Chapter 2.2: The Storm He Couldn't Escape

It had been two days.

Two long, empty days since Rose had kissed him and vanished into the mist of her words: "Wait for me. I’ll bring you a surprise."

Ryu tried to keep calm. He worked his shifts at the convenience store, stocked shelves, counted change. But his eyes kept drifting to the door. Every time the bell rang, a quiet hope rose in his chest, only to fall again when it wasn't her.

By the third day, he couldn’t sleep.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her smile. Felt the soft press of her lips against his. Heard the hesitant whisper of her voice when she said, "I think I’ve always been in love with you."

He replayed that moment again and again, clinging to it like it was the last fragment of a dream he didn’t want to wake up from.

By the fourth day, he started walking.

He wandered the streets with no destination, his phone in hand, refreshing her messages, checking her last seen. Nothing. The same emptiness stared back.

By the fifth day, he went to her house.

Her parents opened the door, surprised and strained. He asked them if she had called. If they had heard anything. Her mother looked like she hadn’t slept either. Her father simply shook his head.

That night, he lay awake again.

On the sixth morning, he took the earliest train to the last place she had mentioned—a peaceful little town surrounded by hills and temples. He asked locals, checked lodges, showed her photo to strangers. Some remembered her vaguely. None knew where she had gone.

Ryu followed every trail he could.

By noon, rain had started pouring.

He found himself near a ranger station, where he heard whispers about a bus that had gone missing. A landslide. No confirmed list of passengers yet. Fear gripped his heart like a vice.

That evening, his phone rang.

"Is this Mr. Tachibana? We’re calling from the local police department. We believe we may have found something that belonged to someone you reported missing. Please come to the General Hospital."

He didn’t wait.

He flagged the nearest taxi, gave the address, and kept repeating it like a chant. The driver, an old man with tired eyes, nodded and drove.

The rain outside blurred everything. The world became a watercolor of headlights and grief.

As they neared the hospital, Ryu saw emergency vehicles, people moving under umbrellas like ghosts. Before the car even came to a complete stop, he threw open the door and ran.

"Hey! Wait! The fare!" the driver shouted.

But Ryu was gone, feet pounding the pavement, soaked to the bone.

He reached the reception desk, breathless. "Tachibana. I’m Ryu Tachibana. You called me."

A nurse led him silently to a room. Inside was a small table. On it, a red umbrella—torn. Damp. Broken.

And beside it, a bouquet of green wildflowers, crushed and stained with mud.

Ryu fell to his knees.

His hands trembled as he touched the items. The umbrella still smelled faintly of her perfume. The flowers—the ones she had once shown him in a picture, saying she’d bring them for him if she ever found them.

The nurse whispered, "We’re sorry."

He didn’t answer.

Behind him, the taxi driver stood at the hospital entrance, watching from a distance. He had followed, demanding his fare.

But when he saw the boy on the floor, broken and hugging a ruined bouquet as if it were a person, something shifted in his face.

He quietly returned to his cab.

No fare could cover that kind of loss.

And so Ryu sat alone, rain dripping from his clothes, heart cracked wide open.

He had lost her.

And no storm outside could compare to the one now raging inside him.

To be continued…