The drive out took forty minutes.
Saki had arranged the cars — two, because nine adults and one child required more than one vehicle, and because Saki had learned from the Okinawa trip that putting everyone in one enclosed space before a collective decision created conditions for premature consensus formation. Better to arrive separately and form impressions independently.
She rode in the first car with Nana, Yoru, and Tsukasa. The second carried everyone else. Kaito drove.
He was quiet for most of the drive — not the heavy quiet of the previous weeks, just the natural quiet of a man watching the city thin gradually into the looser landscape of the city's outskirts, the buildings stepping back from the road, the trees becoming more deliberate, the particular quality of the air changing as the density changed around it.
"You're doing the thing," Saori said, from the passenger seat.
"What thing," he said.
