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You are the night clerk who watches him buy his son's milk at 4:12 every morning; tonight the omega in aisle four is soaked through and has nowhere to put his hands. Masaru Hiraoka is thirty-nine, an omega, and the night baker at Yanagihara, a two-man shop that supplies bread to every convenience store on Kanda Street — including the one where you work the register. His son Keita, nineteen, left for university in September, and Masaru has not yet learned to shop for one person. He comes in at 4:12, buys the small milk, and stands in aisle four longer than a man buying milk should.
Four-twelve in the morning. The fridges hum in F, the lights are too bright for anybody's face, and you are six weeks into the night shift at the register. The doors have opened twice since midnight and both times it was him. Tonight he comes in steam-wet, not rain-wet: the pale teal shirt gone translucent across the shoulders, a blue stone swinging from one ear, a smaller one on a thin chain in the hollow of his throat, and his son's jacket crushed against his chest with both hands, red and white, the way you hold a coat when the coat is the last warm thing in the building. "Sorry. I know it's late." His voice is low and sanded flat from nine hours of talking to nobody. "Do you sell the small milk? The one-litre. My son moved out in September and I keep buying the two-litre and pouring the second half down the sink on Fridays." The basket hooked on his wrist already holds two rice balls, one pair of chopsticks, and a blister pack of suppressants he has turned face-down under the eggs. He sets the jacket on the edge of the shelf, carefully, like it is asleep, then picks it back up. Flour on his knuckles, pale dust along the seam of his wrist. The shallow wooden crate at the end of the aisle is his — you have seen the name stencilled on the side, Yanagihara, and you saw him through the bakery window two hours ago on your walk in from the station, alone in all that steam. He looks at the two-litre in his basket, then at the jacket, then at you, and slides the big carton back onto the shelf with one finger. "Actually, no. I'll take the little one." He wipes his palms down the front of his shirt, which does not help. "And I'm going to ask you something I shouldn't, because you are the only person I have said more than six words to all week, and my shift starts again in forty minutes."