Page 50 of Bearly Out Loud

He listened. He went still inside—not pacing, not restless. She was trusting him. With the evidence, with the timeline, with the raw nerve of a family legacy violated. She was opening the folder because he’d opened his mouth first.

Okada-san placed the first course between them. Sashimi—three cuts of fish on a ceramic leaf, each piece a different shade of pink. Neither of them moved to eat.

“You didn’t know.” Nari’s voice was steady, but her hands were trembling. The micro-shake in her fingers where they rested on the folder’s edge. “I’ve been watching you for weeks. In the studio, in meetings, when you talk about the project. You didn’t know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“If you had, I would have seen it.”

He believed her. She read people for a living—voices, faces, the micro-expressions that separated a performance from the truth. If he’d been lying, she’d have caught it in the booth, in a hallway, in the thousand small moments where his face had done exactly what his instincts demanded and nothing his brain approved.

Okada-san appeared with sake refills. Poured for both of them without asking. Placed a hand briefly on Nari’s shoulder—the grandmother’s universal gesture foreat something—and disappeared again.

Nari picked up a piece of sashimi. Ate it. Closed her eyes.

“This is extraordinary.”

“Okada-san sources from Tsukiji.”

“I’m talking about the fact that you told me the truth before I told you mine.” She opened her eyes. They were wet. She didn’t blink it away. “You could have protected your company. Buried the Meridian connection. Lawyered up and let me find it myself. You brought me to a twelve-seat restaurant with no sign and told me your flagship project might be stolen from my family.”

He picked up his sake. Drank. The nigori was cold and soft and sweet, and his throat was tight, and the woman sitting beside him had tears on her face and fury in her voice and was eating sashimi and undoing him simultaneously.

“I couldn’t not tell you.”

“Because it’s the right thing to do.”

“Because it’s you.”

The second piece of sashimi stopped halfway to her mouth. She looked at him—full, open, no guard and no sarcasm and no performance. For three seconds, Nari Wixx was quiet. Not performing silence. Quiet because the words had found a place inside her that didn’t have a comeback.

Then she ate the sashimi.

“The fish is better than that line deserved,” she said, and her voice cracked on “deserved,” and tenderness pressed against his ribs so acute it hurt.

They closed the folder.

Not by agreement—by mutual, unspoken recognition that they’d opened a wound and now needed to let it breathe before they opened it again. Nari slid the manila folder to the far end of the counter, tucked behind the ceramic tanuki, and turned her body toward him on the stool.

Her knee touched his thigh. She didn’t move it. Neither did he.

The second course arrived. Grilled barramundi, yuzu butter, microgreens arranged like a still life. Okada-san set it between them and said, in Japanese, “Eat. Talk later. The fish doesn’t wait for feelings.”

Nari looked at Dojin. “What did she say?”

“The fish doesn’t wait for feelings.”

“I love her. I’m adopting her. She’s my grandmother now.”

“You already have a grandmother.”

“I’m collecting. Suki for wisdom, Okada-san for food, and I’m accepting applications for a third who specializes in threats.” She took a bite of barramundi and closed her eyes again. Dojin was beginning to understand that Nari closed her eyes when food was good, when music was right, and when she was buying time for her heart to catch up with her mouth. “Okay. I need to stop associating traumatic revelations with transcendent Japanese cuisine because my body doesn’t know whether to cry or order more.”

“You can do both.”

“Already am. This is what range looks like.” She opened her eyes and grinned at him—wet-eyed, genuine, a smile that landed square in his chest and stayed. “My mother would be so proud.”

He laughed. Couldn’t help it. The tension of the last hour—the evidence, the folder, the weight of what Mercer had done—cracked under the force of her grin, and his laugh was rough and surprised and it changed the room. Okada-san glanced over her shoulder with a look that saidfinally.