She looked up at me, her eyes red and wet. “You’d do that? For me?”
The intimacy was in the small things. The sound of her soft footsteps on the wooden floor. The way she would leave her cup in the sink instead of hiding it in her room. The faint smell of the cheap shampoo I bought her drifting from the bathroom after a shower. Life -Life With A Runaway Girl- -RJ01148030-
After an hour, she slid the sketchbook across the table. It was a drawing of me—not my face, but my hands holding the book. The lines were raw, fierce, and incredibly precise. It was the first thing she gave me. She looked up at me, her eyes red and wet
I almost kept walking. That’s the truth. In this city, you learn to look away. But something—the brutal cold of the rain, the lateness of the hour, the sheer smallness of her—stopped me. The sound of her soft footsteps on the wooden floor
She was sitting at the kotatsu, but something was different. Her sketchbook was open to a page she’d never shown me. It was a house—a nice one, with a garden—and in the window, a shadowy figure with a raised hand.
One night, a thunderstorm hit—violent, window-rattling thunder. I woke to a weight on the edge of my futon. She was standing there, trembling.
Aoi didn’t go back. She was placed in a foster home, but a special provision was made. Because she was almost seventeen, because she was stable, and because I was willing to be a supervised guardian, she could stay with me.