Rain again. Different rain. Softer. A mist. It beaded on the bridge railing. On his knuckles.
She stood beside him. Not close. A foot of damp air between them. She'd taken off her suit jacket. Just a white blouse. Getting wet. She didn't seem to care.
They'd driven here. In his cab. Silence. Thick. Not the old static. The new silence. After the truth.
He smoked. She watched the brown water. Swirling. Endless.
"This is your place," she said. Not a question.
"Yeah."
"It's sad."
"Yeah."
She took the cigarette from his fingers. A move so familiar it stole his breath. She took a drag. Coughed. A real cough. Hand to her mouth. "Still terrible."
"Told you."
She handed it back. Their fingers touched. A spark. But different. A weaker charge. A dying battery.
The taste of her lipstick was on the filter. Something floral. Not mint.
"I come here to feel time passing," he said. To the water. "Watch the waterline rise. And fall."
"Does it work?"
"No."
She nodded. Like she understood. She probably did.
He took out the photo halves. Held them together. The tear almost disappeared. A whole picture. Two kids. Blue sky. A promise.
He showed her.
She looked. Didn't take it. Just looked. Her face was blank. Then a tiny crack. A wince. "We were so young."
"We were."
"We look… sure."
"We were."
She turned away. Leaned on the railing. "I have a fiancé."
The words hung in the wet air. A fact. A brick through glass.
Kenji didn't move. "Yeah?"
"A partner at a rival firm. It's… appropriate. He's fine. He's quiet. We like the same wines." She said it like reading a grocery list. "He doesn't know about mint. Or rooftops. Or you."
"You gonna marry him?"
"Probably."
Silence. The rain whispered on the river.
"I live in a nice apartment," she said. "It has a view. I never look at it. I pay a woman to clean it. It always smells like lemons. I hate lemons."
He finished the cigarette. Flicked it. Watched it die in the water. "I live above a noodle shop. It smells like pork broth. All hours. It's… loud."
She almost smiled. "You always wanted quiet."
"I got tired of it."
They stood. The past was between them. A third person. The ghost of 1999.
He saw it now. The trap. They weren't haunted by each other. They were haunted by the people they were back then. The last people who believed in something. The last people who felt a feeling so sharp it could cut.
Every choice after that was just padding. Armor. Walls. To protect that one, vulnerable, real thing. Until the armor became the person. And the real thing was a fossil in a box.
"The song," she said. "In Berlin. It undid me. I sat in the street. In the rain. I cried like my heart had broken that day. Not twenty years before. That day."
"The scent," he said. "Mint. In my cab. A kid chewing gum. I almost drove off the road."
They were prisoners. Not of love. Of memory. Of the flavor of a feeling they could never taste again. Chasing it in songs. In smells. In strangers on platforms.
The peak wasn't a feeling. It was the realization of the cage.
He looked at her. Really looked. At the fine lines around her eyes. The tension in her jaw. The woman who built a fortress. He saw the ghost of the girl. But just a ghost. Faint. Fading.
She was looking at him too. Seeing the ruin. The tired eyes. The man who measured his life by waterlines on a bridge.
They weren't those kids. Those kids were gone. Had been gone for decades.
The tragedy wasn't losing each other. It was losing themselves. And spending a lifetime trying to find those lost kids in every smell. Every song. Every stranger's coat.
The bridge was the peak. The highest point of the trap. Looking out over the water of time. And seeing, clearly, that they'd never left the shore.
"Prisoners of love," she whispered. A sad joke.
He didn't laugh.
The rain picked up. Cold.
They were just two middle-aged people. On a bridge. Getting wet. With a photograph of two strangers in their hands.
The peak was a flatline. The realization that the heartbeat they'd been listening for had stopped a long, long time ago.