“That reminds me, the waitress here said to pass on her regards.” He conveyed to Kinuyo the words Kazu entrusted him with.

“You mean Kazu?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Oh...”

Kinuyo’s expression darkened for a brief moment. But then she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, and quickly looked at Yukio directly again with a smile.

“Er, Kinuyo,” Nagare called out from behind the counter.

Kinuyo looked back at him. Smiling broadly, she simply said, “I know.”

Mystified at this exchange, Yukio reached out for the cup and took a sip.

“Hmm, that’s nice,” he lied. The strongly acidic sour taste was not to his liking.

Kinuyo looked at him with gentle eyes. “She is such a kind girl, isn’t she?”

“Huh, who?”

“Kazu, silly.”

“Kazu? Oh, yes, for sure.”

Yukio lied again. He had no room in his head to consider Kazu’s personality.

“She really sees people’s true feelings. She always thinks about the person who sits in that chair.”

Yukio had no inkling of what Kinuyo was trying to say. But as he was planning to sit it out until the coffee went cold, it didn’t matter what she talked about.

“There was a woman in a white dress sitting in that chair, right?”

“A woman? Oh, yes, yes there was.”

“She went back to see her late husband, but she never returned...”

“Oh, really?”

“No one knows what exchange took place. But even so, no one ever considered that she might never return.”

Yukio noticed that behind the counter Nagare was standing slumped with his head hung low.

“It was Kazu who poured the coffee for her. She had only just turned seven.”

“...Oh, really,” Yukio muttered, seemingly uninterested.

He didn’t get why Kinuyo wanted to tell him this now.

Her face was sad as she heard his reply.

“To think, your own mother, of all people!” she said with a slightly sterner tone.

“Huh?”

“The woman who didn’t return was Kazu’s mother!”

The change in his complexion suggested that even Yukio was moved by these words.

It was such a cruel turn of events for a young girl, who still needed her mother’s love, to go through. Just imagining it was painful. But while it stirred some empathy in him, it didn’t make him feel any more like returning to the future.

He wondered how this conversation and the stirrer were connected.

He began considering the question clinically. Kinuyo picked up the stirrer from the saucer.

“So, you see, ever since then, Kazu places this in the cup of anyone who goes back to visit someone who has died,” she explained while waving it. “It rings before the coffee gets cold.”

“...Oh.”

Yukio’s face turned pale.

But that would mean that...

“That was why Kazu sent her regards.”

She was practically telling Mum that she would die.