"He said in an interview that every time he came to Kyoto, he tried to look for that girl. Look..."
Kazuha Toyama turned the page and pointed at the photo Heiji Hattori had deliberately included in the middle of the magazine article—a picture of himself from his third year of elementary school.
Honestly, bringing along an old photo of himself just for an interview made his intentions painfully obvious. So obvious that Kazuha Toyama found it hard even to fool herself.
"So he really did it so that girl would see the interview and get in touch with him?" Sonoko Suzuki leaned closer to look for a while, then changed her tone again. "Though, come to think of it, he was pretty cute as a kid."
Fine, she admitted it—she simply preferred athletic types with slightly darker skin.
"Right?" Hearing the compliment, Kazuha Toyama's tone turned a little excited. "He was grumpy even as a kid, but he really was cute... Ahem, I mean, isn't it awful of him to do this...?"
"Even if all of that is true, it doesn't really affect anything, does it?" Ran Mouri comforted her after skimming through the interview. "Rather than a first love, it sounds more like a vague crush. If he barely had any contact with that girl, then even if his heart skipped a beat once, it was only a shallow impression. It can't really be called feelings. You've known him for so many years—however you look at it, the bond between you two is stronger, right?"
It wasn't as though she was someone he had known for a long time. People like that could influence each other's preferences in partners for a while even without forming a stable emotional relationship. But after all that, she was just a stranger he