See You When You Get Back

The holiday looms, and Tohru's instinct is to burden no one, so she waves the Sohma boys off to the family banquet and prepares to spend New Year's by herself. Yuki and Kyo, meanwhile, dread three days apart from her nearly as much as they dread the estate itself. A chance remark on the road home reframes the whole plan and sends the household running back together.

Arisa and Saki offer Tohru a place at either of their homes for the holiday, but she declines and returns to Shigure's. After the house is cleaned, Shigure explains that the family will attend the banquet at the estate, though Kyo and Yuki want no part of it, wary of Kagura and Akito respectively. Tohru urges the two to go and celebrate while she remains behind on her own.

On the way to the estate, the group runs into Saki, who quietly points out that this will be Tohru's first New Year without her mother and that she will truly feel her solitude. The words hit home, and Kyo and Yuki race back to the house, where Tohru meets them in tearful joy. At the estate, Shigure joins Hatori and Hatsuharu, who note the absent pair. That night, Tohru, Kyo, and Yuki climb onto the roof to greet the first sunrise of the year as their own small family.

Drawn from chapter eleven, the episode was directed by Takatoshi Suzuki in Japanese and Caitlin Glass for the dub, with a script by Bonny Clinkenbeard and Jeramey Kraatz over the themes Again and Lucky Ending. It gives Hatsuharu his first appearance in the series and takes its title from a line of Tohru's. By this point she has lived with the three Sohmas for four months, and in the English dub she hums the 2001 anime's ending theme while washing dishes.