No Blossom

XX

"Say that again. The last part."

"No, my schedule is full this week, but I'll keep that in mind."

"I'll get back to you".

He put down the phone and sighed, then picked up a cigar from the desk and lit it. Because his desk was so big, I couldn't smell the smoke even though I was sitting right across from him. I tried to imagine how other people felt when they sat there, whether they felt insignificant and intimidated like I did, or if the thought didn't even cross their mind.

"Cutter."

I handed him the cutter and looked away when he cut the cigar and set it down on the ashtray. Next to the ashtray was a family portrait of him with his children, twins, a boy and a girl.

"Everything going well with the new project?"

He asked that, yet he didn't seem to really care for an answer, he just wanted me to tell him that there were no issues. That was my job, to make sure there were no issues for him to hear about.

"Good. You can go."

The cafeteria was unusually crowded that day and I barely even found an empty seat at the far end where the noise from the kitchen was the loudest. It didn't bother me as much as when I'd first started working at the bureau since I got used to the way of things fast, I had to. There was talk about layoffs sometimes. People were afraid of losing their jobs to cyclical unemployment, which wasn't an unrealistic at all. If the average employee was at risk, I was hanging on by a thread.

"If you only eat this much it's no wonder you're so thin", a woman's voice commented from over my shoulder. She took off her scarf and put it down on the table, then sat across from me and started opening her lunchbox. "Hibiki?" I wanted to ask her to leave, knowing full well that she was only there to cause me trouble. But she hadn't done anything too rash yet so I couldn't just tell her to go away. Maybe she felt guilty for what she had said regarding Saya and wanted to apologize. But when I looked at Hibiki, she was stuffing her mouth with food and I could tell that she didn't feel guilty about a thing.

"It's just a regular rice ball. Do you want to taste it that badly or why do you keep staring at it?" She picked up one of the rice balls from her lunchbox and passed it to me. "What- I wasn't staring at it!" I picked up the rice ball to give it back to her, but instead the whole thing just crumbled in my hands. I groaned and was about to grab some paper to wipe away the rice, but then I noticed that Hibiki was already cleaning the mess. "Hibiki?" I had a hard time understanding what was going through her head at that time, so I glanced around the cafeteria and found that it was now mostly empty. There was even a nice table entirely vacant by the window, yet she had come all the way to the back just to sit with me.

"What are you making that stupid face for?"

The sun was already setting by the time I was able to leave the office, and as I walked across the parking lot, I recalled the time when Saya was there, waiting for me and looking up and down the glassy building. I had to turn around and carefully and observe my surroundings to make she wasn't there this time. Of course she wasn't.

What was I even expecting?

Suddenly my phone rang, and I took it out anxiously, thinking that it must have been the boss. It wasn't, it was my mother.

"Hmm? Kiryuu? Can you hear me?" She asked me in a voice so loud that anyone standing nearby would have no doubt heard her. After that she paused, and the longer the silence stretched, the more worried I grew. Had something happened to my father? It was rare of my family to visit me, let alone call me. I tried to think about what she wanted to say, but all that came to my mind was my father's unannounced visit and the hairpin on my bedside table. Had he told my mother about it and she wanted to know who the hairpin belonged to?

Even though only a moment had passed, my throat had turned dry as I went over all the possible things she might ask me. None of which I was prepared to answer. But then she finally spoke:

"You should come home this weekend. You can do that, can't you? It's about your brother."

My brother?

"He's getting engaged. To the chairman's daughter."

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What?

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