I'll be honest, I don't read this series but I know Kei and how she operates, so I can only assume that this lady going back to her ex will end badly and in 20+ chapters so she'll come crawling back to the MC but he'll be with another girl.
only thing about that is it would feel...too vindictive, I guess? The read I have is that Nonoka
needs to be in a relationship where she's mothering her partner, because she wants to feel like she's the caregiver and that she's needed by the other person. She gets that with her ex, but she never would have with Hiromi, who is (for all his faults) still self-actualized enough
as a person to fit the role Nonoka requires.
We see it in this chapter over the cookware thing, but it comes up in other points too, like when they're looking for an apartment and deciding on what's most important, and also when he basically pushes his way into meeting her parents because he personally considers it "the proper sequence". Hiromi has a very strict life plan and understanding of how things "should" go, and that puts him at odds with what Nonoka truly wants.
Yes, she's going back to her ex, and yes, her parents might actually disown her over it, but she's also realized what
she really needs, and what would actually make her happiest (and happiest with herself). So that, in a sense, "solves" her character, and ends her story.
If it to crash and burn on her and she came crawling back to Hiromi, it would undermine her entire character journey of her own self-discovery. Yes, it sucks for Hiromi (and he's the protagonist so we
would feel more sympathetic to him and his perspective of things), but Nonoka as her own person has figured out the core of her own story arc and is now manifesting it...so I'd argue that if she does show up again, it'll be in a "passing in the supermarket" sort of deal, where we see that she
is happy (or at least fulfilled), and Hiromi gets to see that and take stock of how the choice she made was for herself, and how incongruent they really would have been, had they pursued moving in together and eventual marriage.
Because Nonoka
the character is another marker on Hiromi's journey of self-discovery and a part of him needing to learn to assess what it is he actually wants, and
why he wants it, and whether it's actually important or just something he's internalized as he
should want it. She doesn't need to reappear having been fucked over by her ex a second time, in my view, because nothing about that actually does anything constructive for Hiromi's journey and the message of the series as a whole.
It might make some readers feel better in the sense of "haha get fucked you dumb bitch", but that's not what's actually important, nor really that appropriate, and certainly not beneficial to the narrative.
