To be honest, there was one thing that Doumeki noticed that he knew Watanuki didn't. It was Yuuko's yukata and kimono, to be specific. Kimonos are very season specific, as are the obi, hair pins and all of the accompanying dressings. These are things he knows because of his mother and grandmother, because when they dressed him they told him that his wife would one day dress the same, but modern girls hardly ever knew of such things.
And Watanuki doesn't know these things either. Which is why Doumeki thinks of it now, because Watanuki had taken up wearing her clothes – except they weren't her clothes because all of the designs are very masculine... odd, that – and very often he doesn't wear the correct seasonal patterns. But Watanuki doesn't know much about kimono. It was strange, the fact that Yuuko would some times wear unseasonal kimono – it wasn't like her. She had been nothing if not impeccable. But more than that, it was the foods she had Watanuki cook – hot pot in the middle of spring, shaved ice in fall.
His theory makes sense, he thinks as he nurses a saucer of sake. With the shop, time is bent, so he doesn't even bat an eyelash when he sees that the hydrangeas are blooming, even though he'd just come from a torrent of ice cold rain.
Watanuki doesn't know that it's winter.
--
There are things that Watanuki notices now, more than before. Like the fact that Doumeki's eyes track him as he crosses the room, bare feet whispering across the tatami mats. He notices, but still he does nothing. He has adopted everything that Yuuko was, there but not there. He cannot touch Doumeki. Time moves slowly in the store.
There are things he remembers now. Like when he is tidying the store (more calmly than he did in the past) he moves a small figurine of something that looks like a rabbit to the top most shelf. It had been there before, he remembers, right before one of Doumeki's archery competitions and he'd been in a hurry to leave, but Yuuko had told him to move it to the third shelf. It had been covered in dust, then. It isn't, now, even though he hasn't seen it in what feels like years. There's no evidence of dirt.
More than that, he recalls times that there were more or less things on the shelves, where there was a thick layer of dust one day, he cleaned them, and there would be a thicker layer the next day – but with less things on the shelf.
Items still appear on the shelf sometimes.
