Chapter 62: Chapter 61 — Everyone Is Jealous and Nobody Will Admit It
It started, as these things often did, with breakfast.
Kaito complimented Elena’s new herb arrangement on the windowsill. "This looks really nice," he said, the kind of casual observation he made about a dozen things a week without thinking twice.
Yoru, pouring tea three feet away, set the pot down slightly harder than necessary.
Nobody noticed. Yet.
Twenty minutes later, Tsukasa mentioned that she and Kaito had stayed late at the library again, working through a difficult section of coursework.
Haruka, buttering toast, did not look up, but her knife moved with noticeably more force than toast required.
By lunch, Satsuki had observed Kaito laughing — genuinely laughing — at something Saori said over a video call, and found herself, for reasons she did not examine too closely, suddenly very invested in reorganizing her spreadsheet’s color-coding system.
By dinner, the entire household was operating on a frequency of barely-suppressed tension that nobody had named out loud, and everybody was pretending very hard not to notice in everyone else.
Kaito, blissfully oblivious to the gathering storm, picked this exact evening to mention, over the dinner table, that he’d promised to help Yuki rearrange the café’s storage room on Saturday.
"Just the two of us," he added, entirely innocently. "She wants it done before the new espresso machine arrives."
The temperature of the room dropped by several degrees.
Yuki, to her credit, did not notice this immediately. She was too busy enjoying the small, private satisfaction of having a plan that involved exclusive Saturday access to Kaito, something she had not actually engineered on purpose but was absolutely not going to mention out loud.
"That sounds nice," Nana said, in a voice that suggested it did not sound nice at all.
"Very efficient use of a Saturday," Satsuki agreed, in a voice with a similar problem.
Hana, the only person at the table operating on pure honesty, looked around at everyone’s faces and said, loudly: "Why does everyone look like they want to fight?"
The table erupted into a chorus of "nobody wants to fight" delivered with varying degrees of unconvincing calm.
The chaos properly began the next morning.
Yoru, who had decided overnight that she was absolutely not jealous of an herb compliment, demonstrated this total lack of jealousy by reorganizing the entire kitchen spice rack at six AM, loudly, while Elena was trying to check on her basil.
"I’m just optimizing the space," Yoru said, when Elena asked. "Some things were inefficiently placed."
"The herbs were fine where they were," Elena said, watching her own carefully labeled jars get shuffled into a configuration that made sense to absolutely no one.
"Now they’re better," Yoru said, with the specific aggression of someone defending a position she hadn’t actually thought through.
Tsukasa, meanwhile, had decided that if library study sessions were apparently A Topic, she would simply continue having them, more visibly, with slightly exaggerated enthusiasm about every single page they covered.
"This footnote is SO interesting," she announced to the entire kitchen, gesturing at her economics textbook with the energy of someone performing enthusiasm for an audience rather than actually feeling it.
Haruka, not to be outdone, mentioned — three separate times before nine AM — that she and Kaito had a standing arrangement to review her training schedule together every Tuesday, a detail nobody had actually asked about.
"It’s very important for my conditioning," she said, to Yuki, who had not asked.
"Sure," Yuki said, stirring her coffee with more force than coffee required.
Satsuki, for her part, had begun casually mentioning her father’s continued "thorough monitoring," not because it was relevant to anything currently happening, but because it reminded everyone, gently, that she had institutional-level resources backing her position in this household, which was not a competitive flex, she would insist, simply a fact she felt like sharing repeatedly.
By the time Kaito came downstairs for breakfast, the kitchen had transformed into a low-grade battlefield of passive-aggressive efficiency, exaggerated academic enthusiasm, unnecessary scheduling announcements, and pointed mentions of paternal surveillance capabilities.
He looked at the spice rack, now alphabetized in a system that made the cumin impossible to find.
He looked at Tsukasa, gesturing animatedly at a footnote about marginal utility.
He looked at Haruka, who had brought an actual printed training schedule to the breakfast table for reasons that remained unclear.
He looked at Satsuki, who mentioned, apropos of nothing, that her father’s surveillance had recently been upgraded with "improved analytical capacity."
He sat down very slowly.
"Is something happening that I’m missing," he said, to the table in general.
"NOTHING," four separate voices said, with remarkable unison and zero believability.
It was Riku, of all people, who finally cracked the case, arriving for his usual Sunday visit and immediately clocking the atmosphere with the trained eye of someone who had spent years reading café tension.
"Oh, this is great," he said, sitting down uninvited, helping himself to toast. "Everyone’s jealous of everyone else at the same time. This is genuinely the funniest thing I’ve seen since the demon lord cups incident."
"Nobody is jealous," Yoru said, from behind the spice rack.
"Yoru rearranged the kitchen because of an herb compliment," Riku said, counting on his fingers. "Tsukasa is performing academic enthusiasm like she’s auditioning for a textbook commercial. Haruka brought a laminated schedule to breakfast. And Satsuki’s just casually reminding everyone her dad runs surveillance like that’s a normal flex over pancakes."
The kitchen went very quiet.
"I wasn’t—" Satsuki started.
"You absolutely were," Riku said cheerfully, biting his toast. "It’s beautiful, actually. Everyone’s so used to being the calm, mature one that nobody noticed they’re all doing the exact same petty thing simultaneously."
Kenji, arriving a beat later with his usual mysterious snack, looked around the room and immediately understood the situation with the speed of someone fluent in this exact dynamic.
"Oh, it’s the jealousy thing," he said. "This happens at the café too, actually. Yuki gets weird when Satsuki’s here too long. Satsuki gets weird when Elena shows up. It’s a whole ecosystem."
"I do not get weird," Yuki said, from the coffee station, very weirdly.
The actual breaking point came an hour later, when Hana, attempting to mediate the situation with the directness only a seven-year-old could manage, gathered everyone into the living room and announced, with great seriousness, that she had "solved the problem."
"Everyone gets a turn," she announced, holding up a piece of paper with a hand-drawn calendar on it. "I made a schedule. Monday is Yoru. Tuesday is Nana. Wednesday is Tsukasa. Thursday is Haruka. Friday is Yuki. Saturday is Satsuki. Sunday is everybody together, because that’s family day."
The room stared at the calendar.
"Elena gets the herbs every day because that’s not the same kind of turn," Hana clarified. "That’s just gardening."
Saki, standing beside her sister with the long-suffering patience of an older sibling watching chaos unfold, added: "She’s been planning this since the spice rack thing this morning. I told her it might be oversimplifying things but she was very committed."
Kaito looked at the calendar.
He looked at the room full of grown women who had spent an entire morning engaged in increasingly absurd displays of barely-concealed jealousy, now staring at a hand-drawn schedule created by a seven-year-old with the focused intensity of executives reviewing a merger proposal.
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
Then Yoru, very quietly, said: "Wednesday’s actually pretty reasonable."
"I could work with Tuesday," Nana said, equally quiet, equally serious.
"This is insane," Tsukasa said, and then, immediately after: "Wednesday is fine, actually."
Haruka picked up the calendar to inspect it more closely. "This is surprisingly well organized for a seven-year-old."
"I had help," Hana said proudly. "Saki checked the spelling."
Satsuki, staring at the page with the expression of a woman recalculating an entire framework in real time, finally said: "Saturday is acceptable."
Kaito put his head in his hands.
"We are not implementing a schedule made by a seven-year-old," he said, into his palms.
"Why not," five voices said simultaneously, with identical and slightly alarming sincerity.
Riku, watching from the doorway with Kenji, was laughing so hard he had to sit down on the floor.
"This is the best day of my life," he said.
"Should we tell them the schedule doesn’t actually fix the jealousy, it just organizes it," Kenji said.
"Absolutely not," Riku said. "Let them have this."
In the end, nothing was officially adopted, though Hana’s calendar mysteriously ended up pinned to the refrigerator by that evening, and several "coincidental" schedule alignments over the following weeks suggested that at least a few people were quietly, unofficially, following it anyway.
Kaito, exhausted by the entire ordeal, found Nana in the kitchen that night, the chaos finally settled into its usual warm hum.
"I genuinely don’t understand what happened today," he said.
"Everyone got a little insecure at the same time," Nana said, simply, stirring something on the stove. "It happens. We’re not used to sharing this much of ourselves with this many people. Sometimes the jealousy just needs somewhere to go, and it comes out sideways — spice racks, laminated schedules, surveillance flexes."
"Should I do something differently," he said. "Spend time more evenly, or—"
"No," Nana said, looking at him fondly. "You already do that, mostly. You can’t account for every feeling before it happens. Sometimes people just need to be a little ridiculous about it, get it out of their system, and laugh about it after." She glanced at the refrigerator, where Hana’s calendar was still proudly displayed. "Besides, I think we’re handling it fine. A seven-year-old’s color-coded calendar is a pretty gentle way to process feelings, all things considered."
He looked at the calendar.
At the kitchen, fully restored to its usual warmth, the spice rack quietly back in its original configuration sometime during the afternoon, nobody admitting to having fixed it.
"This house is insane," he said.
"Yes," Nana agreed happily. "Isn’t it wonderful?"
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