She read through it carefully, the way Daisuke had taught her to read anything that mattered, not for what it said, but for what it assumed, what it took for granted, where the weight sat. She read it twice. Then, she closed the laptop and called Harold. "It holds," she said. A pause.
"You're satisfied?" She thought about the word. Satisfied was not quite the right shape for what she felt. It was something more complicated, something that included the satisfaction of a thing completed, but also the particular soberness that came from having spent years getting to a moment, and then arriving in it, and finding that it was both more and less than you had imagined. More real, less dramatic.
"It's what it needed to be," she said. Harold made a sound of quiet agreement. "The board wants to meet next week." "I'll be there." She ended the call and sat for a moment in the kitchen, quiet.
Outside, the city went about its morning. A delivery truck idled in the alley. Somewhere two floors up, a door opened and closed. She thought about Daisuke. She had spoken to him 4 days earlier, the first time since the night of the restaurant, the first time she had told him directly what had been happening.
She had called from the same kitchen uh late at night and he had answered on the third ring in the way he always did, unhurried, as though calls came at predictable intervals and this was simply the next one. She had told him about the restaurant, about the Japanese, about Takahashi's face. He had listened without interrupting, which was his way, had always been his way. And when she finished, he had been quiet for a moment and then he had said in the particular dry tone she had not heard in too long, "You used the Kyoto dialect." "I did."
"That was a little theatrical." She had laughed, actually laughed, the kind that came from somewhere deep and real and surprised her slightly. "I know." "Good," he had said. "Theater has its place."
She had told him about the meeting in the West Loop building, about what Takahashi had said, about the moment when his voice had lost its hard shine. Daisuke had been quiet for longer after that. "He was a good man once," he finally said. "Not uncomplicated, not without ambition, but good in the way that people are good before they decide that the cost of remaining so is too high." A pause.
"I always wondered if he knew that about himself." "I think he did," Amara said. "I think he's been knowing it for a long time." Another pause, then gently, "What did you tell him?" "That we'd start there."
Daisuke had said nothing for a moment. Then, "That's right." That had been 4 days ago and now here she was on a Thursday morning, here with a term sheet on her laptop that represented the end of the operational chapter of something that had begun 9 years ago in a building near the Shinsaibashi district with a 17-year-old girl and a man who had too many books and too little interest in being famous. She stood up, rinsed her coffee cup, and pulled on her jacket. The second meeting with Takahashi happened 12 days after the first.