Put It on My Tab

When she was younger, she’d used to roam the shallows, barefoot with her skirt tucked into her waistline, sea glass and porcelain plucked from the sand and the silt, washed clean by the water and carried in her apron. Worthless trinkets, her mother had called them, but worth was something unique to its giver, Makino had always thought.

People weren’t all that different, and maybe that was why she’d ended up in her profession, no longer collecting flotsam and jetsam but the souls who showed up on her doorstep, brought to her shores by accident―or fate, if you believed in that.