Several months later, as a student at Kamii's literature department, Eika decides to write a memoir on her attempted suicide. "A memoir," she'd laughed about it before when discussing it with her professor, "Aren't I too young to write a memoir?" But it's something she feels strongly about, something she thinks needs to be addressed in a country where so many young people are doing what she almost did. She writes about standing at the edge of the cliff and looking down, and the vertigo that overtook her, the dizzyingly freeing feeling she got as she realized she would die if she jumped. She would die, and it would be over.

Putting into words why she hesitated isn't easy. She keeps coming back to the same section and writing and rewriting it, because she still isn't sure what made her wait. But she writes in vivid detail the feeling in her chest when she heard her name, when she turned and saw a young man—whose name she does not give—rushing towards her. She labors over that single passage over and over, because she feels like it's one of the most important scenes in the book. She has to get it right.

The missing posters that had gone up are almost entirely gone from campus, a few lingering on largely overlooked corkboards in the corners department offices, and Eika's gaze passes over them as she walks by, her heart aching, her eyes stinging with tears.

She thinks Ken Kaneki must have gone back to that ledge and jumped.

He said he wanted to live, but she remembers how lost he looked that night when they both sat awake in his apartment, how he put his head in his hands, and she knew, in that moment, that he truly understood her. She knew he must have had the same feelings at one time, maybe even stood where she had been standing. They had never told each other the opening acts of each other's tragedies, the buildup to the change in fortune, the necessary exposition to truly know what happened. Eika regrets not telling him when she asked, but she made her policy of honesty a day too late.

Just a day.

Sometimes, she thinks, it takes even less than that. If Ken had been a minute later, she might've been at the bottom of the gorge, too.

She chooses to live now, to go to school, to study what she wants to study, to read books and relate to them and write them, and to do all the things that Ken might've if he were still there. Eika has bought every book ever written by Sen Takatsuki and is well on her way to reading them all, marking up the margins and wondering what it was about her writing that Ken liked most, because she finds that she has trouble relating.

She's on her way back towards campus after a late night out at the bookstore, and she's getting off the train, head buried in a book, when she bumps into someone and nearly loses her balance. "Sorry," she mutters, catching herself on the wall of the closest building, "I wasn't paying attention."

"It's alright," the stranger says, "Be careful," and keeps going. Eika doesn't get a good look at him in the dark, catching little more than white hair hanging over his eyes, but there's something about his voice that makes her hesitate, stopping mid-stride, turning it over in her head because she thinks she should recognize it.

"Excuse me," she asks, and he stops a few feet away. "Do I know you?"

He doesn't turn around immediately. "Do I seem familiar?"

"Yes." She pauses. "Maybe you just remind me of someone I read about recently."

"Really? You remind me of someone from a book, too." He pauses. "Rather, you remind me of his antonym."

She blinks and he's right in front of her, and Eika has no time to respond.

The kiss is the same, chaste and hurried with a hint of hunger, ending far too soon. With a rush of air, the stranger is gone, and Eika opens her eyes to find she's all alone. She touches her lips, still tingling, still warm, tears forming in the corners of her eyes.

Ken Kaneki did not throw himself into the darkness below the underpass; she knows that now.

But that is all she knows.

The rest of it is a story—a tragedy—that she is not a part of.

Thank you so much to all of my readers and reviewers, I'm glad you stuck with me through this! I know this ended on a bittersweet note, but it is Tokyo Ghoul, and I'm not sure how else it could have believably ended.