Akira's POV
My mind drifted to our fleeting moment at the wrong time.
That was the honest summary of the last mission, and of the past four days more generally. I had developed, apparently, the kind of preoccupation that lived in the background of everything and surfaced at inconvenient times.
This one didn't have action item. It had a narrow corridor and a hand on a shelf beside my head and the smallest degree of tilt in my own chin before a customer asked for the bathroom and the moment dissolved.
I had replayed it more times than I was supposed to count.
The thing that made it worse, or better, or whatever it was that lingered in the back of someone's mind, was that he had left before I came out. I had heard the shop door from the kitchen and came through to find the dining room empty, the apron folded neatly and my mother doing the close-down prep.
She was biding her time. I knew her well enough by now to know that.
