She circled her arms around him and sank her head into his chest.

Looking at her, he was taken aback. He didn’t remember her being so small. She seemed to be trying hard to suppress her emotions. He rubbed her back, hoping to calm her down, but her sobs grew louder.

Her tears brought him back to the morning they had first met, in the old apartment Shoji had shared with Jin. Back then, she’d also been crying.

•

After Yoko had calmed down, they sat on a metal barrier in silence. Shoji took another sip of the Coke. Too sweet and too gassy. He craved a good cup of coffee.

‘I’ve no idea what got into me,’ she said. ‘This is embarrassing.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Each of us has our moments of weakness.’

‘Are you trying to make me feel better?’ She looked at him. ‘I bet you have a lot of questions.’

‘Yes, I do.’ He paused. ‘You said you went to Kuromachi?’

‘That’s right. I waited for a week in a house owned by a doctor acquaintance of Mr Sato,’ Yoko said. ‘Mr Sato called every day to tell me he couldn’t find you. I wanted to believe that you’d managed to get away safely. Perhaps you’d returned to Fukuoka. That would probably have been for the best.’

‘You went to Okinawa after that?’

She nodded. ‘I took the train from Kuromachi to Narita, and then I flew to Kisejima. Mr Sato told me to lie low until things calmed down. Anywhere is fine, he said. Just stay hidden for a while.’ She stopped for a moment, her eyes narrowing. ‘While I was waiting for you, I’d been doing a lot of thinking. I had to make amends with my past. Mr Sato gave me a number so I could call to update him on my whereabouts, but after a few months he became uncontactable.’

If Mr Sato was the one who had helped her, most likely he was also the mysterious man Shoji had spoken with. ‘Why did he help you?’

‘He said he knew my parents.’

‘I see,’ he mumbled, remembering the hostility he’d felt from Mr Sato when they’d first met. Had he been trying to be protective, to take the place Yoko’s parents had never filled? That said … ‘All these years, did you keep looking for me?’

‘At first I did. I went to Tokyo a few times. But we had been separated for long. After a while, I felt like it was time to move on. I had no idea where you could be, and you would probably be seeing someone else, or —’

‘Yoko,’ Shoji said, cutting her off. He took a deep breath. ‘I’ve never been able to forget you.’

A gust of wind blew and shook the water off the trees.

Droplets of water fell on their skin, but neither of them wiped them away.