People always ask how I knew it was real this time. I tell them: because I showed up. That sounds simple, and maybe it is. But for me, for Rosa and me, showing up was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life.
Let me go back to Kyoto. Let me go back to the tea house.
Our company had sent a small team to Japan for a product launch — three days of meetings in Osaka, then a free afternoon before the flight home. Miroslav, our project lead, had declared it a cultural obligation to visit Kyoto. “We are going,” he announced on the train, in that tone he used that was technically a suggestion but absolutely was not. “We will drink tea. We will see the cherry blossoms. We will become cultured people.”
There were five of us. Miroslav, who treated every outing like a military operation. Emiliano, who had already downloaded three different apps to find the best matcha in the city and was narrating his findings to no one in particular. A junior analyst named Keiko who had actually grown up in Kyoto and was quietly, patiently correcting everything Emiliano said. And then Rosa.
And then there was me, Eamon, who had not spoken directly to Rosa in just over two years.
We had history. That word does a lot of heavy lifting. What I mean is: we had been close, genuinely close, the kind of close where you finish each other’s sentences and share silences without filling them. Then a job offer had come for her in Dublin, a good one, a serious one, and we had been at a crossroads — not quite together, not quite not — and I had said the wrong thing. Or rather, I had said nothing. I had let the moment pass like I was watching it happen to someone else, and she had left, and we had spent two years being professionally cordial in emails and carefully not looking at each other on video calls.
The promise I had made was this: I had told her once, late on a rooftop in Milan at a company retreat, that someday I would take her somewhere that looked like a painting. She had laughed and said I was full of grand gestures and no follow-through. She wasn’t wrong. I’d said: “One day I’ll prove you wrong.” She’d said: “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
That was three years before Kyoto. Two years before Dublin. One year before I finally understood what I’d let walk out the door.
The tea house was tucked behind a low stone wall near the Philosopher’s Path, the kind of place you could miss if you were walking too fast. Miroslav had found it in a guidebook, which meant it was legitimately beautiful and not just famous. The cherry trees along the canal were at full bloom, obscenely, heartbreakingly pink against a pale grey sky, petals drifting down in slow arcs like the whole city was exhaling.
I remember standing at the entrance and thinking: here it is. The thing I promised her.
Inside, the tea house was quiet in a way that felt intentional. Low wooden tables, cushions on the floor, the smell of roasted rice tea and something faintly floral. Paper screens diffused the afternoon light into something soft and even. Emiliano immediately began photographing everything. Miroslav sat down with the authority of a man who had earned this. Keiko ordered for all of us in Japanese with the calm efficiency of someone who had done this a hundred times.
Rosa sat across from me.
Not by choice, I think. There were only so many seats. But there she was, and there I was, and the table between us was very small.
For a while we talked as a group. Miroslav held forth on the philosophy of the tea ceremony with a confidence that bore no relationship to his actual knowledge of it. Keiko corrected him gently, twice. Emiliano found out his phone was out of storage and spent ten minutes deleting photos of spreadsheets so he could keep photographing matcha. Rosa watched all of this with that particular expression she had — eyes bright, mouth trying not to smile, like the world was a sitcom she had been watching for years and still found funny.
I had missed that expression. I hadn’t let myself know how much until right then.
“You’re staring,” she said, without looking at me.
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