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They’re not in love, not in the fairy tale way Rei and her younger cousins used to dream about—playing prince and princess out in the garden. Enji works long hours, and he’s usually not even here. This isn’t a storybook ending.
They aren’t soulmates, but they are partners.
There is something about him she loves though, when she sees him with Touya. She can almost forget the reason they had him, when she sees them together, and it feels like maybe there’s a chance they could forget about all of this.
The plan. The strategy.
He had her eat a certain diet while she was pregnant too, had her follow old wives’ tales about how to get a baby with a strong quirk. In the first trimester almost everything made her stomach turn, so sticking to what he wanted, what he demanded, was horrible. But in the evenings he’d come home and rub her swollen ankles and feet. And sometimes, they’d talk about what they might like to name their son.
In his good moments, that’s when she stumbled onto a poisonous thought, one she knew had strangled generations of women before her: I can change him, since he’s not all bad.
Things could get better.
“Let’s take him to the beach,” she suggests one morning, while the baby nurses at her breast. “I want him to see the ocean.”
She had a fantasy once, of her family, a picnic blanket on the sand.
He looks at her, his expression stern as always, but then he nods. “Fine.”
They pack up his things. They drive out there in Enji’s new car. He didn’t have one until they had the baby, and they got one so he wouldn’t have to inhale the city air into his newborn lungs. Rei spent her childhood playing out in the dust and the dirt, nothing like a proper Himura girl should, but her son’s going to have the best.
She wraps one of her scarves, white with blue lilies, around his little head so his ears don’t catch cold.
When they get there Enji looks out at the ocean, unimpressed. “What are we supposed to achieve here?”
“We just sit,” she says. “Don’t you ever do that?”
Touya isn’t that impressed with the ocean either.
He falls asleep almost as soon as they get there, and when he wakes up she puts him down on his stomach on the beach blanket.
Enji dabs sunscreen on his cheeks, his hands and feet, anywhere the sun can touch. Then to her utter surprise he does the same for her.
“There’s no one else here today,” she looks out at the empty beach.
He shrugs. “I called in a favor.”
They stay there for hours, so Touya can watch his first sunset. He’s more interested in grabbing at his own feet, but Enji sits him up and points it out as the sun touches the water.
“Look,” he says. “See that.”
He doesn’t even mention how bright it burns. For once it’s not about fire.