Unbreak My Heart(31)

Before she can say a word, and before I can mouth an awkward hello, her arms are around me.

“It’s so good to finally meet you.” It sounds like it’s as much of a relief for her as it is for me. As if she needed this too.

Like that, the weirdness disappears.

We separate, and Holland says, “Guess I don’t really need to introduce you two.”

“I feel like I know you,” Kana says to me, with only a trace of an accent. I remember Ian telling me she went to college in the United States and lived in San Francisco for a few years before returning to her home.

“It’s good to meet you,” I say, since I can’t really say the same—I don’t know her at all. But I want to know her better.

“Come. Sit.” Kana points to the park bench. “We can chat.”

Holland waves goodbye.

“You’re leaving?” I ask her.

She smiles. “You guys don’t need me.”

And I suppose she’s right. If she stayed, she’d be a safety net, and this isn’t about her.

“I’ll see you later?” I hope so.

She mimes typing on her phone. “You know where to find me.”

Holland walks away, and I watch her for a few seconds, her bright blonde hair a contrast to the rest of the city.

“You look like Ian,” Kana says.

“People usually say that.”

“But he was better looking.”

I crack up at her dry humor. “Can’t say it’s a bad thing that you think that.”

She smiles again, and it’s a warm, winning kind of grin. “I’m so sorry we never met before, but I want to let you know, if you need anything while you’re in town, I’ll do everything I can to help.”

I rub my palms on the fabric of my shorts. “Thanks. I’m not sure what I need.”

“How long are you here?”

I glance up at the sky as if the answer is in the clouds. “I’m here for as long as I have to be, I guess.”

She smiles softly. “I understand. You want to know the sides of Ian you feel you didn’t know.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure I had a special view into him, but I’ll do what I can to share.”

Since she’s being so direct, I cut to the chase. “What do you know about the meds? Did he stop taking them?”

She offers a rueful smile, and in it, I sense she’s about to tell me some sad truth. “I didn’t keep track of that,” she says, surprising me. “We honestly didn’t talk that much about his illness.”

That’s not what I expected to hear. “You didn’t?”

She shakes her head, runs her slim fingers through her thick black hair. “We talked about a million other things. We talked about music, and the best type of soba noodles. We talked about books, and whether mango boba tea was better than milk tea. We talked about baseball, and he tried valiantly, even until the bitter end, to convince me the Dodgers were the greatest.” She leans back on the bench, her eyes far away for a moment, then she meets my gaze. “But I remained loyal to my Tokyo Giants.”

“And he remained ever loyal to the Dodgers.”

“And he liked to come see me play.”

“Play? Baseball?” I furrow my brow.

She laughs, shaking her head. “Don’t I wish I could hit a fastball? No, he came to see my blues band. I play saxophone with some friends, and he’d watch me perform, and afterward, we’d drink tea, or eat mochi ice cream, or track down a noodle shop as we walked around the city at night.”

I picture the two of them, and now I can see it. What was blurry moments ago is clearer. My brother was just a guy seeing a girl in her hometown.

“Sounds a lot like dating,” I deadpan.

She laughs. “Yes, it was exactly like dating.”

“He was here a lot,” I say, fishing around for something, but I’m not sure what exactly.

“He was, and yet it felt like never quite enough.”

Those words hit me in the gut. That’s how it goes when you lose someone you love—you feel as if you never had enough time, enough memories with them.

Then again, I had more moments with Ian than anyone else was lucky enough to have. There’s no one on earth who amassed more hours with the guy than I did.

And yet, what I wouldn’t give for another day.

Another ball game to cheer at.

Another chance to dunk his head underwater in the pool. And to be dunked.

Another pizza and a movie night.

My throat tightens, but I push my way through, returning my focus to Kana, who also wanted more time.

“Were you in love with him?” Maybe it’s strange to ask. Maybe it’s fucking obvious. All signs point to yes. But even so, I want to hear from her.

Her smile is soft, and her eyes are true. “Very much so.”

It’s not that I doubted that she loved him, but Kana has always been abstract to me. She’s someone Ian talked about from time to time. She’s someone he visited. But she hasn’t been entirely real to me.

Until now.

I’m not the one to give comfort, but it feels like an affront to the universe if I don’t let her know how much she mattered to him. “He felt the same way about you.”