The old Furuhashi house sat at the end of a gravel road forty minutes north of the city, behind cedars his great-grandfather had planted the year the company was founded.
Three years had passed since Iharu last visited.
Polite people would have called it a long absence.
The honest way was that he had avoided the place because the house made every family silence seem deliberate. It remembered his father's voice, his grandmother's shoes, the old grinding room, the smell of polishing oil, and every lesson Eiji Furuhashi had given him before Iharu learned which lessons were affection and which were inheritance.
At the gate, he parked and listened while the engine ticked down in the cold.
His failed visor sat heavy in his coat pocket.
He could have driven the last stretch. The gravel road was wide enough, and the latch hung open. But his grandfather had told him once that a car arriving was a fact and a man arriving was a visit.
