Maybe I'm just insufficiently jaded due to not having read Stretch, but the subtext in the first chapter gives me a lot of hope. There's the old standard "weirdly intimate friendship between women that may or may not be construed as potential romance" (trite, but I love it because I'm yuri trash), but the amount of interest and commitment Kazuki shows towards Kaede seems like an indication of latent homoromanticism (no signs of homosexual interest... yet). The (ex-)boyfriend notices it despite never even seeing the two in person, though he ends up expressing it in the most ass way possible.
I think the long-distance nature of her relationship with Yuuji was a metaphor to Kazuki's emotional distance to it. She's going along with it because she's trying to sculpt her life around the heteronormative hard-working wife ideal: she's doing it because she feels like she's supposed to, not because she personally wants it.
TL;DR It feels like A Room for Two: Post-Grad Edition. Kazuki = Kawawa, Kaede = Kasumi.
last edited at Aug 15, 2016 7:34AM