The bus ride was quiet, the kind of quiet filled with things left unsaid.

  Yuki sat beside Aoi, watching droplets race down the window like tiny comets. She held the journal tight in her lap, her thumbs brushing over its worn leather like it was a relic, or maybe a compass.

  They barely knew each other.

  And yet, something about the journal—about their shared connection to Shirou—tied them together with invisible thread. It wasn't fate, Yuki thought. Just… a coincidence that felt like one.

  The bus stopped with a soft hiss of brakes. The old neighborhood was smaller than Yuki remembered. Quieter. The buildings leaned closer together, the streets a little more cracked, the signs a little more faded. But the path to the park hadn’t changed.

  They walked in silence, the rain now a soft mist that clung to their jackets.

  And then they saw it.

  A single cherry tree stood in the center of the small clearing, bare and solemn, its branches skeletal against the gray sky. Beneath it was an old bench—half-rotted, moss creeping over its sides like slow, green fingers.

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  Aoi stepped forward first. “This is it.”

  Yuki nodded. “He called it Haru’s Place in one of his poems. Spring never came back after she left, he wrote.”

  Aoi slowly lowered herself onto the bench. “That’s… heartbreakingly beautiful.”

  They sat there for a while. Just breathing. Listening.

  Then Aoi opened the journal to the marked page with the map. Scribbled beneath it in Shirou’s fading handwriting were just six words:

  “Where the silence still remembers us.”

  Yuki read it aloud, then glanced around.

  “Do you think she ever came back?” Aoi asked quietly.

  “I don’t know,” Yuki said. “But maybe… maybe he hoped she would.”

  A breeze stirred the branches above them. A single blossom—unseasonal and impossibly pink—drifted down and landed in Aoi’s lap.

  She looked at it, stunned. “It’s not even spring…”

  Yuki said nothing. He simply watched her, watched the way her fingers trembled as she cradled the petal like a secret.

  The wind whispered again.

  And just for a moment, it felt like someone else was sitting on the bench beside them. Watching. Smiling.