Chapter 86: Realize part of the truth
( this Chapter is told from Ethan’s pov )
Raina had just come back from Japan.
To be honest, I was glad she was back.
The house felt less empty when she was around. Even when she was busy, even when she was glued to her phone dealing with work or streams or whatever crisis seemed determined to follow her around these days, her presence alone made things feel normal.
At least that was what I kept telling myself.
Because something wasn’t sitting right with me.
Something hadn’t been sitting right for a while and her coming back did not fix it. If anything it made the feeling more specific, like her presence had given the wrongness a shape it did not have when she was absent.
Before she left for Japan, I had received a text from a number I did not recognize.
The message said it was Felix.
Felix Stein. My college roommate. My closest friend for two years. The person who had simply stopped existing one semester and left no explanation behind him.
I went to the diner the message pointed me toward. I sat there for over an hour and nobody came. I was ready to write the whole thing off as something cruel and strange, someone’s idea of a joke, when Raina appeared. She had followed me across the city.
And gave an excuse that made less sense the more I thought about it.
She claimed she was worried.
Worried enough to follow me across town.
Worried enough to sit outside for hours watching me.
No normal person does that.
At the time I let it go because arguing with her felt pointless.
But I never forgot it.
Then there was the look on her face when I first mentioned Felix.
It wasn’t confusion.
It wasn’t curiosity.
It was something else.
Shock.
Pure shock.
The kind that appears before someone remembers to hide it.
And after that came the sudden trip to Japan.
Family emergency.
That was the explanation she gave me.
I accepted it because I trusted her.
But trust and understanding weren’t the same thing.
Nothing was adding up.
The more I thought about it, the less sense any of it made.
While she was gone, another message arrived.
Another message from Felix.
This time he wanted me to meet him in a park.
Come to the park on Elmfield Road. Come alone. You have questions. I have answers.
My first instinct was to delete it.
Whoever was behind this had already wasted my time once.
I wasn’t interested in being made a fool of again.
Then I read the last part again.
You have questions. I have answers.
I stared at the screen for a long time.
Because whoever was sending those texts wasn’t wrong.
I did have questions.
Too many questions.
So I went.
The park was cold and quiet, the kind of weekday afternoon that belonged to elderly dog walkers and nobody else. I sat on a bench near the central path and waited.
Half an hour passed.
Then forty minutes.
Nobody approached me.
Nobody called my name.
Nobody even looked at me twice.
The only person who came close was an elderly man who sat down beside me, fed crumbs to a few pigeons, then got up and left twenty minutes later.
Eventually I gave up.
I stood.
Checked my phone.
Nothing.
No calls.
No messages.
Eventually I stood to leave.
My phone vibrated.
Look beside you.
I looked.
The bench was empty.
I looked around again.
Still nothing.
Then I shifted slightly.
And saw it.
A brown envelope tucked between the bench and the armrest.
My name was written across the front in a handwriting I didn’t recognize.
ETHAN.
I picked it up.
My pulse quickened.
What the hell was this?
I scanned the area once more then I opened it.
Inside was a single photograph.
I looked at it for a long time.
The face in the photograph was familiar in the specific way that things were familiar when you had not thought about them in years, the recognition arriving slowly rather than immediately, having to locate itself through layers of time.
Himari.....?
The name surfaced from somewhere I had not been in a long time.
Himari Ishigami. Susan’s roommate. The quiet girl from freshman year who had told me she didn’t care when I introduced myself and then eaten lunch across from me three times a week for a semester as though that exchange had never happened. The girl who had barely registered in my memory at the time because I had been too busy being different kinds of distracted.
I sat on the park bench and looked at her photograph and tried to understand what she had to do with Felix or with me or with whoever had left this envelope here.
Nothing came.
My mind immediately went to Susan.
Because Susan had mentioned Himari before.
Several times.
I just never listened.
At the time it sounded like bitterness.
Like another one of her attempts to blame somebody else for her problems.
So I ignored it.
Now I wasn’t so sure.
I drove home with the photograph in my jacket pocket and the question sitting in my chest without an answer.
When Raina came back from Japan I watched her more carefully than I usually watched people.
She was distracted. Not in any dramatic way, not in a way she would notice me noticing, but in the way someone was distracted when they were running a second conversation inside their head continuously. She would drift slightly in the middle of something and come back a beat later and pick up exactly where she had left off, as though the gap had not happened.
I had seen her tired before. I had seen her stressed. This was different and I could not name what was different about it.
Eventually I picked up my phone and called Susan.
She answered almost immediately.
"Ethan?"
There was genuine surprise in her voice.
"What a shock."
A brief laugh followed.
"Finally come to your senses?"
"Susan."
My voice sounded more serious than I intended.
"We need to talk."
The amusement vanished.
A pause.
"About what?"
"Meet me at the restaurant where we had our first date."
Silence.
"Three o’clock."
Then I ended the call.
By two-fifty I was already there.
Waiting.
The restaurant hadn’t changed much.
Same tables.
Same lighting.
Same soft music.
The place felt smaller than I remembered.
At exactly two-fifty-five, Susan walked through the door.
She spotted me immediately.
Then approached.
"Hey."
She placed her handbag on the chair before sitting down.
"Hey."
For a moment neither of us spoke.
She adjusted the sleeve of her blouse.
Then looked at me.
"So."
A faint smile.
"What could possibly be important enough for you to call me?"
The smile sharpened.
"Because the last time we met, you made it pretty clear you wanted nothing to do with me."
I cleared my throat.
"I’m sorry about that."
Susan’s expression shifted slightly.
Not softer.
Just surprised.
"I need your help."
That got her attention.
I leaned forward.
Locked my fingers together.
And said the one thing I never imagined myself saying.
"I need you to tell me everything you know about Himari."
Susan blinked.
Once.
Then twice.
And suddenly laughed.
Not because she found it funny.
Because she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
"Oh."
She leaned back.
"So you’re still in the dark."
"What does that mean?"
"I thought maybe you’d finally figured it out."
She shook her head.
"No."
The pity in her eyes bothered me more than anger would have.
"You still have no idea."
"Susan."
"No."
She pointed at me.
"You listen for once."
I stayed quiet.
"You know, I used to worry about you."
Her voice lowered.
"I thought you were getting involved in something you didn’t understand."
I frowned.
"What are you talking about?"
"I tried to protect you."
The bitterness in her voice surprised me.
"But you never listened."
She laughed again.
Short.
Humorless.
"And now look at you."
I felt irritation building.
"Susan, stop talking in riddles."
She stared at me.
Then slowly stood.
Picked up her bag.
And looked down at me.
"You really want to know about Himari?"
"Yes."
Her eyes narrowed.
"Then don’t ask me."
"What?"
"Ask your girlfriend."
I frowned.
"What does that mean?"
Susan adjusted the strap of her handbag.
Then spoke the words that would replay in my head for the rest of the day.
"Because your girlfriend knows Himari better than anyone."
I stared at her.
Confused.
"What are you talking about?"
She only smiled sadly.
Then turned toward the exit.
"Susan—"
She stopped.
Just long enough to glance over her shoulder.
"I genuinely wish you luck, Ethan."
Then she left.
I sat in the restaurant for a long time after she left. The other tables filled up and emptied around me. The music played through its loop twice. The waiter came to ask if I wanted anything and I said no without looking up.
Your girlfriend knows Himari better than anyone.
I turned the sentence over. Looked at it from different angles. Tried to find the interpretation that made the most sense.
My mind went back through things it had filed away.
The first text from Felix, the number I did not recognise. Raina following me to the diner and saying she had been worried. The look on her face the first time Felix’s name came up in conversation. The sudden trip to Japan. The distraction she had come back with. The envelope in the park. The photograph.
Himari Ishigami.
Susan’s roommate.
I thought about the brief time I had known her in college. The way she kept to herself. The way she had been described by people who noticed her at all, quiet, intense, difficult to know. The way she had looked at me across the cafeteria table the few times we had sat near each other.
I thought about the photograph.
I thought about Raina.
And then a thought arrived that I immediately tried to dismiss.
I dismissed it.
It came back.
I dismissed it again with the specific energy of someone who understood that entertaining certain ideas changed things permanently and could not be undone.
It came back a third time and this time it brought evidence with it.
The age. The same. The timeline. Matching. College. Maxford State. The same campus. The same semester. Himari disappearing from Susan’s life around the time something had happened that Susan had tried to tell me about and I had not listened to. Raina appearing in my professional life through a sequence of events that I had accepted one piece at a time without stepping back to look at the full shape of it.
The way she had known his favorite flower.
The way Malik had known my address.
The way she had appeared at the coffee shop.
The way she had looked at me the first time we met in her pink house on Opalvine Court, that particular quality of looking at someone that did not match the stated context of two strangers meeting for the first time.
I sat in the restaurant with the noise of other people’s ordinary afternoons around me and I felt the shape of something enormous assembling itself from pieces that had been scattered across the last year of my life, pieces I had picked up one at a time and set aside without asking why they all felt like they belonged to the same thing.
The photograph.
Himari Ishigami.
Raina Takahashi.
The same quiet intensity. The same look. The same specific quality of composure that looked like stillness from the outside and was something else entirely from within.
Susan’s voice.
Not knows of. Not knows about.
Knows.
Knows Himari.
The way you knew yourself.
I stopped breathing for a second.
The restaurant kept going around me, completely indifferent, cutlery and conversation and someone laughing too loudly at a nearby table, the whole ordinary machinery of an afternoon, and I sat in the middle of it with everything rearranging itself into the one shape it had been all along.
Raina.
Himari.
Both Japanese .....
Not connected.
Not acquaintances.
Not former roommates or college rivals or any of the other explanations I had tried and failed to locate.
The same person.
The same person who had sat across from me in a pink house on Opalvine Court and pretended to be meeting me for the first time. The same person who had been in my freshman year cafeteria. Who had heard my name from Susan and said I don’t care with the specific disinterest of someone deciding something. Who had disappeared from campus around the time Felix had disappeared from campus.
"Oh God," I said.....
