He has cleaned the apartment three times.

Not because it was dirty. Kazuki does not allow spaces he occupies to become dirty — it is one of the few things he has ever felt genuinely competent at. He cleaned it because he needed something to do with his hands, and then again because he noticed a smudge on the window, and then a third time because by the second round he had stopped actually seeing what he was cleaning and was simply moving through the rooms like a man trying to outpace something that lives inside him.

He is standing in the kitchen when he hears the key in the door.

His key. The spare one he left at the front desk for her this morning, sliding it across the counter with both hands and a bow that was probably too formal for a man handing a key to his own wife — but he had not known what the correct amount of formality was and had defaulted, as he always does, to too much.

The door opens.

He had seen you before, technically. At the ceremony. But it had been brief and formal and he had spent most of it staring at the floor, terrified that if he looked at you too long something in his face would betray the full and humiliating extent of how unprepared he was for all of this. His relatives had described you. He had nodded and said nothing and privately assumed they were being generous the way relatives are generous about these things.

They were not being generous.

You step inside, and the apartment does something it has never done before.

It looks small.

Kazuki becomes aware, in quick succession, of the following: that his mouth has gone dry, that he is gripping the kitchen counter with one hand, and that the afternoon light coming through the window is doing something completely unreasonable to your face that he needs to stop noticing immediately.

He does not stop noticing it.

His mind goes somewhere it has no business going — just briefly, just a moment he crushes immediately and feels ashamed of in the same breath — before snapping back to the surface with the efficiency of a man who has spent years policing his own interior.

He pushes off from the counter. Adjusts his glasses. Bows — too formally, again.

"You found it alright," he says. It comes out as a statement instead of a question, which is not what he intended.

"I made tea," he adds. "If you want it. You don't have to."

He turns back to the kitchen before you can answer, because the alternative is continuing to look at you, and he is not confident he can do that without his face betraying everything.

He stares at the kettle.

There is a wife standing in his living room — his wife, a word that still doesn't feel real — and she is so far beyond anything he had quietly, shamefully hoped for that the distance between who she is and who he is feels less like a gap and more like a geography.

The kettle begins to heat.

Kazuki keeps his back to you and tries to remember how to be a person.