The town hosted a memorial service.
It wasn't a service for Jun's body. It was a farewell ceremony for the hope of finding him.
In a solemn rite, a symbolic box was offered, containing a faded photograph and the mud-caked shoe. It represented the finality that the ocean had cruelly delivered.
Yui stood on the periphery, watching the crowd—her parents, the teachers, the close friends and neighbors—all clad in black. All sharing the communal grief that she absolutely refused to join.
You can't mourn what isn't dead.
That simple, fierce thought was the only thing keeping her upright. A shoe, a single piece of leather and rubber, was not a body. It was a sign, perhaps, but not a sentence.
Jun had promised her, with the quiet certainty of destiny, that if she waited, he would always come home. And Jun never broke a promise.
The Shrine of Waiting
Jun's small, solitary house became her ritual ground. While the town slowly began to refer to it as "the empty house," Yui thought of it as a waiting room.
Every day after school, rain or shine, she would go there.
She never moved anything. The air inside was a carefully maintained time capsule.
His school bag still lay slumped against the wall. The half-finished Shōnen manga was still open to the page where the hero was mid-battle.
Her denial manifested as meticulous care. She wasn't cleaning; she was preserving.
She would wipe the faint layer of dust from the surface of his desk. Careful not to smudge the dark rings left by his forgotten cup of hot chocolate that she made for him.
She would gently shake out his favorite worn-out hoodie, draped over the desk chair. Trying to stir the faded scent of sea-salt and his own unique, warm musk. Then she would fold it exactly as it had been.
It was a form of silent prayer. If she moved something, if she packed a box or threw anything away, it would be an admission that he wasn't coming back in the next hour. She couldn't admit that.
She started locking the window every night. The town gossip whispered that Jun had simply been careless, that a wave might have dragged him out from the shore.
Yui hated the sea now, with a cold, desperate loathing. She would lock the window to keep the sound of the waves—that mocking, incessant roar—outside, away from his things.
Isolation
Her parents were loving, but they were also heartbroken. They tried to hold her, to force her to cry, to eat, to move on.
"Yui, my dear, you have to let go of the idea that he's coming back. You have to mourn him," her mother pleaded one evening. She held Yui's hand over a dinner plate that remained untouched.
Yui only stared at the table, her face devoid of expression. "He told me to wait. I'm waiting."
Her beautiful, bright energy, the defining feature of the Sunlit Promise had been completely extinguished. Her eyes, once brimming with light, now held a careful, distant void.
She was polite, compliant, and cold. She excelled in her studies, never causing any trouble, never asking for anything. She was present in body, but her mind remained in a locked, silent room, waiting for the door to open.
Over those first few months, the townspeople's pity turned to hushed reverence. And finally, to fearful distance.
They spoke of the poor girl who lost her first love and, perhaps, a part of her soul along with him.
She was still the most beautiful girl in town. But she was a statue now, polished smooth by grief, impossible to reach. The Silent Princess had been born, guarding a promise that only she believed could still be kept.