Arato Hisako walked up the stairs to the Nakiri mansion in step with Erina, checking off items on the second seat's to-do list as they went.

"Now that the alumni banquet is over with, all there's left to do is organize your job offers into an Excel spreadsheet," the sixth seat said. "Now will it be better for you if I categorize them by name, geographic region, or number of Michelin stars?"

"Definitely by stars, but Hisako..." Erina paused to give her friend a long look, noting that she hadn't removed her broad sunglasses since before they left that morning. "Are you really okay?"

"Of course. Why wouldn't I be?" she asked, although the answer was more than clear.

It had been four days since she and Akira officially broke up. The severance had been neat as a surgeon's cut, on both of their schedules for months now.

In two weeks their class would graduate from Totsuki, and Hisako would be off to Switzerland to start her new position at the World Health Organization. Akira, on the other hand, had accepted a junior executive role at the Haubi Food Corporation, and would remain in Tokyo.

Hisako had known that they were doomed from the moment their plans solidified; she just hadn't expected it to bother her so much. She shot her friend the brightest smile she could manage, despite the fact that her eyes were still puffy from the tears they'd been leaking all week. "I'm fine, Erina-sama. Really."

"Hisako—"

"Why don't we go over all the restaurants' credentials one more time. We need to have everything in order before graduation, especially since—"

"Since you won't be there to swoop in and rescue me?" Erina raised an eyebrow.

"That's not what I meant," Hisako insisted. "It's just—" The sixth seat trailed off halfway down the hall. She froze as she heard a spirited debate coming from the direction of Alice's room.

"You're both being utterly ridiculous, you know! Ryo-kun, please talk some sense into your friend!"

"It's pretty unnecessary," the fourth seat chimed in, sounding as lethargic as ever. "Just go to Switzerland. You'll get a job."

"Exactly!" Alice continued. "You're the third seat in Totsuki's Elite Ten; any kitchen in the world would kill to have you, but you need to take your relationship more seriously than this!"

"We're eighteen years old. It makes absolutely no sense to—"

"What makes no sense is to just break up because you're both too stubborn to admit that the relationship means something to you! I mean, you love Hishoko, don't you?"

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Hisako turned around and bolted back down the stairs before she could hear anything else. By the time Erina caught up with her again, she was sitting outside in the garden, making a spreadsheet on her tablet.

"Do you want to know how the rest of that conversation went?" the second seat asked, taking a seat next to her.

Hisako reached beneath her sunglasses to thumb fresh tears away from her cheeks before glancing at her best friend, trying to read her expression. "I don't think I do, Erina-sama."

"Then I won't tell you," she replied. "But can I at least ask why not?"

Hisako sighed. Because if he loved her, she was a dumb bitch for leaving, and if he didn't, she was a dumb bitch for crying over a guy who didn't love her. She didn't know which would be worse at this point. "It wouldn't change anything, and it's best not to harp on things like this for too long."

Erina nodded. "You're always practical about these matters," she said. "But if you ever want to take an evening to complain and eat ice cream, I'm available."

"I might have to take you up on that later," Hisako replied. "But for now we should probably get to our closing committee meetings."

By the time Hisako reached the Alumni Relations Committee office at Totsuki's Parliament, Tadokoro-san had already printed all the necessary documents and set tea and snacks out on the coffee table.

"Thank you for updating the database while I was away," Megumi said as she took a seat on the couch.

"No problem at all, Tadokoro-san." Hisako was actually grateful to have a menial task like that to keep her mind off things. "How was New York?"

"It was amazing," Megumi said. "I've never seen anything like it."

Hisako smiled. Finally some good news! "Did you and Yukihira get everything settled with the apartment?"

The dark haired girl nodded a few times. "We put down a deposit on place on the west side of Queens. It's really a really convenient location because we both need to go into Manhattan for work."

"You took the job at the Ritz, right?" Hisako asked, recalling that a number of luxury hotels had been courting her for the past few months.

Megumi nodded."I got to visit the hotel while Souma-kun was meeting with Shinomiya-senpai. It's right across the way from Central Park."

"That sounds nice," Hisako replied. Tadokoro-san's entire setup—moving clear across the world with her high school sweetheart, putting down roots in a brand new city—sounded almost too good to be true. And Hisako knew for a fact that it actually was. "Tadokoro-san, I don't mean to pry, but...have you put any thought into Doujima-san's offer?"

At the alumni banquet, Hisako overheard the legendary chef ask Tadokoro Megumi to be his second in command. It was clearly his intention to groom her into the next head of the Totsuki Tourism Division.

For a fraction of a second, Megumi's smile faltered, and Hisako spotted a flash of longing in her golden eyes. But the expression was gone as fast as it came. "The Ritz was my best offer in New York," she said simply. "And it this point, I'm more sure about Souma-kun than I am about anything else."

Hisako had assumed that it would be something like that. As soon as Shinomiya Kojirou had announced plans to open his third restaurant in the heart of Manhattan, everyone knew he would offer the head chef position to Yukihira Souma. "Does Yukihira know about the offer?"

Megumi shook her head. "I haven't told anyone, not even my family back home. And...I'd really appreciate if it stayed between the two of us, Arato-san."

"Of course," Hisako assured, thanking the gods that she'd been too grief-stricken over the weekend to mention it to Erina. "You are truly an amazing person, Tadokoro-san."

"I think you are too, Arato-san. You're incredibly strong," Megumi replied, and in that moment Hisako adored her for leaving the rest unsaid.

As Nakiri Erina sat atop her desk with a handful of playing cards and a handle of whiskey, she wondered why she had made the mistake of assuming the annual report would get written today. That Yukihira Souma always had a unique talent for distracting her. Her lips curved downward into a frown as she realized her days would soon be excruciatingly productive.

"What's with that face, Nakiri?" the first seat asked her, grinning. "You realized that you're never gonna beat me at spades?"

"Please. You say that like you've actually won before." Erina rolled her eyes, mentally berating herself for letting her melancholy show. "I was just thinking of how pitifully small that apartment you showed me was. Where on earth is poor Tadokoro-san supposed to put her dresses?"

"Nakiri, most women don't have half the dresses you do."

"And that ought to be a crime," she replied. "Seriously, you better not screw things up in New York. It would be extremely embarrassing for me to have lost the first seat to a chef who crashed and burned in his first year out of school?"

Souma gave her a long look. "Is that your way of saying good luck?"

"A-absolutely not! My concern is solely for my reputation and the welfare of Tadokoro-san!"

"Whatever you say, Nakiri," he said before taking another sip from the bottle of Jack. Erina did all she could to keep from blushing over the fact that his lips were where her lips had just been. Why oh why was she still thinking this way about her friend's boyfriend? "Have you decided what you're gonna do with yourself yet?"

Erina shrugged. "All I know is that I want to leave the country," she said. "I might try freelancing for a while like Saiba-sama."

"I could see you doing that," he said. "Making restaurants all over the world that much more obsessed with that damn tongue of yours."

Erina's eyes narrowed as she searched for something back-handed in the comment. After sensing nothing, she relented. "We should call it a night. I don't trust either one of us to write a report in this state."

"We can always delegate to Takumi," Souma pointed out.

"Takumi?" Erina's brow furrowed. "Why would a task like that go all the way down to the seventh seat?"

"We're drunk, Hayama's depressed, Kurokiba and Alice won't do it, and Arato is probably busy with the rest of your work."

"Ah." All of that sounded about right. When on earth had they become this bad at their jobs?

"Can I walk you back to the mansion?" he asked, and she said yes even though there was a driver waiting for her outside.

The air was warm and fragrant with the scent of dewy grass and newly-bloomed flowers. Perhaps for the first time since they met, they wasted no time bickering, both of them sensing the end of an era.

"Night, Nakiri," he said once they were in front of the mansion's wrought-iron gates.

"Yukihira-kun," she said, just as he turned to leave.

"What's up?"

Before Erina could think better of it, she was hugging him, long and hard and just barely skirting the line between friendship and that which lied beyond it. Her eyes brimmed with tears as he returned the embrace, and she tried her best not to dwell on how well her face fit in the space between his neck and shoulder. The romantic in her wanted to believe it meant something, but she had closed her eyes to such thoughts long ago.

"Take care of yourself," she whispered through a boulder-sized lump in her throat.

And then she was walking swiftly through the gates, up the ramp, and into the mansion. She didn't turn back even once.

Author's Notes: Hi everyone! This story is meant to function as a prequel to On Casual Commitments and provide some more context for the events of that fic. However, you don't have to have read it to understand this story. I'm going to address what characters were up to in the years after graduating from Totsuki and answer some questions that were left unanswered by the end of On Casual Commitments, so if you have anything you'd like me to address, please let me know! Thanks for reading, everyone, and have a great day!