Shira’s nerve regeneration required specific nutrients the hospital-issue diet didn’t provide.
Mira’s optic nerve pathways needed sustained nourishment that ordinary food couldn’t deliver.
He wasn’t a chef. He wasn’t a Food Smith. He had no formal training.
But he could read. And he could follow instructions. And he had a debit card with four million coins on it and two wives whose families had handed them off without a single conversation about what they needed to actually heal.
He wrote: Specialty market. Research ingredients for nerve recovery.
He underlined it.
===
After lunch he told them he was going out.
Mira was at the kitchen table with her whiteboard. She wrote something before he could reach for his jacket.
Where.
"Specialty market," Kai said. "I want to look at some ingredients. For cooking."
Mira held the board up again.
You already cook.
"I want to cook better," Kai said.
Mira lowered the board. She was quiet for a moment. Then she wrote slowly, like she was choosing the words carefully.
My recovery program had a nutritional component. The specialist at Vanguard’s medical wing drew it up before the accident. I never used it. It’s in my discharge file.
Kai looked at her.
"The blue folder," he said.
Yes, Mira wrote.
"Can I read it?"
A pause.
Then: You already read everything in that folder.
Kai kept his expression neutral.
"Can I read it again," he said.
Mira’s mouth did the thing it did when she was suppressing a reaction she didn’t want him to see.
She wrote one word.
Fine.
==
He read the nutritional component of her discharge file standing at the kitchen counter while Shira navigated herself into the living room using the braces and whatever residual shoulder control she had been quietly practicing.
The specialist had been thorough.
Ingredients. Preparation methods. Frequency. Specific compounds that supported nerve pathway regeneration in Gift-channel injuries. Some of them were obscure. Some were expensive.
All of them were findable.
Kai photographed every page.
Then he put on his jacket and told both of them he’d be back before dinner.
"The door is locked," he said. "Type-5 barrier active. Don’t open for anyone."
From the living room, Shira said: "You are not our father."
Kai paused at the door.
He had heard this tone from her before. It was the tone that meant she was uncomfortable with how much she had revealed over breakfast and was recalibrating by being irritating.
"I know," Kai said. "I’m your husband. That’s worse."
He heard Shira make a sound.
It was almost a laugh.
He closed the door.
==========
The specialty market was forty minutes from the apartment.
It occupied a block between a pharmacy and a herbalist on a street that smelled like dried things and old wood.
The owner was an elderly woman who looked at Kai’s photograph of the discharge file for approximately four seconds and then started pulling items off shelves without being asked.
"Nerve recovery," she said, more to herself than to him. "Gift-channel damage specifically. Spinal or optical?"
"Both," Kai said.
The woman paused. She looked at him over her glasses.
"Both," she repeated.
"Yes," Kai said.
She looked at him for another moment. Then she turned back to the shelves.
"You’re going to need two separate meal protocols," she said. "The compounds for spinal regeneration conflict with three of the optical pathway ingredients. You can’t combine them. You rotate them."
"Show me," Kai said.
He spent two hours in the market.
He came home with four bags, a handwritten rotation schedule from the old woman, and exactly 87,000 coins remaining from the cash he’d brought.
It was the most he had spent on a single shopping trip in his life.
He did not hesitate once.
=========
『 MATERIAL INVESTMENT LOGGED. 』
『 ▸ Specialty market — nerve recovery ingredients (Shira Voss): 43,500 coins spent. 』 『 ▸ Specialty market — optical pathway ingredients (Mira Elys): 43,500 coins spent. 』 『 ▸ Research time invested: 2 hours. 』 『 ▸ Total material: 87,000 coins. 』
『 Queued returns: pending breakthrough. Multiplier ×500. 』 『 Projected return at next breakthrough: 43,500,000 coins per wife. 』
『 HOST NOTE: The woman at the market. Did she ask who you were buying for? 』
Kai thought back.
’No,’ he thought. ’She just started pulling ingredients.’
『 She saw the discharge file. She noticed it was for two different injuries. She spent two hours helping you without asking who you were. 』 『 Some investments are not logged. Some are just what people do. 』 『 This system notes them anyway. 』
Kai read that last line standing in the apartment hallway with four bags of specialist ingredients at his feet.
He wasn’t sure why that particular notification hit differently.
Maybe because it was true.
He cooked dinner using the first ingredients from the rotation schedule.
It wasn’t complicated. The old woman had been very clear about preparation. Low heat. Specific timing. Don’t combine the spinal compounds with the optical ones. Keep everything separate.
He made two dishes.
The same base — rice, broth, light vegetables. But two distinct additions. One bowl for Shira, one for Mira.
He knocked on both doors.
"Dinner," he said.
They ate together.
Shira noticed immediately that her bowl smelled different than Mira’s. She looked at it, then at Kai, then at her bowl again.
"What’s in this," Shira said.
"Specialty ingredients," Kai said. "For nerve recovery. The discharge file had a nutrition protocol. I found everything on the list."
Shira was very still.
"You spent money on this," she said.
"Yes," Kai said.
Shira looked at her bowl.
A long silence.
"How much," Shira said.
"Enough," Kai said.
Shira’s jaw set. She wanted to argue about it. He could see it. The argument was right there behind her eyes, something about how she didn’t ask for this, about how he shouldn’t spend money they don’t have on things she didn’t request.
She looked at the bowl.
She picked up her spoon.
She ate.
Mira had her whiteboard in her lap. She had been using her sense of smell and the cane to locate the bowl on the table — she was getting faster at it. She took a bite.
She put her spoon down.
She wrote something and held the board up toward Kai’s voice.
This is different from the usual.
"Good different or bad different," Kai said.
A pause.
Warm. Deeper. Like it’s doing something.
Kai nodded. "It should be. Give it time."
Mira lowered the board.
She picked up her spoon and kept eating.
Shira kept eating too. She didn’t say anything else. But halfway through the bowl she reached up very slightly with her braced arm — the motion was small and not quite controlled yet — and adjusted her own spoon grip.
A tiny adjustment.
Her own hands doing a tiny thing they hadn’t done properly in six months.
She didn’t comment on it.
Kai noticed and said nothing.
Some things were hers to keep.
After dinner, after the dishes, after both wives had retreated to their rooms and the apartment had gone quiet —
Kai sat on the couch.
He pressed his palm to the cushion.
Shira. Awake but calm. Her rhythm had a quality in it tonight he hadn’t felt before. Not the compressed-tight quality. Not the lying-awake-thinking-about-the-accident quality.
Something he could only describe as deliberate.
Like someone quietly practicing something small in the dark.
Mira. Her room. Still. The audio reader must be on because he could feel the faint vibration of sound through the floor. And then, just for a moment, overlaid on it —
A note.
Barely.
Half a breath of a hum. Cut off almost before it started.
But there.
『 MIRA ELYS — VOCAL ACTIVITY DETECTED. 』 『 Second instance. Duration: 0.4 seconds. Longer than last night. 』 『 Gift channel: still 99% sealed. But the pathway is alive. 』 『 Each time she does this it is not a decision. It is her body remembering what it used to be. 』 『 That is how it begins, Host. 』
Kai sat on the couch in the dark and felt it.
Both of them in their rooms.
Shira practicing something small with her hands.
Mira humming half a note she couldn’t stop herself from making.
Neither of them knew the other was doing it.
Neither of them knew he could feel it.
He sat with both of them through the wall and thought: You’re trying. Both of you. Quietly. Without telling anyone.
Something settled in his chest so heavy and warm it didn’t have a name.
’Friday,’ he thought. ’Rehabilitation clinic. Both of you. Properly assessed for the first time.’
’Let’s see what they find.’
He closed his eyes.
He pressed his palm to the cushion and felt both rhythms until they slowed into sleep.
Then he let himself follow.