Ami walks the shoreline; the tiny waves lap at her bare feet and wet them. Where she steps in the saturated ground, her footprint fills with the overflow. Nothing of her shows on John's radar. She holds one of the candy pieces tightly in her hand, gripped hard as it presses into her palm.

She approaches where he sits. For once, she is the taller, and when she is close enough, she looks wordlessly down at him seated on the grass for several moments before speaking. It takes her a moment to work up the words.

Or the courage.

"You saw me with Kanda," she reminds John bluntly, without preamble. There's a pause before she adds, "Did my face look like someone in love?" The tense way she stands, the sense of withheld emotion, suggest the answer's importance to her.

And she has no one else to ask.