Page 48 of Bearly Out Loud

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your face is saying plenty.”

“My face is saying that you’ve been courting a woman who was building a case against your company, and she kissedyou anyway, and that’s either the most romantic or the most terrifying thing I’ve ever witnessed.”

Dojin didn’t answer. Because Reo wasn’t wrong.

His phone buzzed. Not Nari. His mother.

Colette:Suki Saito has invited us for tea. Next Saturday. You will attend. Wear the blue. It brings out your eyes. Do not argue with me, do not argue with Suki, and do not argue with the tea.

He showed the screen to Reo.

Reo read it. Read it again.

“The mothers are talking.”

“The mothers are talking.”

Reo tilted his head. “Threat level?”

Dojin pocketed his phone. Looked at the corporate filings spread across his desk. Looked at the window, where Midtown glittered in the fading afternoon light—indifferent and beautiful and full of people who had no idea that two families on opposite ends of Manhattan were pulling on the same thread from different directions, about to unravel the same lie.

“Thirteen.”

TWENTY-SIX

DOJIN

The izakaya had no sign.

A narrow doorway between a vintage record shop and a closed cobbler on East Ninth Street. A single paper lantern hung above the entrance, unlit, its kanji faded to a shadow. If you didn’t know it was there, you walked past. The owner preferred it that way. So did Dojin.

He held the door open. Nari ducked under his arm and into the stairwell—a steep descent, wooden steps worn concave by decades of feet, the air thickening with steam and soy and the sweet tang of rice vinegar as they dropped below street level. At the bottom: a curtain. Dark indigo, hand-dyed, fraying at the hem.

Nari pushed it aside and stopped.

Twelve seats. A single cypress counter running the length of a room no bigger than a subway car. No menu. No hostess. No decor except a ceramic tanuki on a shelf above the sake bottles, grinning like it knew secrets. The kitchen was visible behind the counter—two burners, a cutting board, a woman.

Obaa-san. Seventy-odd, spine like rebar, gray hair pulled back in a knot held with chopsticks that might have been ivory or bone or sheer force of will. She looked up from a daikonshe was peeling with a knife that could have performed surgery, saw Dojin, and her expression shifted from concentration to accusation.

“????”You.

“Okada-san.” He bowed. Proper. The bow said he understood that in this room, his billions meant nothing, and the woman with the knife was the highest authority.

“Three months. No visit. I thought you died.” She pointed the knife at him. “You bring honey?”

He set a jar on the counter. Rooftop wildflower. Late-harvest, the last batch before winter had shut the hives down. Okada-san picked it up, held it to the light, and nodded once. The nod was an entire performance review.

Then she looked at Nari.

The assessment took four seconds. Sharp dark eyes honed by decades of reading people since before Dojin’s parents were born. She studied Nari’s face, her posture, the jacket draped over her arm—his jacket, unmistakably—and then looked at Dojin with an expression that conveyed, in order: surprise, evaluation, approval, and a suggestion that grandchildren were in order.

“You bring a girl.”

“A colleague.”