PART ONE - END-GAME
[NARRATOR: There is a specific kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep. The kind that lives in the chest, behind the sternum, in the precise location where purpose used to be. Akio Hukitaske has been exhausted in that specific way for six years without naming it — without having the language for the difference between tired-from-working and tired-from-having-forgotten-why-you-started. The monitor glow is the color of sleeplessness. The office hums with the mechanical grief of people too depleted to grieve. And somewhere underneath the code and the coffee and the 2:43 a.m. cursor blink is a fourteen-year-old kid who wanted to cure diseases — who was laughed at for it — who buried the wanting so efficiently that he forgot he'd ever wanted anything at all. Tonight the burial ends. Not gently. Welcome to the last night of Akio Hukitaske's first life.]
The glow of the monitor was the color of sleeplessness — cold, unwavering, merciless.
Akio Hukitaske sat hunched over his desk at Enshin Games Inc., the hum of machines merging with the dull ache behind his temples. The walls were pale gray. His skin was pale gray under the fluorescent lights. Half-drunk coffee sat congealed beside his keyboard — a monument to forgotten lunches, forgotten evenings, forgotten years.
He blinked at his screen. Another line of code. Another error message. Another sigh that went nowhere. 2:43 a.m. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen the sun rise without being inside this building. He couldn't remember, specifically, when that had stopped bothering him.
Around him the office was alive in that half-dead way of all Tokyo tech firms — the quiet scurrying of exhausted bodies, the clack of keys, the shuffling of shoes, someone's mechanical laughter from three desks over. The specific laughter of a person using sound as a survival mechanism. The air conditioner wheezed out recycled fatigue. Someone coughed in the corner. Someone else muttered just five more minutes for the tenth time that hour, and the words landed in the recycled air and dissolved there, and no one acknowledged them.
[AKIO'S INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: I used to love this. That's the part I can't locate anymore — not the love itself but the memory of it. The specific texture of caring about what I was building. There was a version of me who sat at a desk like this and felt something that was not endurance. I know that version existed because I have photographs of him smiling. But I can't find the access point. I can't find where the caring went when it left.]
He rubbed his eyes. His fingers trembled. The cursor blinked like a mocking pulse.
The memory arrived without warning — the way specific memories do when the body is too depleted to defend against them. Fourteen years old. Wide-eyed. Talking to his parents across the dinner table about pharmacology, about curing diseases, about the specific joy of chemistry — of substances and their interactions and the enormous fact of human suffering being addressable. His parents had laughed. Not cruelly. That was the thing about it. Not cruelly — just: the gentle dismissal of people who understood the world as it was and could not imagine their child navigating it differently. That's a childish fantasy, Akio. The world doesn't work that way.
So he'd buried it. Under practicality. Under the reasonable logic of a career path that paid. Games were stable. Games were safe. Safe. The word mocked him now in the specific way that compromises always eventually mocked the people who made them.
"Akio."
The voice tore through the office. Kurobe — his boss, a person who appeared to have been assembled entirely from stale caffeine and the specific cruelty of someone who had once been as depleted as everyone around him and had chosen to become the source of depletion rather than its victim — stomped toward his desk. Tie hanging loose. Eyes bloodshot. The expression of someone arriving to discharge themselves of something.
"Where is the patch update. You were supposed to fix the memory leak last night." Akio swallowed. "I'm still debugging it. The system keeps freezing when the process threads—"
"Excuses." Kurobe's hand hit the monitor hard enough to rattle it. "Two weeks, Akio. Two weeks on a single patch. You think the company is paying you to sit here and stare at error messages?"
"I haven't slept," Akio said. Quietly. Not as an excuse — as a fact, delivered to the fluorescent air because it needed to be delivered somewhere. "What was that?" "Nothing, sir."
"This update goes live tomorrow." Kurobe's voice rose into the specific register of someone who had learned that volume functioned as a substitute for authority. "I don't care if you stay here three more nights. I don't care what your body is doing. If that patch crashes again, you're done."
He paused. Let the pause accumulate its specific weight.
"You're thirty-two, Akio. You're replaceable. The new interns process faster than you do. They're more flexible and newer to the job as well. They want it more. And honestly—" a pause, a breath, the specific cruelty delivered with the casualness of something not recognized as cruelty by the person delivering it— "I'm not sure you ever wanted it enough to begin with."
Kurobe turned. Left. Moved on to someone else before Akio could process the landing of it.
[NARRATOR: The last sentence was the one. Not the threat. Not the replacement. The I'm not sure you ever wanted it enough — because that was the thing Akio had spent eighteen years trying to want. Trying to manufacture the wanting for the safe choice. Trying to feel the love for the work that photographs of his fourteen-year-old self had apparently recorded and he could not locate from the inside. The accusation of insufficient wanting arrived in the specific location where the buried pharmacy dream had been placed and it landed there precisely and it stayed.]
Hours blurred. Code blurred. His body became a machine that refused to shut down even as every system inside it registered the wrongness of continuing.
By 10 a.m. the office was full again. New shifts. New deadlines. New people in the early stage of the process Akio was in the late stage of. He dragged himself to the vending machine. His reflection in the metal: bloodshot eyes, cracked lips, stained tie.
This wasn't living. He understood that now with the specific clarity of someone who had arrived at the bottom of something. Then came the meeting. Then came the words budget cuts delivered in the flat tone of institutional language designed to make human damage sound like accounting.
Then came the envelope. No ceremony. No warning. A slip of white paper on his desk. He read it. He read it again. He read it a third time. Termination.
[NARRATOR: The word didn't register as language first. It registered as sensation — a specific hollow feeling behind the sternum, in the precise location where the purpose he couldn't find had used to be. The word filled that hollow and it was not comfort. It was confirmation.]
HR said something. A coworker offered something adjacent to pity. The words dissolved into static. He packed slowly — old sketches, a photograph of his team from the early years when the team still smiled, a small dragon figure from the first game he'd shipped. The lights hummed. No one looked at him. That was the unspoken rule of these moments. You disappeared yourself while the office continued around you and no one acknowledged the disappearing because acknowledgment would require proximity to the thing they were all afraid of.
Outside, Tokyo's evening rain had started. He walked with no destination because there was no destination. His umbrella broke in the wind at Shibuya Crossing. He didn't stop. He was already soaked. The termination letter crumpled in his pocket. His other hand held a cheap whiskey bottle and he didn't remember buying it.
He ended up in an alley behind a ramen shop. The steam from the vents fogged the air. He slumped against the wall, rain in his hair, the bottle half-empty, the city pulsing faintly in the middle distance, entirely unaware of him.
"All of this," he said to the wet air. "All these years." His voice was hoarse and small and the rain absorbed it immediately. "For nothing. I gave everything I had to something I didn't even want and I have nothing left and it wasn't even—"
He stopped. It wasn't even what I wanted.
That was the specific thing. That was the thing that had been underneath every depleted 2 a.m. and every mechanical laugh and every just five more minutes for the entirety of his adult life. Not that the work had consumed him. That he had let it consume him in place of the thing he'd been told to stop wanting at fourteen, and the replacement had consumed him without producing anything, and now he was thirty-two in an alley in the rain holding a whiskey bottle and the sum total of the exchange was nothing.
Then came the footsteps. Soft. Even. Measured. A shadow lengthened over the puddles. Akio looked up.
The person standing before him was young — mid-twenties, dressed immaculately in a black suit and red bow tie. Not a wrinkle. Not a spot of rain on him despite the rain being present everywhere else in the alley. He smiled. Polite. Unsettlingly still.
"You look like someone who's done with life," the stranger said. His voice was smooth in the specific way of people who had practiced smoothness until it became structural. "I know the feeling."
"Do you." Akio's voice came out with no energy for inflection. "Then you'd better leave before you catch it." The stranger crouched beside him. Unfazed. "No need. I'm not afraid of endings." A pause. "In fact I rather enjoy them. Specifically the ones that aren't actually endings."
"What do you want."
The stranger reached into his coat. Produced a syringe. The liquid inside it moved in a way liquids didn't move — shimmering with colors that didn't belong to anything Akio had a category for.
"What is that."
"A chance," the stranger said. His grin widened into something that had left politeness behind entirely. "Akio Hukitaske. Age thirty-two. Programmer at Enshin Games Inc., terminated at 6:42 p.m. tonight. No family contact in four years. No partner. No plans." A pause. "Your grandfather was Mamoru Hukitaske. The pharmacist. You used to visit his dispensary on summer holidays and he used to let you label the bottles and you used to think that was the most important work in the world."
Akio's blood ran cold. "How do you—"
"You've been selected," the stranger said, and his eyes were gleaming with something that was past excitement, past joy — the specific expression of someone at the conclusion of an extremely long experiment. "For something reborn. For a second attempt at the wanting you buried."
"I don't know what you're—" The syringe plunged into his neck.
Fire. Electricity. Drowning. All at once — not sequentially but simultaneously, every sensation at maximum, the specific overwhelming of a body encountering something it had no architecture to process.
The last thing Akio saw was the stranger's expression cracking open — the smoothness, the stillness, the practiced polish of him — cracking open into something that was unambiguously, completely, terrifyingly delighted.
"It works," the stranger said, and his voice broke on the words the way voices broke when years of waiting arrived at their result. "It works, it works, it—" Then the world shattered.
[NARRATOR: There is a specific kind of confusion that belongs only to mothers. Not the confusion of encountering something impossible — mothers encounter impossible things with the frequency of people who have been trusted with the unreasonable weight of other lives and have learned to process the unreasonable before breakfast. The confusion that belongs only to mothers is the confusion of encountering something impossible that involves their child specifically. Harumi Hukitaske received the call at 7:14 a.m. from Shibuya Police Station. The officer on the line told her they had found a sleeping child on the street. The child had identification on him — a wallet, a work ID, a terminated employee card from Enshin Games Inc. — all belonging to one Akio Hukitaske, age thirty-two. The child, the officer said, appeared to be approximately fourteen years old. Harumi told the officer that her son was thirty-two. The officer told Harumi that the child in their station was clearly not thirty-two. Harumi told the officer she understood that but her son was thirty-two. The conversation deteriorated from there. Welcome to the morning after. Welcome to the specific impossible thing that Harumi Hukitaske is attempting to hold without the architecture to hold it. Welcome to Akio waking up in a body that has already caused problems he hasn't been conscious for.]
The ceiling again.
He registered it before anything else — the pale plaster, the water stain in the corner, the specific quality of light coming through a window to his left at an angle that meant morning, early morning, the kind that hadn't yet committed to the day.
He knew this ceiling.
The knowing arrived before the remembering, which was its own specific wrong thing — the body recognizing the room while the mind was still assembling itself from whatever the syringe had done to it. He lay completely still and let the assembling happen. There was no hurrying it. Every system was coming back online slowly, reluctantly, like machinery that had been off for longer than a night's sleep.
His head.
The pain behind his temples was different from yesterday's — not the chronic dull ache of years of fluorescent light and recycled office air, but something acute and recent, the specific pain of a body that had been through something it had no category for and was filing the experience as damage because it had nowhere else to file it.
He raised one hand to his face. Stared at it for four full seconds. Small. The hand was small. Unmarked and small and the wrist attached to it was narrow in the specific way of a wrist that hadn't yet spent decades at a keyboard.
[AKIO'S INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: It wasn't a dream. I was hoping — in the specific way of a person who knows they're not actually hoping — that it was a dream. The alley. The rain. The stranger in the bow tie. The syringe. The fire and electricity and drowning. I was hoping to wake up in the alley or in a hospital or anywhere that was consistent with the laws of physics and the known behavior of reality. But the hand is small. The ceiling is my childhood ceiling. The water stain is in the corner exactly where it was when I was fourteen. So it was not a dream. So I need to do an inventory and I need to do it without losing my composure entirely because losing composure is not useful and I have — I have enough information now. I have enough to work with. Inventory. Start there.]
He sat up. The room tilted immediately. Hard. The horizon line performing a full rotation that his body had no framework to compensate for and his arms went out automatically — grabbing the mattress edge, the sheets, anything stationary — while his vision strobed between the wallpaper and the ceiling and the floor in rapid disorienting sequence. He stayed still. Gripped the sheets. Breathed.
The spinning peaked. Held. Then began, slowly, to reconsider.
He was on a bed. His childhood bed. In his childhood room. The walls were pale blue with the small repeating pattern — diamonds, he remembered now, small diamonds in a slightly darker shade — that he'd spent years looking at in the specific way of a child looking at familiar things without seeing them. The desk. The shelf. The chemistry set.
His grandfather's chemistry set, specifically, on the shelf exactly where he'd left it at the age of eighteen when he'd packed for university and closed this room and not thought about the chemistry set again for fourteen years.
He was thinking about it now.
He swung his legs over the mattress edge. His feet found the floor. He stood — carefully, one hand on the desk, the world doing its unsteady thing beneath him — and crossed to the mirror on the back of the door.
He looked. The face in the mirror was fourteen years old and it was his.
He stood there for a long time. Not processing — the processing was happening, somewhere below the level of conscious thought, in whatever part of him was responsible for integrating things that didn't fit — but not yet producing output. Just standing. Just looking. At the smooth skin and the sharp dark eyes and the blue hair from his father that had always refused direction.
His father who had left. The thought arrived without invitation. He pushed it aside. Not now.
[NARRATOR: What Akio does not know yet — what he is about to learn, standing in his childhood room in his childhood body with the dizziness still operating at a background frequency — is that the last twelve hours have already been eventful in his absence. That his regression did not happen privately, in an alley, with only the stranger as witness. That someone found him. That the found-him produced a chain of events he will need to understand before he can understand anything else. That his mother — Harumi Hukitaske, a mother who has been managing impossible things alone for longer than Akio knows — is on the other side of his bedroom door right now, sitting at the kitchen table with her hands flat and a cup of tea she hasn't touched, waiting for the sound of him waking up.]
He heard her before he saw her.
The specific sound of a chair shifting in the kitchen. The small sound of someone who had been sitting very still for a long time making the first small movement of deciding to stop sitting still. He looked at the door. His hand found the handle.
He opened it.
The hallway was dim, the kitchen light at the end of it casting a pale rectangle across the floor. Harumi Hukitaske sat at the kitchen table with both hands flat on the surface and a cup of cold tea between them and the expression of a person who had been rehearsing something for hours and had now arrived at the moment of delivering it and found the delivery was harder than the rehearsing.
She looked at him. He looked at her.
She had aged — that was the first thing, the involuntary observation that arrived before anything else — not dramatically, not devastatingly, but the specific way that a person aged when they had been managing things alone for a long time. There were lines around her eyes that he didn't have a memory of from childhood but that his adult self recognized as years of narrowing focus, of sustained effort, of the particular expression of a mother who had decided to handle things and had been handling things since.
Her hair was shorter than he remembered from his actual fourteen. Different, slightly. The small ways that time had moved through her while he'd been spending himself down to nothing in a cubicle. She swallowed.
"You're awake," she said. Her voice was careful in the specific way of someone carrying more than the words. "I'm awake," he said. She looked at him for a long moment. Then she said: "Sit down, Akio."
Not a question. Not a request. The specific voice of a mother who had decided that sitting down was the necessary first condition of everything that needed to happen next. He sat. Across from her. The kitchen table between them — the same table, the same slight wobble on the left front leg that had been there since before he could remember, that his father had always said he would fix and had never fixed before he left.
Harumi looked at her cold tea. Then at her hands. Then at him. "The police called me at 7:14 this morning," she said. He waited.
"They said they had found a child sleeping in an alley in Shibuya. In the rain." She paused. "They said the child had a wallet on him. A work ID. An employee termination notice." Another pause. Longer. "All belonging to my son. Akio Hukitaske. Age thirty-two."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"I told them," Harumi continued, her voice producing the careful quality of someone describing something they had lived through and not yet finished processing, "that my son was thirty-two years old. That I didn't understand what they were describing."
"What did they say," Akio said.
"The officer said—" she stopped. Something moved across her face. Not quite a laugh. Not grief exactly. Something between the two that didn't have a clean name. "The officer said, very slowly, as if I was the one not understanding, that the child in their station was clearly not thirty-two. That I needed to come and collect my son."
"And you told them again."
"I told them again. That my son was an adult. That I didn't know what child they had found with his wallet but my son was thirty-two years old and I had not seen him in eight months because he didn't return calls and I was—" she stopped again. The hands on the table pressed flatter. "I told them I was worried. That something had happened to him. That I wanted them to investigate."
"They didn't."
She looked at him. "They did a blood match. From the identification. Cross-referenced against the national registry." A pause. "It matched. My blood. The adult Akio Hukitaske's blood. The child sitting in their station." She was quiet for a moment. "The officer told me — and I could hear in his voice that he had made a decision about the kind of person I was — the officer told me that the results were clear. That the child was mine. That my son was a child. And that if I said one more word about my son being a thirty-two-year-old adult they were going to have some very serious questions for me about why I was trying to abandon my son at a police station."
[NARRATOR: The specific cruelty of the situation was not in anyone's malice. It was in the perfect reasonableness of every assumption the police had made. A child in an alley with an adult's identification — clearly stolen, clearly explained. A blood match confirming maternal relationship — clearly routine. A mother claiming her minor son was actually an adult — clearly someone in denial, clearly someone with something to hide, clearly someone who needed to be reminded that abandonment was a crime and her son was in their station. The case was closed before it was opened because every piece of it fit a simpler story than the true one. And the true one was not a story anyone in that station had the framework to receive. So they didn't look. And the not-looking was the most reasonable thing they could have done. And that was the cruelest part.]
"You came," Akio said.
"Of course I came." Her voice was flat with the specific flatness of someone for whom of course carried the weight of everything that hadn't been said between them in eight months and longer.
"What did I look like," he said. "When they brought me out."
She looked at him. At this face she was looking at right now across the kitchen table — the fourteen-year-old face with his grandfather's face bones and her own eyes and the blue hair that had always been its own jurisdiction from his father. "Like you," she said quietly. "You looked exactly like you. At fourteen." A pause. "I knew your face. I knew it immediately. But I also—" she stopped.
"You knew I was thirty-two," he said.
"I knew you were thirty-two," she confirmed. "And you were asleep and young and soaking wet from the rain and there was a bruise on your neck—" her eyes went briefly to his neck, to where the syringe had been, and then away again "—and I carried you out of that station in my arms and I put you in a taxi and I brought you home and I put you in your bed and I sat in that kitchen and I did not sleep."
The kitchen held this for a moment. "How long have I been—" "Since 7:40 this morning," she said. "It is now 4:17 in the afternoon."
He sat with this. The dizziness was still present at its low frequency, the body still recalibrating, still filing the experience of being restructured at the molecular level under the heading of something to be dealt with gradually.
"Mom," he said. She looked at him. The word in his too-high voice sitting between them with its full weight.
"I remember everything," he said. "Every year. I remember being thirty-two. I remember the office and the termination and the alley. I remember the person who did this." He paused. "I'm still me. All the way in. Thirty-two years of me, in this body."
Harumi looked at her hands for a long time. "I know," she said. Very quietly. "I don't understand it. I have been sitting in that kitchen for nine hours trying to find the framework for it and I don't have one. But I know." She looked at him. "Your eyes are yours. Not a fourteen-year-old's eyes. Yours."
He looked back at her. "I need to find who did this," he said. "I know," she said.
"I need to find the person in the bow tie. I need to understand what the syringe was. What the selection process was. What Subject 9764 means." The information arriving in sequence, the adult mind operating from the child's body with its full inventory. "There are others. He said I was selected. That implies a methodology. A list. People before me and probably people after me and I need—"
"Akio."
He stopped.
She was looking at him with an expression he didn't have a complete name for. It was not the expression of a mother looking at a child. It was something more complicated — the expression of a woman who had been alone for a long time looking at the only person she was connected to and finding that the connection was more present than it had been in years, even under the unreasonable circumstances, even across the impossible distance of eighteen missing years sitting in a fourteen-year-old body.
"I know you need to find them," she said. "I'm not going to stop you." A pause. The hands pressed flat on the table. "But I need you to understand something first."
"What."
"I can't—" she stopped. Started again. "Whatever this is. Whatever was done to you and whoever did it and whatever Subject 9764 means. I can't be part of that. I can't follow you into it." Her voice was not cold. It was the specific voice of someone being honest about their limits. "I have been managing alone for a long time. Since your father—" she stopped. The small stop of someone encountering a wound they'd learned to route around. "For a long time. I don't have the capacity for whatever this investigation requires. I'm telling you that honestly."
"I'm not asking you to investigate," Akio said.
"I know," she said. "But I'm asking you to understand that my limit exists. That I'm—" the hands shifted on the table. "I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're alive. Whatever alive means in this specific impossible situation. But I need you to not bring the dangerous thing into this house further than it's already come."
He looked at her. At the lines around her eyes and the shorter hair and the cold tea and the nine hours of sitting alone with something she didn't have a framework for.
"Okay," he said.
She nodded. Once. The specific nod of someone receiving something they'd been genuinely uncertain about receiving.
"There's something else," she said.
He waited.
"You can't— you look fourteen, Akio. You look exactly fourteen years old." She was speaking carefully now, in the voice of someone who had spent nine hours thinking through implications. "You can't be a thirty-two-year-old. Not visibly. Not in public. Not in any context that involves anyone who knew you as an adult or anyone who will encounter you going forward."
"I know," he said.
"Which means," she said, "you need to attend school."
The kitchen was quiet for a moment.
"School," he said.
"School," she confirmed. "You need to be a fourteen-year-old in every visible way. You need to enroll. You need to attend. You need to—" a pause, and something moved across her face that was almost the almost-laugh again "—you need to sit in a classroom and do things you already know how to do and you need to do it without telling anyone who you actually are."
"Because if I don't blend, someone investigates," he said. "And if someone investigates the blood evidence they find the same thing the police found and they come to you."
"Yes," she said. "And because—" she paused. "The person who did this. The person in the bow tie. If they're watching — and I think you think they're watching — they're expecting you to behave like a child. Or to try to behave like an adult and fail. They're not expecting you to be quiet and patient and strategic." She looked at him. "Blend. Be quiet. Find them from inside the cover."
[NARRATOR: Nine hours alone in a kitchen with something she didn't have the framework for, and she had arrived at the correct strategic conclusion. This was Harumi Hukitaske. This was what managing alone for years without the architecture for impossible things produced in a person — not the capacity for the impossible, but the specific patience of someone who had learned to think clearly in the presence of things that had no right to be real. She was telling him: I can't follow you into this. And she was also telling him: here is the map. Both things were true. Both things were her. And Akio, sitting across the kitchen table from his mother in a body that was eighteen years younger than his memory, understood both things with the full weight of thirty-two years of understanding that had come too late and now hadn't.]
He looked at his small hands on the table. At the kitchen that was his childhood kitchen. At the window behind his mother where the late afternoon light was doing its low golden thing across the rooftops.
"He called me Subject 9764," Akio said. "Which means there are at least 9,763 before me."
Harumi said nothing.
"He knew about grandfather," Akio continued. "The dispensary. The bottle labeling. Things I never told anyone." A pause. "Which means the selection wasn't random. He researched. He built files. He knew what I wanted before I was told to stop wanting it."
"Akio—"
"I'll blend," he said. "I'll attend school. I'll be fourteen in every visible way." He looked at her. "But I need you to know that I'm looking. That every classroom and every hallway and every interaction is me looking. Because whoever Subject 9763 was — whatever happened to them — I need to know before it happens to whoever comes after me."
Harumi looked at him for a long time.
Then she reached across the table and put one hand over his small hand — the hand that was her son's hand, that was thirty-two years old, that was fourteen years old, that was both of those things simultaneously in the specific impossible way of this specific impossible morning.
"Your father would have—" she started. Stopped. The wound routed around, again. "Never mind."
"I know," Akio said. Quietly. He did know. That was the thing. He knew exactly what she'd been about to say and exactly why she'd stopped and exactly the shape of the absence his father's leaving had made in both of them.
She withdrew her hand. Stood. Crossed to the kettle.
"I'll make tea," she said. "And then you're going to eat something. And then tomorrow I'm going to find out about school enrollment." She filled the kettle without turning around. "And we don't speak about any of the rest of it unless the door is closed and the windows are—"
"Mom."
She turned.
"Thank you," he said. "For carrying me out of the station."
The kettle went on. She turned back to it.
"You're my son," she said. Simply. As if that was the full answer. As if that covered all of it.
And in the specific way that some simple things covered everything they needed to cover, it did.
And somewhere, at the precise distance required for the work being done, a figure in a black suit and red bow tie wrote one more line in a leather-bound notebook beneath the entry for Subject 9764.
Note: Maternal contact reestablished. Cover established. Subject contained and strategic. Blood evidence processed by institutional actors and discarded. A pause. The pen hovering. Then: The mother is sharper than projected. Monitor.
He closed the notebook.
"Now," he said softly.
"Let's see what you do with the cover, my dear pharmacist."
[To be continued in Chapter 2: Back to School, Back to Dreams]
[To be continued in Chapter 2: Back to School, Back to Dreams]