She told herself she wasn't thinking about him.
She was reviewing the Nakamura acquisition, actually. The documents were right there on her desk — forty pages, flagged in three colors, requiring her signature and her attention — and Hana Shirogane was a woman who gave her attention completely and efficiently to whatever required it.
She was absolutely not thinking about a red scarf.
Or the way he'd sat down on that bench like the world had simply asked him to and he'd said sure, why not. Or the specific quality of his voice when he'd said you're really in pain right now — not like a diagnosis, not like pity, but like someone reading aloud something they could see clearly and wanted her to know they could see.
She turned a page.
Read the same paragraph for the third time.
Put the documents down.
Fine.
"Masao."
He appeared, as he always did, with the timing of someone who had been approximately eight feet away this entire time.
"I need information," Hana said. "On a Kaito Arisawa. University student, twenty-one—" she paused, and in the pause made the mistake of remembering, very precisely, the exact angle of his smile — "approximately five foot eleven. Black hair. Red scarf. I need his university, enrollment status, financial situation, address—"
"His favorite color?" Masao said pleasantly. "His star sign?"
Hana gave him the look that had made grown men in boardrooms reconsider their life choices.
Masao remained unaffected. He had built up immunity over three decades.
"It's a business matter," she said.
"Mm."
"I'm considering a contractual arrangement."
"Of course you are."
"He could be a valuable—"
"Miss Shirogane." His voice carried the particular gentleness of someone about to say something true and slightly devastating. "You came home this evening with color in your cheeks for the first time in four years."
The room was very quiet.
"It's cold outside," Hana said.
"It's seventeen degrees."
"I may be coming down with something."
"You haven't been ill since 2019."
She picked up her water glass. Set it down. Straightened the folder in front of her that didn't need straightening. "Are you going to get me the information or spend the evening being insufferable?"
"I'm talented enough to do both." He moved toward the door. "By morning," he said, with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had won something without technically fighting. "Oh — and Miss Shirogane?"
She didn't look up. "What."
"He's twenty-one."
"I'm aware—"
"You were in middle school when he was born."
"Masao."
"Learning long division. He was learning to walk—"
"Get out."
He left. She could hear — she was almost certain she could hear — him smiling from the hallway.
Hana sat alone in her study and stared at the wall and was extremely professional about everything for approximately four minutes.
Then she picked up her pen and, on the back of the Nakamura acquisition documents, wrote — nutritional needs. proper meals. jacket — collar worn. university fees? — before she caught herself and turned the paper over with the decisive energy of someone who was absolutely not doing what they were clearly doing.
She didn't sleep well.
This was, she told herself, entirely unrelated to anything. She often didn't sleep well. Her mind ran too fast and too late and her body had its own complex negotiations with rest that had nothing to do with brown eyes or crooked smiles or the way a stranger had looked at her — really looked — for the first time in longer than she wanted to calculate.
She lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling of her bedroom — vast, pale, impeccably plastered — and her mind, traitorous and unhelpful as always, offered her this:
What if he'd said yes.
Not the contractual yes. Not the polite, calculating yes of every man who'd ever sat across from her in a hotel and decided she was worth something on paper. The other kind. The kind that meant—
She turned over.
He's twenty-one, said the sensible part of her brain, in Masao's voice.
He has kind eyes, said the other part, which she was beginning to resent.
You have known him for less than an hour.
He didn't look at the chair.
That one landed differently. She let it sit there in the dark and breathed around it carefully, the way you breathe around something that might break if handled wrong.
In sixteen years — through every meeting, every introduction, every carefully arranged encounter in every expensive restaurant — she could count on two fingers the number of people who had looked at her and seen her first. Not the wheelchair. Not the money. Not the carefully arranged composition of Hana Shirogane, CEO, heiress, object of pity or ambition depending on the day.
Just — her.
He'd done it without trying.
She turned over again.
He called you a stranger, she reminded herself. He suggested dating like he was suggesting they try a new restaurant. He is a twenty-one year old university student who probably eats instant noodles and stays up until two AM for reasons unrelated to acquisition documents.
He smiled like he meant it.
She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
This was, she decided, simply the result of emotional exhaustion and one too many rejections in a short span of time. She was vulnerable and therefore her judgment was temporarily compromised. She was a rational adult and she would behave like one.
She was going to find out everything about Kaito Arisawa and then make a very logical, unemotional decision about how to proceed.
She was not going to lie in the dark imagining what it would be like if he looked at her the way he'd looked at that elderly woman in the park — with that simple, uncomplicated warmth, like caring for people was just something his hands knew how to do.
She was absolutely not going to think about that.
She thought about it for another forty minutes before she finally fell asleep.
Across the city, in a neighborhood where the lights were fewer and the streets narrower, Kaito Arisawa was already asleep.
He slept the way he did everything — completely, without ceremony, sprawled diagonally across a futon that was slightly too small for him in an apartment that was slightly too small for everything. His economics textbook had fallen off the bed at some point. His phone alarm was set for five forty-five. His jacket — the one with the worn collar — hung over the back of the single chair.
He hadn't thought about the woman in the park before falling asleep.
Or rather — he had, briefly. Her face. The careful way she'd constructed every sentence like she was building something that needed to hold weight. The way please had slipped out smaller than everything else, like it had escaped before she could stop it.
He'd thought: she's lonely in a way she's stopped calling loneliness.
He recognized it. He'd lived next to it his whole life — in children who had stopped crying about their parents because crying eventually just became noise. You learned to carry it differently. Quietly. So quietly sometimes you forgot it was weight at all.
He'd fallen asleep thinking he hoped she was okay.
That was all.
That was, for Kaito, often enough.
Morning.
Masao set the folder beside Hana's coffee at seven fifty-two with the precision of a man who understood that timing was everything.
Hana was already dressed, already composed, already the version of herself that ran companies and made decisions and did not blush — had not blushed, Masao was imagining things — over strangers in parks.
She opened the folder.
Three jobs. She read that line and felt something pull tight and low in her chest — three — and moved on before it could become something she'd have to name.
Scholarship records. Enrollment. Employment history. She turned the pages with the efficient focus of a woman who processed information for a living—
And stopped.
She read it once.
Twice.
The morning light fell across the page and her coffee went cold and Masao stood at his respectful distance and watched the exact moment Hana Shirogane's composure developed, for the first time in a very long while, a crack.
"Masao," she said. Her voice was strange. Careful. Like someone walking on ice they weren't sure about.
"Yes."
"Did you verify this?"
"Three times."
She looked up. Her gray eyes — usually so controlled, so contained — were doing something complicated that she didn't seem entirely aware of.
She closed the folder.
Outside, the morning went about its business. Somewhere across the city, Kaito Arisawa was already on his feet, already moving, already carrying everything he carried with that easy, unhurried grace that had no idea it was being thought about.
"Cancel my nine o'clock," Hana said quietly.
"Already done," said Masao.
She put her hand flat on the closed folder and looked at nothing and thought about a boy who had heard her most desperate, broken, ridiculous question and responded by simply — sitting down.
What happened to you?
You're really in pain, aren't you.
She pressed her lips together.
"Masao," she said, without looking up.
"Yes, Miss Shirogane."
"Not a word."
A pause, perfectly measured. "I wasn't going to say anything."
She picked up her coffee. It was cold. She drank it anyway.
End of Chapter Three.