The estate was always quiet in the afternoons.

Not silent — just settled. Like it had already decided how the day would go and saw no reason to rush toward it. He liked that part best. Mornings were busy, full of voices and instructions and doors opening and closing. Afternoons belonged to maintenance sounds and distant movement. Gravel shifting. Water running somewhere behind hedges. The low hum of air moving through the house.

He learned the place by sound before he learned it by sight.

Gravel sounded different depending on who walked on it. Guests moved lightly, distracted. Staff walked with purpose, steps evenly spaced. Sato’s shoes had a loose heel that clicked once every three steps. He could hear it from the window before the car ever came into view.

The hedges made straight lines no one ever cut through. Even when no one was watching, the paths were followed. He’d once asked why, and Sato had shrugged and said rules were easier than choices.

The tennis court sat lower than the house, tucked away like it didn’t want attention. You had to mean to go there. He liked that too.

Rei was already there when he arrived, adjusting the strap on her bag. She smiled when she saw him — the same small smile she always used, quick and unassuming — and asked if he’d practiced his footwork.

He hadn’t.

She laughed anyway.

It wasn’t loud. Just a soft breath of amusement, like the question hadn’t really required an answer. She rolled a ball toward him with her shoe and told him to show her what he remembered.

He liked lessons with Rei because they felt simple. Do this. Try again. Move your feet. Breathe. There was no pressure to win, only to improve. She corrected him without making it feel like a mistake.

They hadn’t gotten far.

BREAK

The sound came first.

Shoes on gravel. Too fast. Too uneven.

Rei stopped mid-sentence.

She didn’t look afraid. She didn’t tense or shout or step back. She just went still, like she was listening to something underneath the noise.

He followed her gaze past the hedges.

A figure stumbled into view.

His brain tried to place it in the wrong category. Someone late. Someone drunk. Someone who shouldn’t be there but was anyway. The posture was wrong, though. Arms hung loose, swinging without intention. The head dipped forward as if it were too heavy to hold up.

“Stay here,” Rei said.

She reached for his wrist, her fingers light. Not a grip. Guidance.

The figure turned.

Rei’s hand tightened, just slightly.

“Run,” she said.

He nodded. Or thought he did.

Something grabbed him.

Cold fingers closed around his sleeve, wet and heavy, and the sudden weight pulled him sideways. His feet tangled. His legs locked, like they weren’t his anymore. His breath vanished completely, knocked out of him so fast it felt stolen.

He didn’t scream.

His thoughts went blank.

Everything reduced to texture — gravel biting into his palm, the sour smell clinging to the thing holding him, the sound of his own heartbeat too loud inside his head.

Rei moved.

There was no warning. No buildup. She turned fast and precise, the way she moved on the court, and the racquet connected with a sound that didn’t belong to anything he understood.

Not loud.
Not sharp.

Just wrong.

The grip vanished. The weight dropped away. The body didn’t fall so much as collapse, hitting the ground and staying there.

Rei didn’t look at it.

She was already facing him again.

“Run,” she said.

Her voice was the same.

That was what scared him most.

His legs shook so badly he thought he might fall. Rei stepped forward and nudged him — just enough — and whatever had frozen him cracked.

He ran.

They didn’t stop until they reached the side entrance near the game room. Rei slammed the door shut behind them and locked it. The sound echoed inside the hallway.

She crouched in front of him.

Her eyes scanned his arms, his neck, his hands. She checked for blood first, then for shaking that didn’t stop. He wasn’t bleeding, but she pressed a towel into his hands anyway.

“Hold this,” she said.

He did.

That was when he looked back through the glass.

The body lay where it had fallen, twisted in a way that made his stomach hurt. He didn’t look at the blood. He looked at the jacket.

Dark fabric. Loose seam at the sleeve.

It took a second.

“That’s…,” he started.

It was Sato.

The man who drove him to lessons. Who waited in the car with the engine running, radio low. Who always asked if he’d won, even when he hadn’t. Who nodded like it mattered either way.

Rei didn’t follow his gaze.

She was watching the hedges. The path. The open space beyond the court like it might change again if she stopped paying attention.

“Inside,” she said.

AFTER

They moved deeper into the estate.

The house felt different from the inside. Doors that were usually open stood closed. Voices were low, clipped. Someone whispered into a phone and turned away, trying again.

“I have to call home,” a woman said. “I need to tell my mom.”

The phone rang.

And rang.

Another voice followed too quickly, too hopeful.

“She’s probably in the bath.”

No one answered that.

He sat on a bench near the wall, towel still clutched in his hands. Someone brought him water. Someone else moved a chair so it blocked a hallway he’d walked through a hundred times before.

Rei sat on the floor nearby, her racquet resting across her knees like it didn’t belong to her anymore.

He watched her hands.

They were steady.

That didn’t make sense to him.

Later, Shizu appeared.

She wiped her hands on a cloth that used to be white. Her dress was darkened in places that hadn’t been before. She looked at him once — really looked — and nodded.

“You’re safe here,” she said.

Her voice didn’t shake.

That night, the estate didn’t return to quiet.

It settled into something else.

Lights were dimmed. Curtains drawn. Doors locked and checked twice. Adults spoke in fragments, careful not to finish sentences that felt too heavy to carry all the way through.

He lay awake in a room he’d slept in before and listened to the house breathe.

It sounded different now.

Much later — after voices lowered, after footsteps slowed — he understood what had ended.

Not safety.

Not childhood.

Something smaller.

The idea that people stayed who they were.

They had always been kind to him.

He hadn’t known they were capable of that.

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