She stared at the envelope. That stupid pink paper. A fossil. Her hand twitched. Didn't touch it.
"Too late?" Kenji's voice was rough. A scrape. "You decided that. You gave up."
Her head snapped up. Eyes fired. "I waited! A whole year. I checked that dorm phone until my ears hurt. I wrote letters. Not just that one. Three. You never answered. Nothing. Just... silence."
"My parents sent them back!" He slammed a palm on the table. The sound cracked through the room. "They hid them. In a box. With the debt notices. I never got them."
A beat of silence. Her face did something complicated. A flicker of the old pain. Then it hardened again. "You could have found me. If you wanted to. A phone book. A directory. You didn't."
He laughed. Bitter. "And say what? 'Hey. It's me. The ruin. The one your father warned you about. Still a ruin. Wanna run away?'"
"Yes!" The word exploded from her. Raw. "That's exactly what you should have said!"
"You were in Kyoto! At law school! You had a path. A real one. I was... I was loading boxes. Sleeping on floors. What was I supposed to offer? More nothing?"
"You were supposed to offer you!" Her voice broke. Shattered. The professional wall was dust. "That's all I wanted! The you on the roof. The one who promised. The one who smelled like cold and smoke. Not a job. Not money. You."
He took a step closer. The table between them felt like nothing. "And what about you? The you with the mint. The one who wasn't afraid. Where did she go? She turned into this." He gestured at her suit. At the room. "This... perfect statue."
"Don't." A warning. Low.
"You traded up. Traded the rooftop for the corner office. Traded our static for this... this hum." He was shaking. "You got quiet. The wrong kind of quiet."
Her composure snapped. "You think I wanted this? This... hum? You think I like the smell of this place? It smells like carpet cleaner and regret! I did what I had to do. The quiet girl died on that train. The one left behind needed armor. So I built it. Brick by brick. And it's heavy."
"Then take it off."
"It's welded on!" A sob ripped out of her. Ugly. Real. "It's part of my skin now. That girl, Kenji? She's a ghost. Just like the boy you were. We're two ghosts screaming at each other in a conference room."
He reached into his pocket. Pulled out the two photo halves. Held them out. The torn edges. The faded blue. "This is real. It happened. It wasn't a ghost. It was us."
She looked at the pieces. Her face crumpled. The anger bled out. Left exhaustion. A deep, bone-colored tired. "That's the tragedy. It was real. And we let it become a ghost. We both did. You with your silence. Me with my... armor. We buried it alive."
He put the photo pieces on the table. Next to the pink envelope. A sad little museum of what they'd killed.
The static was gone. The white noise of twenty-seven years. Cleared away. What was left was the ugly, beautiful truth. Raw. Bleeding on the polished wood.
There was no villain. Just two kids who got broken by the world. And two adults who never figured out how to glue the pieces back together.
The loud office outside was a distant planet.
In here, just the sound of their breathing. Ragged. Out of sync.
"Your father was right about one thing," he said, quiet now. "I was a ruin. I still am. Just an older ruin."
She wrapped her arms around herself. A self-hug. "My father was a coward. He was afraid of mess. Of feeling. So he built a cage and called it safety. And I... I just walked inside and locked the door."
She looked at him. Really looked. For the first time. Saw the lines. The fatigue. The man carrying the boy's wound. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "For giving up. For believing the silence."
"I'm sorry," he said. The words were stones in his throat. "For not fighting louder. For becoming the ghost you were warned about."
The argument was over. No winner. Just two survivors of the same shipwreck. Washed up on different shores. Finally acknowledging the same storm.
The static was clear.
The signal was gone.
All that was left was the empty, ringing silence after the scream.