Twelve Hours Ahead

Chapter 1: I. Hola, Konnichiwa

The first voice message Hana Mori ever received from Mateo Rojas was eleven seconds long, and nine of them were silence. She was standing in the back of the bakery in Sapporo at four in the morning, elbow-deep in dough, when her phone buzzed against the flour bin. It was the language-exchange app she had downloaded on a whim three weeks earlier, after her sister married a man from Valencia and Hana had realized, at the wedding, that she could say thank you and where is the bathroom and nothing else in the language of half the guests. She wiped her hands on her apron and pressed play. A breath. The creak of something wooden. A long, uncertain pause, and behind it, faintly, the far-off cry of gulls. "Hola," said a man's voice, low and a little hoarse, as if he hadn't spoken all day. "Um. Konnichiwa. I am Mateo. I am from Chile. I want to learn Japanese. I am very bad. I'm sorry." Then the silence again, and then, in a rush, "Okay. Bye." Hana listened to it three times with flour drying on her wrists. It was the I'm sorry that undid her. It was so unnecessary, and so sincere. She wiped her screen with her sleeve and, standing among the cooling racks and the smell of yeast and butter, she held down the microphone button. "Hello, Mateo," she said in careful English, the only language they shared. "I am Hana. I am from Japan. I want to learn Spanish. I am also very bad. Please do not be sorry." She sent it before she could rerecord it. Then she put the phone in her pocket and shaped forty loaves of milk bread and told herself that it was nothing.