“I want to, Hana.” Keishin stood up.
“He has given his consent.” The Horishi set a nomi down, its tip tinted with blue ink. “He cannot take it back.”
“But I can.” Hana grabbed Keishin’s clothes from the floor and knocked the silver water bowl from the table. A puddlepooled by Keishin’s feet. She shoved Keishin into it and jumped in after him.
—
Hana climbed out of her courtyard’s pond and found Keishin standing in front of her.
“Why, Hana?” Keishin’s throat tightened around his voice. “Why did you stop her? The Horishi would have told us where to find your mother.”
Hana averted her eyes from his nakedness. Keishin had stripped himself of more than just clothes. The sacrifice he had been about to make for her bared his soul. She did not need her father’s or mother’s glasses to see that he was blinding. She held out his crumpled bundle of clothes.
“Get dressed and leave.” Her words trembled as much as her hands. She had never meant anything more. Or less. She wanted him to stay as desperately as she needed him to go. Though the map of her skin was not visible, she knew every inked detail on her tattooed map by heart. Keishin was not in it.
“Hana…”
“Go home, Kei.” She dropped his clothes on the ground. “While you can.”
Chapter Sixteen
Payment
Keishin stood at the pawnshop’s door, his hand around its brass knob. It was ironic, he thought, that the only regret he would have wanted to pawn was going to be the moment he stepped back into his world and shut the door behind him. He looked back over his shoulder at Hana. “Tell me why you stopped the Horishi.”
“The price was too high.”
“I was willing to pay it.” He let go of the knob and turned to face her. “It wasn’t your place to decide for me. It was my choice.”
“And it would have been the last real choice you made. Did you think that the Horishi was going to give you your future for free? The same fee is paid by everyone whose path is mapped out on their skin. Freedom. Knowing your future would have stripped you of every choice, every chance you could have turned left instead of right. You would lose the ability to dream and hope, to wish for an outcome other than what is written. Is that a price you would be willing to pay to help a stranger?”
“It would be a lot simpler for me to walk away if that was true. But you aren’t exactly a stranger anymore.”
“You do not know me.”
“I know enough. I know what it’s like to have a parent vanish like smoke and leave you with nothing but questions and pain.My mother abandoned us when I was a young boy. We left Japan because of it. Breathing the same air she used to breathe was like breathing broken glass.”
“I’m sorry…” Hana said. “But this is different. My father did not abandon me.”
“Didn’t he? The doubt gnawing inside you is the very reason you’re trying so desperately to find him. You want to prove yourself wrong. You want to find him and hear him tell you that this is all a misunderstanding. I haven’t seen my mother since she kissed me on the cheek and tucked me in bed the night before she left us. And yet today I found myself walking around Tokyo at dawn hoping that I would run into her and finally be able to ask her why she didn’t love me enough to stay.”
“I…” Tears crept into Hana’s voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“I want you to be right, Hana. I want you to find your father and not spend your life searching for answers that will never come.”
Hana shook her head. “Just go. Forget that any of this happened.”
“How?”
“In time, you will be able to live your life just as our clients do. Everything you have seen and heard here will feel like a dream. I should have never allowed you to come with me.”
“You didn’t force me to do anything.”
“I took advantage of your curiosity and kindness. I can read people. It is what I have spent my whole life training to do. I dangled the strange and impossible in front of you because I knew you would not be able to resist trying to figure out whether what I told you was true.”
“You and I both know that isn’t what happened. A coin decided for us.”
“Did it?”
