Page 65 of A Serving of Hope

“Just imagine. A man my age shows up two days in a row, asking for the macaroni gratin. Anyone would find that a little odd. On the second day, just after I’d finished, the owner came over and said, ‘Big fan of macaroni, then?’ ”

Yuiko leaned forward eagerly. “What did you tell him?”

“Well, a certain habit from my days in the police kicked in,” continued Nagare with a wry smile. “Stake a place out for too long and people start to get suspicious. If they work out why you’re really there, you might as well hand in your badge. So you learn to make up excuses. I told him it reminded me of a restaurant my mother took me to as a child. That it brought back memories.”

“And what did Masa—sorry, I mean, the owner,” said Yuiko breathlessly. “What did he say to that?”

“Masaya Ogawa told me he knew exactly what I meant. And he reached out to shake my hand.”

As Nagare handed her a business card bearing the name, tears welled in Yuiko’s eyes.

“I knew it,” she murmured. “He remembers.”

Nagare gave Yuiko a moment to gather herself. When he eventually spoke, it was in a low voice. “But there’s something else I should tell you.”

Yuiko glanced up at him, a shadow passing over her face. Koishi, still standing behind Nagare, was staring at the ceiling.

“He told me it was his father who had taken him.”

Now Yuiko’s expression clouded over completely. Koishi let out a deep sigh.

“He said his father used to take him to an old Western-style restaurant in Ginza for the chicken macaroni gratin, and that the version he serves is a recreation of that beloved dish.” Nagare spoke slowly, as though gauging her reaction.

“His…father…” said Yuiko in a low, absent voice. Her heart seemed to have wandered somewhere far away.

“It seems Masaya loved the gratin at Candle so much that he pestered his father to take him back.”

Yuiko winced with frustration. After all these years, she found herself wishing she’d never told her ex-husband the name of that restaurant. He had stolen and tainted a memory that was supposed to belong to her and her son alone.

She gave Nagare a probing look. “You’re sure he said Ginza?”

Nagare nodded silently in response. Then he dealt her another blow. “About the name of the café—Tapestry, I mean…”

Yuiko steeled herself and met his gaze.

“It was actually inspired by the teacups.” Nagare was looking at the Minton cup.

“The…teacups?” repeated Yuiko, lifting the cup in her hand.

“It’s a design known as Haddon Hall, based on the tapestries that once hung in an English castle of that name. Masaya was so fond of it he named his café after it.”

“Right…Of course,” said Yuiko, nodding over and over as if to convince herself. “Silly of me to think a child his age would even remember the music I played him.”

For Koishi, listening to her father report these findings was one of the toughest experiences of her entire career as a food detective. She felt as though she were watching Yuiko be pounded by a series of increasingly brutal waves, each of which shattered another of the fragile hopes she had carried over the years. Instead of helping her, they were rubbing salt into an open wound.

The whole point of recreating a dish was to help the client find a sort of peace. Nostalgia was part of the process, but it was usually balanced by a quiet optimism about the future. The client might feel remorse for the past, but it was always accompanied by the sense that things would be easier, or at least different, from now on.

Even if Yuiko had been hasty in her assumptions, couldn’t they at least have spared her the truth?

“Still…” she murmured, “I suppose I’m still the one who set all this in motion. I mean, I introduced him to that gratin. Then he grew to love it, and now he’s serving it in a café in Shizuoka. All because I took him to that restaurant.” With tears brimming in her eyes again, Yuiko was doing her best to hold herself together.

“Ah, yes,” said Nagare. “There’s one other thing I meant to tell you.” Both Yuiko and Koishi waited with bated breath for him to go on. He tapped at a tablet, then set it down on the table. “Does this look familiar?”

“Wait,” said Yuiko, leaning in to inspect the photo on the screen. “That’s…”

“The coaster you wrote on at Tapestry, I believe?”

Yuiko nodded in astonishment.