When I woke up, there was a glove on my right hand, the kind that leaves just the fingertips bare.
The top floor of the tower condo. An unfamiliar ceiling. The weight of a down comforter. I wanted to think it was a dream, but the feel of my fingertips told me this was real.
Last night, I had stayed here. I had tried to refuse, and couldn't quite manage it. I had no energy left to go back to that apartment.
"Good morning, my god."
I looked toward the voice. Kisaragi was kneeling by my pillow. Her silver hair glowed faintly, the morning light shining through it.
"The glove—I put it on you while you slept. I have heard that when your hands get cold, they move more sluggishly at the keyboard. I chose one that leaves only the pads of the fingers bare, so it is easy to type with your fingertips."
I looked at my right hand. Over fingertips hardened from years of typing lay soft fabric. It fit perfectly.
"How do you know the size of my fingers?"
"I have been watching for three years."
Kisaragi said it as if it were the most natural thing. Just as if she were talking about the weather.
Three years. Those three years I had kept writing, unread by anyone, stuck at single-digit PVs. This person had been watching the whole time. Enough to remember even the shape of my fingers.
A chill ran down my spine. But my fingertips were warm.
On the breakfast table sat a single teacup.
When I reached for it, the teacup was right where my fingers would naturally close around it. I could hold it without moving my arm, without getting up. Its placement had been calculated.
"I have let it cool to sixty degrees. I understand that people who cannot handle hot things feel anything above sixty-five degrees as too hot."
"...How do you know I can't handle hot stuff?"
"You wrote it once, in the comments section. After the chapter about a protagonist who cannot eat hot ramen, you added, This is from personal experience."
I was speechless. A single remark from three years ago. An author's comment on a chapter with single-digit PVs, one no one should have seen.
She remembered it. A single remark from three years ago. Words I myself had long since forgotten.
A chill went down my spine. At the same time, the depths of my chest slowly grew warm. These two feelings arriving together was something I had been tasting over and over since yesterday.
Kisaragi didn't sit across from me. She stood quietly a little way off, watching me drink my tea. They were the eyes of someone serving. No—to put it more precisely, they were the eyes of a believer watching over an altar.
"Um," I said. "You don't have to be so formal."
"No."
Her voice did not waver.
"I want you to think only of writing, my god. Money, meals, laundry—I will take on all of it. There is not a single chore in this world that should be allowed to trouble you."
I, she had said. Her plain, unguarded "I." Not the icy formal "I" she uses at school.
I drank the tea. It was neither hot nor lukewarm. The temperature was exact.
I had never once in my life been looked after like this. My family was poor. I left home early and grew up alone in this city, where doing everything for myself was just how things were. So I had absolutely no idea how to take this excessive kindness.
Early in the afternoon, I tried to go back to my apartment. My change of clothes, my charger, my half-finished plot notes—it was all over there. Besides—being here, I couldn't breathe. I was suffocating on kindness.
When I headed for the entrance, Kisaragi followed me. I thought she would stop me.
She didn't.
"Have a good day," she said, opening the door and bowing her head.
"It is not locked. You are free to go wherever you like, whenever you like."
I was thrown. I'd been sure she would try to keep me there.
"I have already settled this month's rent on that room. I have also seen to it that the electricity and gas will not be cut off. And I have arranged for the money you send to your family home to go out without delay."
"I have a charger and a change of clothes, the same ones, ready for you here. ...I have not touched anything in your room. There were things you had not finished writing."
My feet stopped.
At the end of every month, I send a little money to my family home. Cutting into my part-time wages. It's the softest part of me, something I had never told anyone.
She had already filled that in.
"So that you will not be troubled, wherever you go home to," Kisaragi said, smiling. "Please take anything you need for your writing home with you."
I opened the door.
I had opened it, and yet I no longer knew where I was supposed to go home to.