It was a cold night at the threshold of winter.
I took Koyomi back to that six-mat room in the apartment.
I didn't live there anymore. The cardboard boxes and piles of books had long since been cleared away. Even so, Koyomi had never canceled the lease on this room. The tatami, the fluorescent light on its last legs, she had left everything as it was back then. When I asked her why, all she said was, "I did not want to erase it."
"This brings back memories," Koyomi said, lining up her shoes neatly in the entryway. It wasn't the Ice Princess voice she used at school, but the softer one that came out at home.
The room was chilled to the bone. I sat cross-legged in the middle. Koyomi sat a little apart from me, knees together as always.
The winter wind passed by outside.
The business with Yuna, and with Shota, was over now.
My serial was pulling in tens of thousands of PVs these days. You'd never think it was the story of a guy who'd had single-digit PVs three years ago.
But there was one thing, the most important thing, I still hadn't been able to ask.
The very first words Koyomi had said to me. "You saved me." What lay at the bottom of that one line.
I think I was afraid to know. Once I asked, I would be carrying a weight completely different from numbers or fame.
But I didn't want to run anymore.
"Koyomi," I said, looking at the weave of the tatami.
"Is it okay if I ask?"
Koyomi's hands stopped.
"About those words. ...You said I saved you, didn't you? The very first time. What did you mean by that?"
For a while, there was no answer.
The fluorescent light was buzzing faintly.
Koyomi reached into the bag she had brought.
That notebook again, I thought. The thick leather-bound journal. Update times. Typo corrections. Analysis. Relationship charts. I had seen its thickness and its contents on that shelf in the summer, so I already knew.
But what came out was something else.
Not leather. An ordinary, old cloth-bound notebook. Its corners were rounded and frayed, and its spine showed signs of having been mended twice. It was the last of several, Koyomi said.
I had never seen it before.
"This is something I have not shown you yet."
Koyomi was holding it in both hands. It was a different way of holding something from how she handled the file that bound all my chapters together. More like touching something from much farther away.
"It is my diary."
"...Your diary."
"From before I met you."
I took it.
When I opened to the first page, the first thing I thought was—the handwriting is so young.
It was the handwriting of a child of ten or so. The lines wobbled. And yet the format of what was written was frighteningly precise.
Up at six. Voice practice. Demerits: three.
Piano, forty minutes. Demerits: one. Left hand.
Dinner. Posture. Demerits: two.
Today, total demerits: six.
I turned the page.
It was the same. The next day. And the day after that. A date, items, and demerits. No impressions, no complaints. Not even the weather.
"This..."
My voice wouldn't come out right.
"You wrote this?"
"Yes."
"...It wasn't your mother keeping it?"
"My mother did not write anything," Koyomi said quietly.
"So I counted them myself. ...So that I would not make the same mistake next time."
I kept turning the pages.
The handwriting gradually got better, the lines straighter, coming closer and closer to that meticulous script. And at the same pace, the demerit column grew longer.
There wasn't a single record of being scolded. Nobody had yelled at this girl. Nobody had raised a hand to her, either. They had only been quietly disappointed.
So this girl had graded herself. Every day. For years. Without skipping a single day.
I could no longer hold on to the edge of the page.
And then—there was one thing that sent a chill through me.
The way this diary was written was the same as the leather-bound notebooks. Date. Item. That format that didn't allow a single thing to slip through.
The last date was three years ago.
That was where the diary ended. After that, blank pages went on for dozens of pages.
I tried to say something.
The words wouldn't come.
Every word I could offer this girl was something I had already written. Live, even if you have to crawl. If there is even one reason to wait for tomorrow. ...She had been reading those for three years.
Anything I could say now was already sitting right next to this diary.
"Koyomi."
Saying her name was all I could manage.
I put my finger on a blank page.
"It ends here. Three years ago. ...Why?"
Someday I will tell you properly. All of it. —That was what she had said, that day.
"—That night, what on earth happened to you?"
Koyomi slowly closed her eyes.
Her eyelashes were long.
And then, as if opening for the first time, by her own hand, a door that had always been shut, she quietly spoke.
"Will you listen?"
I nodded.
"To what happened that night. ...To why I call you my god."
The fluorescent light was buzzing faintly again.
Koyomi's voice was no longer the Ice Princess's voice, nor the soft one from home.
It was from somewhere further in. A voice from the deepest place, one she had never shown anyone.