Akira Tachibana is a seventeen-year-old second-year student at Kazamizawa High School. Tall and slender with long black hair and sharp purple eyes, she was once the ace of the school’s track and field club, excelling as a sprinter. During the autumn of her first year, she suffered a serious injury to her right Achilles tendon during practice, which forced her to quit running and left her feeling lost. She lives with her mother in a sixth-story apartment in Yokohama, and to find a new sense of direction, she begins working part-time as a waitress at a family restaurant called Garden. Akira is quiet and soft-spoken, rarely showing her emotions, which often leads others to mistake her neutral expression for coldness or anger. In truth, she is kind and caring, with a fierce sense of right and wrong. After a physiotherapy appointment on a rainy day, she seeks shelter at the restaurant, where the forty-five-year-old manager, Masami Kondo, offers her a free cup of coffee. Deeply moved by his simple kindness, she develops romantic feelings for him and begins pursuing him with an earnest, sometimes aggressive determination, despite the age gap. Her relationship with Kondo becomes the focus of her intense, goal-oriented energy, once channeled into running. She is also distanced from her former teammates, including her childhood friend Haruka Kiyan, as she struggles with the painful memory of her lost athletic career. Even after her injury, Akira remains fast and physically capable, and her resilience and sincerity drive her personal growth as she searches for a new purpose.