The garden hadn't changed.
That same narrow path still curled between the low hedges, their edges clipped with care, though time had left its subtle fingerprints. A few dry leaves clung stubbornly to the stones, scattered like fragments of memory no one had the heart to sweep away. Near the far wall stood the old sakura tree, tall and composed, branches swaying gently with a wind that spoke in hushes. The first blossoms had begun to appear; timid, pale things not yet ready to announce spring. It was still too soon, and yet, they bloomed anyway.
It was well past midnight when I stepped out into that quiet. The kind of quiet that feels too large for a house to hold. Inside, sleep would not come. The silence pressed too closely, too tightly. Out here, at least, there was space to breathe. The sky above was veiled by a thin stretch of cloud, muting the stars. The air held that strange contradiction only early spring can manage, cold enough to touch, yet too gentle to push you away. A quiet insistence that some seasons arrive not with thunder, but with aching slowness.
I sat on the stone bench, the one Dad had built for us with hands that always smelled of earth and pine. It creaked beneath me, not from weakness, but from age. It remembered. It held me the way memory does not entirely comfortably, but faithfully.
Then I heard it.
The sliding door opened behind me, barely more than a sigh.
When I turned, Aoi was there.
She stepped outside barefoot, her toes brushing the old wooden porch. She wore a cardigan over her nightdress, the fabric loose and soft, her hair cascading in a mess of waves that hadn't felt a brush in hours. The moonlight wove silver through her strands, giving her an almost spectral glow; real, but just barely. The kind of real that slips away if you breathe too loudly. She didn't speak. She only walked toward me, one silent step at a time, the same way she had moved at dinner, as though the floorboards remembered more than she did, and each one hurt to cross.
"Couldn't sleep?" I asked.
She shook her head. Her eyes avoided mine, drifting instead toward the sakura tree. She sat beside me, carefully. Her shoulder brushed mine for a heartbeat, then pulled back, just slightly. Not rejection. Not distance. But the trembling instinct of someone who still wasn't sure the person beside her was truly there.
The silence that followed was thick and knowing. Not the kind that demands words. The kind that says I stayed. I didn't walk away. The kind that carries the weight of shared ghosts and unopened letters.
"I used to sit out here when I missed you," she said, her voice no louder than a thought. "It felt like… if I waited long enough, you'd come walking through the gate. Like time could fold back on itself if I wanted it badly enough."
I looked at her then, but she wasn't really here. Her gaze was fixed ahead, eyes glazed with something that had no name. Maybe she was seeing the garden as it used to be. Or maybe she was still waiting.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"For what?"
"For leaving. For not coming back when I should have."
She didn't answer right away. Her lips parted, but nothing came. Then, slowly, she turned to me. The light didn't reveal much, but what it showed was enough; her expression was unreadable and yet unbearably gentle. As though she were holding something fragile between her words.
"You didn't have a choice," she said.
The steadiness of her voice was a quiet kind of violence. Beneath it, I heard the sound of something delicate under strain, like porcelain flexing just before it gives way.
"I know that. I do." Her breath stuttered, just once. "But I still hated it. All of it. Every single day you were gone. The house stopped feeling like home. Even the walls. Even the air. Everything felt like it was pretending without you."
Her words struck something hollow in me. They didn't land with a crash. They settled, slow and heavy, like rain falling through water.
"You've changed," I said, barely above a whisper. "You've grown up so much."
A laugh slipped out of her then. But it was dry. Bitter around the edges. "Someone had to. Someone had to stay and keep the pieces from falling apart."
We turned to face each other. For the first time in years, I truly looked at her.
Her eyes weren't the same ones I remembered. Gone was the glimmer of unshaken wonder, the open-book innocence. In its place was something deeper. Something shaped by solitude. Something carved by time and waiting. Her gaze carried the strength of someone who had survived too many quiet days with too many unanswered questions.
"I waited for you," she said, and this time it cracked through her. "Longer than I should have. I sat out here until the porch light gave up. Mom would call, but I stayed. Just in case. Just in case it was you behind that gate."
I opened my mouth, but the words tumbled out too quickly.
"Not stupid. Don't even say it. That wasn't stupid."
She blinked. Her eyes shimmered for a moment, then cleared. Her lips trembled. But the tears didn't come. Maybe they had already been spent. Maybe she had nothing left to give to grief.
The silence returned, thicker than before. But not empty. It pulsed with everything we had left unsaid for years. With every unwritten letter. With the thousands of seconds that had gone unnoticed between the ticking of clocks.
Above us, the sakura tree reached into the night. One blossom, defiant and alone, had opened. Too soon. Too brave. Its pale petals shimmered like a memory too stubborn to forget.
"I missed this place," I said.
"Me too," she breathed.
And though the garden was the same; the same paths, the same stones, the same tree that had watched us grow, it no longer felt like it belonged to who we had been. It felt like a meeting place for two people who had been lost in opposite directions.
Not as children.
Not even as siblings.
But as strangers once known to each other, sitting in the ruins of what was, trying to find their way back through a garden that remembered everything they tried to forget.
And in the space between us, our hearts listened tired, uncertain, still learning how to beat where they had once belonged.
Still wondering if they ever could again.