The Rains That Fell Before Us

013 | What He Actually Come Back For

The roof access door was propped open with a textbook someone had left there, probably weeks ago.

She pushed through and the cold hit her immediately, sharper up here than on the ground, the kind of cold that came with height and open sky and no buildings to break the wind. Caiden was already there, standing near the far wall, and he crossed toward her when he saw her face.

"Talk," he said.

So she did.

She told him everything. The phone call with her mom. What Sora had said in the corridor. The rate, not just the timeline. Six months before things got significantly harder, not six months until the end, which somehow felt worse because it meant there was a version of herself coming that she wouldn't be able to fully prepare for no matter how many journal entries she wrote.

She said all of it and Caiden listened and didn't interrupt once.

When she finished he said, "Sit down."

"I don't want to sit down."

"Okay."

He stayed standing with her then, close enough that she could feel his presence without them touching, and they both looked out at the city below. Tokyo doing its enormous indifferent thing. Traffic and buildings and people going places they had decided to go, all of them carrying their days without thinking about how many they had.

"She told Sora before she told me," Nora said.

"I know."

"She's been carrying this since the appointment and every morning she watched me read the wrong number in my journal and she said nothing."

"I know."

"The front pages say one year," she said. "I've been reading one year every morning for six weeks."

"Yeah."

She looked at him. "Stop agreeing with everything I say."

"You're not wrong about any of it."

"I know I'm not wrong. That's not the point." She turned and sat on the low concrete ledge after all, because her legs had made the decision without her. He sat beside her. Same distance as always, not crowding, just there. "I'm trying to figure out what to do with it," she said. "The information. I can be angry at my mom later. Right now I just need to know what to do with it."

"Update the front pages," he said. "Tonight. All of it, the new timeline, the rate thing, everything. So tomorrow-you has the full picture."

"Yeah."

"And call your doctor. Not through your mom. Directly. Ask them yourself."

"Yeah." She hadn't thought of that. It was so obvious now that he said it. "I should have been doing that already."

"You didn't know you needed to."

She looked at the city. A bird moved across the grey above them, going somewhere with purpose.

"The rate thing," she said. "The recognition. Language sometimes." She stopped. "That's new information. That changes things."

"What does it change."

"Everything I write in the journal. The way I write it. I've been writing for a version of me that can still read fluently, still understands context, still gets subtext and implication." She paused. "If that changes I need to write differently. Simpler. More direct. Less between the lines."

Caiden was quiet for a moment. "You're already planning for it."

"I'm always planning for it. That's the whole system."

"I know. I'm just." He paused. "That's a lot to be carrying."

"I've been carrying it for two years."

"I know." He looked at her. "But now I know more of it. So you don't have to carry all of it by yourself."

She held his gaze.

There was something in his face that she had been noticing for weeks now, something she kept putting in the journal in different words because she hadn't found the right ones yet. It wasn't pity. It wasn't the careful soft eyes people got when they were trying to treat her gently. It was something more level than that. Something that looked at the full picture of her situation and didn't look away from any part of it and still just. Stayed.

"I need to talk to my mom tonight," she said.

"Yeah."

"And I need to call the doctor Monday."

"I'll come with you if you want."

She looked at him. "To the call?"

"Or the appointment. Whatever it is. If you want someone there."

She thought about that. Past-her had gone to all of them alone or with her mom, which meant every appointment existed in the journal as a summary rather than a memory, facts without the feeling underneath them.

"Yeah," she said. "Okay."

He nodded.

They sat on the roof for a while longer and she let the cold air do its thing and thought about six months and the rate thing and the journal and what she was going to write tonight. The wind moved and the city moved and a train went past on the elevated track in the distance.

"Caiden," she said.

"Yeah."

"The arrangement." She looked at him. "We were going to talk about what it actually is. On the roof. Before Hana came."

He turned to look at her.

"I still want to talk about it," she said. "Not right now. But soon."

"Okay," he said.

"I just wanted you to know that six months didn't change that for me. If anything." She stopped.

"If anything what."

"It makes it more urgent," she said. "Not less."

He held her gaze for a long moment.

Then the roof door banged open and Hana appeared, slightly out of breath, looking between them.

"Okay both of you need to come down right now," she said. "Sora is talking to the vice principal and I don't know what he's saying but it doesn't look good."