The cherry blossoms had returned to Yukimura, brushing the wind with soft pinks and silken petals. Ayame Minoru stood beneath the cedar tree on the hill behind the school, her fingers curled tightly around the familiar fold of paper she had carried for the last twelve months. The edges were frayed now, the ink slightly smudged, but the words still pulsed in her memory:
"April 9th. Here. Promise?"
She let the breeze touch her face, trying to still her racing thoughts. The schoolyard below was quieter than she remembered. Of course it was—it had been a year. Students had moved on. So had life. And yet something about the air hadn't changed. The scent of ink and erasers. The weight of secrets unspoken.
He had said he would meet her here. Kael.
But the cedar tree held no boy this time. Only shadow and sunlight scattered through its branches.
Ayame adjusted the strap of her bag and slowly sat at the base of the trunk, just as they used to. She stared out at the skyline of their small town—familiar and unchanged, and somehow lonelier than it used to be. She thought back to that final day of school. The rush of students. The ache of their goodbye. The way he had pressed the napkin into her hand with a grin too wide to be hiding anything… and yet.
Time had played its cruel trick. A year had passed. Messages dwindled into silence. At first, she told herself he was just busy, just overwhelmed. Then came the absence—total and unwavering.
Still, something in her resisted doubt. The Kael she knew wouldn't forget.
She looked around again. Then her eyes caught a mark—etched faintly into the wooden bench across the way. She stood and walked over slowly, heart tightening. The initials were familiar, carved just below the grain:
K.A.
No date. No flourish. Just that.
A whisper of something unfinished.
Back home that evening, Ayame pulled out the notebook her grandmother had left behind—a weathered collection of diagrams and phrases scribbled in old ink, the kind of book only eccentric grandmothers passed down. Stargazer's lore, she used to call it. Mostly nonsense.
But tonight, the pages seemed more alive.
On the third page, beneath the sketch of two colliding constellations, a new line had appeared—no recollection of having seen it before:
"When the paths of memory are frayed, the stars remember."
Ayame blinked.
Below it, a small spiral had been drawn into the margin. The exact spiral Kael had doodled on their napkin. She knew it by heart.
She hadn't added it.
And yet there it was.
She reached out, brushing her fingertips over the page, her breath still.
Outside, the wind shifted slightly, lifting the corner of the napkin on her desk. A single cherry blossom petal slipped in through the window, landing silently beside it.