Chapter 6: The Book Left Unwritten
The next evening, it was Kaito who didn't speak much.
He brought the usual tea, a blanket folded over one arm, and a book he never unwrapped. Aira noticed immediately. His smile wasn't quite whole. His movements were careful, like someone trying not to disturb the air around them.
They sat together as the sea whispered and the sun bled red into the horizon.
Aira, wrapped in the blanket, waited.
When he didn't speak, she did.
"You don't have to carry all the quiet for both of us."
Kaito glanced at her, startled. But there was something in her tone—not demanding, not curious. Just… open.
He exhaled slowly. "It's harder, sometimes, to know what to say."
"Because of me?"
He shook his head. "No. Because of me."
Aira tilted her head slightly.
Kaito looked down at his hands, rubbed his thumbs over the calluses that never quite faded. "Before the bookstore, I was a teacher."
She blinked. "Really?"
He nodded. "Literature and writing. For high school kids."
"That sounds like something you'd be good at."
"I thought so too," he said softly. "And for a while… I was."
The sea groaned softly against the rocks below.
"Until?" she asked.
He hesitated. Then: "One of my students. Her name was Mika. She wrote stories like her life depended on them. And maybe it did. She came to me after class one day and said, 'I don't want to disappear. So I write things down.'"
Aira's breath caught faintly at the echo of her own words.
Kaito went on. "She left a notebook on my desk the last day I saw her. Full of poems. One of them ended with, 'If I vanish, let these words be my proof.'"
He closed his eyes for a moment.
"She died two weeks later. Suicide."
The wind was cold now, but neither of them noticed.
"I left teaching after that. Not because of her," he said quickly. "But because… I stopped believing I could make a difference. If someone like her couldn't be saved, what did I think I was doing?"
Aira looked at him, not with pity—but with recognition. Pain shared.
"I think," she said gently, "you didn't fail her. You were just one chapter in her story. Not the ending."
Kaito gave a faint, broken smile. "She loved the ocean. Used to write about it constantly."
"She would've liked it here."
He nodded. "Yeah."
Aira reached into her coat and pulled out her own notebook—the one Kaito had returned to her, now with more pages filled. She passed it to him.
"Will you read it?" she asked. "Just a few pages. I want you to hear someone choosing to stay."
Kaito took the notebook carefully, as if holding something sacred.
Then, under the fading sky, he read her words aloud—her stumbles and scars, her hope blooming quietly between the lines. And Aira, for the first time in years, felt seen—not just understood, but witnessed.
They sat side by side, no longer just two lonely people on a bench.
But two voices.
Two stories.
Still being written.
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