That night, my new serial got a comment. One.
I want to read what happens next. I'll be waiting tomorrow, too.
Just that. Someone, somewhere, whose name I didn't know.
But I read that one line over and over. The screen blurred a little.
"Are you crying?" Kisaragi asked gently.
"I'm not crying."
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.
"...Even if it's just one, there's someone waiting for tomorrow. That alone is enough for me to write again. Even if no one reads it, there's one. I write for that one. That's how I've always done it."
Kisaragi said nothing.
She simply sat beside me, gazing intently at that one comment together with me. Her profile, for some reason, looked closer to tears than I was.
"I am glad for you," she said at last. Her voice was damp.
"Your words have reached one more person. ...One more person who will wait for tomorrow."
One more.
The way she put it caught on me a little. As though she were counting another person there already.
"...Were you waiting too?" I asked. There was no need to say for three years, at 12:02 a.m. out loud. She nodded, just once.
"I am your very first reader, after all."
Very first, she had said. There was a strange force in the way she said it.
A reader. Would a mere reader keep opening that screen two minutes after midnight, every day for three years, without missing a single one?
I deliberately didn't ask about those notebooks in the study.
Her records, three years' worth. That thickness. If I asked, I felt she might end up telling me something. And if I heard it, I felt there would be no going back.
That night, we simply spent the time quietly.
Kisaragi makes a warm drink and sets it at the edge of my desk. Cooled to just the temperature I can drink. Drinking it, I say the plot of the next chapter out loud. She nods quietly.
It was a quiet night.
A soundproofed room in the tower condo. The noise of the city doesn't reach it. All I could hear was the sound of my keyboard and the faint sound of her turning pages. It was comforting. For these three years, my nights had always been spent alone. In a room with no one in it, I had written with only the midnight update to hold me up.
Now there is someone beside me. Someone who believes in my words more than anyone in the world.
"Will that princess find happiness?" Kisaragi asked suddenly.
"She will," I said. "The more someone has crawled through the mud, the more right they have to be happy. That's what I write. That's what I've always written."
She smiled, just a little.
"...I see."
For some reason, those two words sounded terribly like an important confirmation.
Late at night.
Tired from writing, I went out onto the balcony. The top floor of the tower condo. Below, the city lights spread out like a carpet.
Kisaragi came too, standing beside me a little way off.
The night wind stirred her silver hair.
"Kisaragi."
"Yes."
"Why me?" I asked, still looking at the city. "There are plenty of better writers. Famous ones, too. Why me, with my single-digit PVs?"
Kisaragi was silent for a while.
Then she spoke quietly.
"It is not because you are skilled. Nor because you are famous. It is because your words, for me, they—"
She cut herself off there.
When I looked at her profile, Kisaragi was gazing at the city lights.
Her eyes didn't hold their usual moist light.
They were looking somewhere farther away, somewhere dark. As if she were remembering a pitch-black night when not a single one of these lights had been lit.
"...It is nothing."
She smiled.
But in the depths of that smile, for an instant, I saw it.
The profile of someone who couldn't wait for the night to end.
I couldn't say anything.
The wind stirred her hair again. Kisaragi had already returned to her usual smile, and was about to go get something for me to put over my shoulders. Worried about my body.
She's always worrying about me.
But that faraway look of hers—who worries about that?
That night, for the first time, I thought so.