she loves to hear him say the name of the café: he says it with such affection and pride. Like it is something that they share.
To this day, Haru knows she still has a tendency to freeze up. To lose inside her throat the words she wants to say. She has known this ever since she first tore that mask from her skin. Although it might her take her time to find the words again, she will always speak her mind.
Today, they sit opposite each other at a table inside La Liberté Café. It is after closing. The sunlight is russet at this hour. A pot of heliotrope flowers and two cups of coffee sit on the table between them. His fingers hover around the handle of his mug. But he does not lift it. She had locked his eyes with hers.
"Does this feel like home to you?" she asks.
Both his eyebrows shift upward slightly. Some part of her anticipates that his gaze will wander. That the silence will stretch for too many seconds.
Half a second passes.
"Of course." He says it so plainly. It takes her a couple of seconds to find her voice again.
"Why?"
His eyes widen a millimetre or two. But he does not look curious so much as concerned. Haru cannot help but fidget at that. Pivots her heel where it touches the linoleum floor. Another half-second passes.
"We're growing beans in the basement, aren't we?"
There is a shade of worry to his voice. Neither one of them breaks eye contact. From that, she knows that he knows that whatever she is asking him is important to her. Warmth stirs under her collarbones. Haru remembers wondering aloud if any vegetables could grow in the darkness of the collective unconscious. Yusuke had suggested that beans sprouts could. Now they grow beans in the dark a floor below them.
Her mind follows the subway tunnels in her memory to all the times when she would practice speaking freely. She can recall how some of the things she said made Ryuji grit his teeth into something resembling a smile. Made Makoto's voice go thin. But whatever she said never seemed to affect Yusuke as it did the others.
Maybe they too are the same weapon.
"Yes, yes," she says. Laughs a little. "We are." Reaching across the table, Haru takes the hand furthest from his mug into her own. Runs her thumb over his knuckles and prominent tendons. His fingers curl gently over hers. "How silly of me to forget." Her thumb trails off the edge of his hand. Presses into the side of the knuckle of her index finger.
His other hand comes to rest over top hers then. This time, Yusuke's eyes find hers first.
"Shall we check on them?" he asks. His voice is no echo. Neither is his smile. But it returns to her what all of her had always wanted.
Haru smiles back at him.