See, and that was why Sakaki generally didn't talk to people.

"Oh," she said, looking over at Harry now with a frown that seemed to be going for both sympathetic and apologetic, but was a bit too subtle to even come close to either of them. "I'm sorry to hear tha--"

Then the rest caught up with her, and she blinked.

"A year?"

Maybe she'd misheard him, or mistranslated. She had spent the entire last week speaking almost exclusively Japanese, so it made sense that she would need a warm up refresher on her English again.