What We Never Forgot

Chapter One: The Things We Leave Behind

Some houses announced their loneliness before you crossed the threshold.

It lived in the stagnant air behind the windows, in the curtains pulled across perfectly good sunlight, in the peculiar silence of rooms that had spent too long waiting for someone to give them purpose. The rental house at the end of Midorigaoka Lane possessed all three. Its dark roof sloped modestly beneath the afternoon sky, its narrow garden had surrendered to the spring weeds, and the brass number beside the gate hung crooked enough to offend me on a professional level.

I liked it immediately.

"The owner lives in Osaka now," the rental agent explained as she wrestled with the lock. "She inherited the property from her aunt, but maintaining it from another city became difficult. No one has stayed here for nearly a year."

The key turned with a complaining scrape. Mrs. Endo stepped aside, and I entered a house scented with old cedar, dust, and the faint medicinal sweetness of mothballs. Beige paint concealed what should have been beautiful plaster walls. An oversized cabinet had been pushed in front of the living room's best window, presumably by someone engaged in a personal feud with natural light. The floors, however, remained original. Their polished boards stretched toward the back of the house in warm honey-colored lines, darkening slightly where decades of footsteps had traced the same familiar paths.

Buildings remembered everything. They remembered the hands that raised them, the storms that battered their roofs, the children who dragged toys across their floors. Even when owners departed, and names changed, something of the lives inside them settled into the timber. Restoration required learning how to listen.

People were considerably less cooperative.

"The lease is for six months," Mrs. Endo continued. "There is an option to renew, of course. You mentioned the Takamine restoration might run longer?"

"Only if the western wing has deteriorated beyond what the initial survey indicated." I crossed the living room and drew the curtains apart. Sunlight poured through the glass, illuminating drifting particles of dust and transforming the neglected garden into a bright tangle of green. "Although historic properties have an unfortunate habit of keeping their worst secrets until someone removes a wall."

Mrs. Endo laughed. "I imagine you see all sorts of things in your line of work."

"Mostly terrible plumbing and men who insist they know more about structural engineering than the woman hired to assess the structural engineering."

Her laugh became more genuine. "You will find plenty of both around here."

"How reassuring."

I slipped off my shoes and continued through the house, noting details automatically. The kitchen needed better lighting, although its cabinets were sound. The upstairs bathroom had been renovated within the past decade. One bedroom overlooked the street, while the larger room opened onto a small balcony shaded by the drooping branches of a maple tree. Beyond the surrounding roofs, a dense line of forest climbed toward the hills.

My fingers tightened around the balcony railing.

Distance changed the shape of a place without changing its bones. The shopping district had expanded. Apartment buildings crowded streets that had once held little more than family restaurants and modest storefronts. Still, the hills remained where I remembered them, their tree-covered slopes gathering beneath a pale sky. Somewhere beyond them stood an estate surrounded by old walls, old money, and traditions so deeply embedded they might as well have been poured into the foundation.

Nine years had passed since I had last stood this close.

Apparently, nine years were not enough.

"The main road makes it very convenient," Mrs. Endo said behind me. "The shopping district is fifteen minutes away, the hospital is nearby, and the older residential neighborhoods are just beyond the trees."