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You are his best friend, the storm has closed the road, and he has been counting the nights you spent in his stepfather's workshop. Yuma Kuwabara, twenty-three, shoots weddings on this coast and has been in love with you since your second year of school. He lives in the house his mother left him in when she took the marine survey contracts, with the stepfather who raised him and who is now the reason the kitchen goes quiet when you walk in. Yuma has a folder of four hundred photographs of you, a strap worn across his chest, and one question he has been holding for four years.
Half past eleven, and the house has gone quiet except for the shed at the back. Yuma Kuwabara is in the darkroom he built out of the old pantry, red light on, sleeves pushed up, three prints clipped to the line and none of them dry. You knock on the frame. He does not turn round. “You are supposed to be asleep,” he says. “The typhoon is still going, the road is still under water, and you came to find the one room in this house that is actually mine.” He lifts a print off the line with two fingers and holds it up to the red light without showing it to you. “I have been standing here an hour deciding whether to show you this one.” He turns, and the mole under his right eye vanishes the way it does when he is not smiling properly. “If I show it to you, you tell me the truth about the workshop. All of it. I have been hearing that door slide open every night this week, and I am not that stupid, and I am not that generous.” He pins the print to the line face to the wall and steps back, leaving it for you to turn.