Chapter 6: The Foundation Below the Shrine

The tide schedule said low water at eleven forty-three, and Hana was at Kenji's door at eleven fifteen with her school bag and the grocery notepad and the particular expression she had learned to wear when she was doing something she had not yet decided whether to tell anyone else about.

Kenji came out before she knocked. He had the camera already.

It was his father's Minolta — a manual SLR with a cracked eyecup and a tendency to underexpose in low light that Kenji had learned to compensate for by opening the aperture one full stop and trusting the film. He'd told her once that his father had used it for documenting catch weights, engine parts, a record of everything that mattered enough to keep evidence of. Now Kenji kept it on the shelf above his desk, loaded, because keeping it loaded was the only use he could think of that felt proportionate to the camera's former life.