I walked home to my apartment through the pouring rain.
I had turned down the tower condo's black car, and I was soaked to the bone. That perfect study, that too-quiet acceptance—they kept swirling in my head the whole way.
It had been the worst three days. Dumped as "cringe," found by an heiress who knew everything about my three years, called a god. I wanted to get back to my own den, fast. To cool my head in that six-mat room full of trash and piles of books, where nothing ever changed.
I walked trying not to remember that too-quiet acceptance. Please, go home. Footsteps that didn't follow. She hadn't let me go. She had known it would be useless to go. Now, I can see that.
But back then, I still didn't understand.
I climbed the old outdoor staircase and stood in front of my door.
I went to insert the key—and my hand stopped.
The door was open, just slightly.
There was no way I'd forgotten to lock it. There was nothing of value in the room, but locking up was the one thing I always did out of habit. My heart made an ugly sound.
Quietly, I pushed the door open.
The school's Ice Princess was in my room.
A six-mat room. Cardboard boxes, and piles of books on the verge of collapse. A futon that never gets put away, unfolded. The dying fluorescent light, buzzing faintly.
In the middle of it all, Koyomi Kisaragi was kneeling formally on the floor.
She had been here, before me.
Leaning against the wall, at some point, were several binders of all my chapters, printed out and bound. Next to them, a large sheet of paper mapping out the relationships between the characters. Diagrams packed tight, unraveling the foreshadowing I had strung throughout more carefully than I ever had myself. This cramped, filthy room had been quietly filled with her three years of records.
My den had, at some point, been turned into her altar.
Kisaragi pressed her fingertips to the floor and bowed her head deeply. Her silver hair flowed across the tatami.
"Welcome home, my god."
I couldn't move.
This was the answer key to the nightmare that had begun three days ago.
Just then, a thought brushed across my mind.
For three years, every night at 12:02 a.m. Not a second off, the one and only "one" who read my stories. That person whose face and name I didn't know.
Her records had meticulously noted the times of all my updates. The 12:02 a.m. updates, without missing a single one, for three years.
For three years, not a second off, 12:02 a.m. Like clockwork, just one person.
—No way.
The moment that thought surfaced, something cold ran down my spine.
No. I grew afraid to think any further, and shook my head. No way. There couldn't be a coincidence like that. Something like that.
Kisaragi raised her face. Her moist gray eyes looked straight up at me. And then, her hands still on the tatami, she said,
"My god. I have a request."
The sound of the rain receded.
"Please, let me provide for you."
I doubted my ears.
"So that you need never worry about money again. So that you need not cut into your writing time with part-time work. So that you may think of nothing but writing. I will take on all of it."
There was no hesitation in her voice. It sounded as though she were simply saying aloud something she had decided long, long ago.
Provide for me. Keep me. Words that sounded like either one, and she said them with the gentlest face.
The words wouldn't come. I couldn't refuse, and I couldn't nod.
She quietly stood and laid her hand gently on the front door, still open. I thought she was going to close it. She wasn't.
She left the door open.
"I will not lock it," Kisaragi said, smiling.
"...Wait."
At last, my voice came out.
"How did you unlock my door?"
Kisaragi tilted her head slightly. Her face said she genuinely didn't understand what she was being asked.
"As of this morning, the property management company for this building is under the Kisaragi umbrella."
She said it lightly, as if talking about the weather.
"I paid my respects to the landlord as well. ...There had been talk of tearing the building down. It would be a problem if your room were to disappear, my god."
It took me five seconds to swallow what that meant.
The key to my room—this person had—
—this whole apartment building.
"I left the door open. So that you may come home whenever you like. ...All of it."
It was only then that I finally realized.
When she said "all of it," she didn't just mean the door.
She wouldn't lock it. No confinement, no restraint. I could leave anytime, for anywhere, freely.
But—what if, wherever I went, I no longer had a single reason left to return to?
If I let her provide for me, let her prepare a place for me to write, and she went on filling every part of my life before I could get to it myself. Where would I go home to then?
Even this six-mat room I ran home to. As of this morning, it was hers.
So that I would have no choice but to come back here, she had already begun, quietly, one by one, filling in my "reasons to go home."
Beyond the open door, Kisaragi was smiling, happily.
My world from three days ago was nowhere to be found anymore.