Chapter 66: Chapter 65 — The Step
He didn’t tell anyone what day it would be.
Not Saki, who would have wanted to help with logistics. Not Yoru, who would have wanted to discuss it with the thoroughness of someone planning her own eventual proposal vicariously. He simply decided, on a Wednesday morning, that it would happen that evening, and spent the day moving through his usual routine with the ring sitting in his jacket pocket like something both impossibly heavy and entirely natural to carry.
The ring itself had taken longer to choose than he’d expected. Not because of the cost — that had never been the difficulty — but because he’d wanted something that meant what he needed it to mean, and meaning didn’t come from carats or settings. He’d gone, eventually, with something simple. A thin band, a small stone, nothing that would draw attention to itself the way Nana never drew attention to herself even while holding an entire household together.
He’d had it engraved on the inside, where only she would ever see it: From the beginning.
Her own words, given back to her.
The day passed the way ordinary days passed.
Breakfast, the kitchen full of its usual collaborative chaos. Campus, where Tsukasa noticed something different in his expression and asked about it twice, both times accepting his deflection without pushing further, trusting him to share when he was ready. The café, where Yuki watched him with the particular attentiveness she’d developed for noticing when something significant was happening beneath someone’s surface calm.
"You’re somewhere else today," she said, during a lull between customers.
"A little," he admitted.
"Good somewhere else, or—"
"Good," he said. "Very good."
She studied him for a moment, then nodded, asking nothing further, which he was grateful for.
He came home before Nana finished her own work for the day — she’d taken on some freelance bookkeeping recently, work she could do from the kitchen table between household tasks, and he found her there now, glasses on, papers spread across the surface, the late afternoon light catching the strand of hair that always escaped.
"You’re back early," she said, not looking up.
"I wanted to ask you something," he said.
"Mm?" She continued working, half-distracted, the way she often was during these stretches of focus.
"Walk with me," he said. "Later. After the girls are settled."
This made her look up.
"Is something wrong," she said, the immediate maternal alertness she carried for everyone in the house, not just her daughters.
"Nothing’s wrong," he said. "I just want to walk somewhere with you. Is that allowed?"
She studied his face for a long moment, something in his expression she couldn’t quite name but recognized as significant anyway.
"Of course," she said softly.
Dinner happened. Hana told an elaborate story about something that had occurred at school involving a disputed eraser, delivered with the dramatic gravity of a courtroom proceeding. Saki added periodic factual corrections. The house moved through its evening rhythms, warm and ordinary, and Kaito found himself watching all of it with the particular clarity that comes before something significant — every detail slightly heightened, slightly more precious for knowing what was about to follow it.
After dinner, after the dishes, after Saki had ushered a reluctant Hana toward bedtime with the patient efficiency of an older sister well-practiced in this exact negotiation, Nana found her coat by the door, where Kaito was already waiting.
"Where are we walking," she asked, as they stepped out into the cooling evening.
"You’ll see," he said.
She gave him a curious look but didn’t push, falling into step beside him, the neighborhood quiet around them, streetlights beginning to flicker on against the dimming sky.
The walk took them, gradually, toward the old apartment building — the one they’d lived in before the house, before any of this had expanded into something this large. Nana hadn’t been back since the move, hadn’t had a reason to, and something in her expression shifted as the building came into view, recognition and a quiet kind of nostalgia settling over her features.
"Why here," she said softly.
He didn’t answer immediately, leading her instead toward the front of the building, toward the concrete step where, eight months into knowing her, he’d once sat for an hour without moving so that Hana could sleep against his arm.
The step looked exactly the same. Slightly worn at the edges, the same crack running through the corner that had been there since before either of them lived in the building.
He stopped in front of it.
"Do you remember this step," he said.
Nana’s eyes had gone soft, understanding arriving slowly.
"Of course I remember," she said. "Hana fell asleep on your arm. You didn’t move for an hour because you didn’t want to wake her." Her voice caught slightly. "I watched you from the window. I told myself it was nothing. I’d already started lying to myself by then."
"I think about this step more than you’d guess," he said. "It’s the first place I remember actually thinking — clearly, consciously — that I wanted to be someone you could rely on. Not because you needed rescuing. You never needed that. Just because I wanted to be worth relying on, for you and for them."
Nana looked at him, something building behind her eyes that she hadn’t yet let fall.
"Kaito—" she started.
"I’m not finished," he said gently.
She stopped, waited, her hands twisting slightly at her sides.
"Eight months," he said. "Before anyone else. Before the alley with Yoru, before any of it. You’d already become the person whose footsteps I listened for. The person I made sure to come home for, even on nights I was exhausted and could have justified skipping dinner." He reached into his jacket pocket. "I’ve thought about a hundred ways to do this. None of them felt right except this one. This step. Where it actually started, even if neither of us said so at the time."
He knelt.
Nana’s hand flew to her mouth.
"Kurashima Nana," he said, opening the small box, the ring catching the last of the evening light. "You rebuilt your entire life twice, alone, and you did it so well that I almost didn’t notice how much you were carrying until I’d already fallen for you completely. I don’t want you to carry anything alone again. Not the girls, not the house, not any of it. I want to be the person you come home to as much as you’ve already become the person I come home to." He paused, his voice steadying with something that sounded almost like relief at finally saying it. "Will you marry me?"
Nana stared at the ring, at him, at the step beneath them that had held this exact location in both their memories for so long.
"From the beginning," she read, when he turned the band slightly to catch the light, the engraving visible.
"Your words," he said. "Given back."
She was crying now, openly, the composure she maintained for everyone else completely gone, replaced by something rawer and more honest than he’d seen from her even in the kitchen, even in the entrance hall with cups raised in mock warfare.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, obviously yes, you absolute—" She laughed through the tears, pulling him up from his kneeling position, pulling him into her arms with the same fierce, complete embrace she’d given him once before, in this exact kitchen-adjacent life, when she’d finally stopped waiting to say what she felt. "Yes."
He held her on the step where it had all quietly begun, the streetlight above them flickering once before settling into a steady glow, the old building’s windows dark and unaware of the significance unfolding just outside.
"The girls," Nana said eventually, pulling back slightly, wiping her eyes. "They’re going to lose their minds."
"Saki’s going to want to update the wedding folder," Kaito said.
"Saki’s going to want to take credit," Nana said, laughing again, brighter now.
"She’s earned some of it," he admitted.
They stood together on the step for a long while after, the ring catching streetlight, the neighborhood quiet and unaware that something this significant had just happened on an ordinary concrete step outside an apartment building neither of them lived in anymore.
"Thank you," Nana said finally, "for remembering this step mattered."
"It’s where I started becoming someone worth this," he said. "Of course I remembered."
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