She knew on a Friday.
Not because of any single thing — not a test, not a dramatic moment of certainty arriving from nowhere. Because of the accumulation of small things that her body had been saying quietly for two weeks in the specific language she had learned twice before and had not forgotten, the way you did not forget the particular vocabulary of something that had changed the shape of your life.
The tiredness that was different from ordinary tiredness. The way the rice smelled in the morning, which was not wrong exactly but was too present, more present than rice had any right to be. The pause at the kitchen counter on Thursday that Saki had noted in her notebook — eight seconds, Saki had recorded, which was accurate, and which Nana knew because Saki was always accurate — the pause that had happened because her body had said something and she had stopped to hear it.
She had heard it.
