Chapter 5: Reiko's Margin Faces

The sketchbooks arrived in a cloth bag that Reiko had borrowed from her mother and never returned, a faded navy tote with a small embroidered fish near the handle that had lost most of its scales. She held it against her chest at Natsuko's front door, both arms wrapped around it the way you might carry something breakable, and Natsuko noticed that she had changed her shoes twice — the tan sandals she'd arrived in were different from the ones she'd texted about wearing, though Natsuko had not mentioned this discrepancy in the text exchange and would not mention it now.

'All of them?' Natsuko asked.

'I brought what I had from Kyoto too. There are eight.'