“You’re a very fortunate man.”
“Indeed.”
Nurse Prasida’s mood remained reflective as she watched Kazeyuki walk down the hallway and disappear into his corner office. She had worked with Dr. Collington for years, and she had watched that girl follow him around the hospital like a lost puppy who had found her person. She had also watched the doctor treat Kitty with the same impeccable courtesy he showed everyone, never more, never less, and Prasida had always wondered what it would take for that man to let someone past the walls he didn’t seem to know he had.
And now that it had apparently happened...
Why did it seem that Dr. Collington was only speaking the truth intellectually, but his heart had yet to grasp what made Katherine special?
Meanwhile, Kazeyuki, unaware of the questions his own words had invited, opened the cabinet behind his desk and took out the ishi-usu.
The stone mill was small enough to sit on his desk, two rounds of carved granite that fit together with the kind of precision that machines still couldn’t replicate. It had belonged to his mother’s family, and the grooves in the stone had been cut by hand in a workshop in Uji over sixty years ago. Beside it, he set the tin of tencha leaves he kept in the cabinet’s lower shelf, and a ceramic chawan that was older than the mill.
The process of grinding his own matcha was one that most people would have called unnecessary. Powder was available in any specialty store, pre-ground and sealed, ready to whisk. But Kazeyuki had never been interested in what was ready. He was interested in what was right.
He fed the tencha leaves into the top of the mill and began to turn. Counter-clockwise. One rotation every three seconds. Too fast and the friction would burn the leaves. Too slow and they wouldn’t grind at all. A rhythm that required perfect accuracy would’ve weakened many a man, but for Kazeyuki, it was freeing and relaxing, a process that allowed him to think without distractions.
And right now, all he wanted to think about...was her.
Katherine.
To keep her safe, he needed to focus on the six things in Anastase’s checklist.
Intimacy. Inner circle. Intuition. Inhabit. Inhibit. Impart.
And of those six...
Kazeyuki hadn’t meant to kiss her, but itdidhappen, and that took care of the first point.
He also hadn’t planned to let her know that she had always been ‘Katherine’to him while everyone saw her as ‘Katherine’.But that had happened as well without him planning anything.
And after that, well...
The stone turned under Kazeyuki’s hands, the tencha leaves crackling faintly as they were drawn between the granite surfaces. The first trace of green powder began to collect around the base of the mill, and that was when the memory he was doing his best to repress—
Kaz.
It almost had him losing focus, and he could even feel a flush staining his cheeks just from the memory alone.
Kaz.
That was how she had called Kazeyuki, and it had caught him...off guard, the way Katherine had shortened his name when no one else had. And the way she had made that one syllable sound more intimate than anything he had ever heard.
Kaz.
She had helped him achieve the second point on the list without even knowing it, cementing the bond between them as each other’s inner circle, and after that...
Intuition.
Kazeyuki watched the powder—a bright, vivid shade of green—start to accumulate as he kept grinding, and a faint grassy scent started to perfume the air inside his office.
Anastase had told him there was no way of knowingwhenthe third point would happen. Or how. It was an all-or-nothing kind of goal, one that was born from a million little things coming together at the same time.
Intuition was the hardest thing on the list because it requirednothingfrom him at all except to be still. And wait. And trust in the process. For some, that was the definition of fate. For others,faith.But for Kazeyuki?
The jury was still out on that one.
In the meantime, he still had three other points on the checklist, and the fourth one, at least...