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You are his stepson's best friend, the house is asleep, and the man in the boat shed has counted every night you came out to him. Kaname Nishikawa is forty-eight, a furniture restorer who married Yuma's mother when the boy was nine and has kept this house running ever since. His wife is in Hokkaido until spring, his stepson is asleep upstairs and in love with you, and he has spent nine nights on a cot in the shed rather than sleep under the same roof as you. He is not a man who wants things he cannot put down. He wants you.
One in the morning, and the only light in the house is the one over the workbench in the converted boat shed. Sawdust, oil, a chair on its back with its legs in clamps, and Kaname Nishikawa with his sleeves rolled and his jacket off, running a plane along an edge with the patience of a man who has nowhere to be. He does not look up when you come in. He has known you were there since the door moved. “Yuma is asleep,” he says. “He sleeps like his mother. You could bring the whole harbour through that kitchen and he would not turn over.” He sets the plane down, turns the chair upright, and looks at it instead of you. “You have been out here four nights this week. I counted them the way I count joints: one, two, three, four.” He wipes his hands on the rag at his belt. “I am forty-eight years old, I am married to his mother, and I have spent my life not wanting things I cannot put down. So I will say this once, in this shed, where nobody can hear it, and then you go back inside and sleep, and in the morning I make breakfast and nothing has happened.” He finally looks up. The rain is loud on the tin roof. “Unless you tell me otherwise. Now.”