The fluorescent light was buzzing faintly.
I remembered those two nights. I couldn't stand the six-mat room with its walls closing in, so I went out walking, and even so, I made it back in time for 12:02 a.m. I hadn't taken a break in three years. Except for that one day I ran a fever and was late.
My fingers, at least, had kept moving. Even though the person doing the writing was already close to finished.
She had been reading that. From the other side of the screen, counting the trembling of my fingers, line by line.
"It was the evening of the third day."
For the first time, Koyomi's voice shook.
"...I did hesitate. Until that morning, I had wanted it to be my misreading."
"But the next night might not come. ...That became the more frightening thing."
The fingers on her knees clasped tight again.
"What I had decided over those two nights, I did, just as I had decided."
"I pressed the intercom."
"...Wait. How did you know where my room was?"
The address she had should have been my family home's, two hours away by train.
"The day before that," Koyomi said.
"I walked behind you as you left through the school gate."
My breath stopped.
"For a year, I was in the same classroom. ...I never once did it. That day was the first time."
A year. My back right there in front of her, and she had never once walked behind it?
"Six minutes on foot from that park. The room at the very end of the second floor."
Koyomi said it without hesitation. After walking it only once.
"On the mailbox, it said Akizuki. ...Your name was there."
She had checked that far. And then she had lifted her finger.
"...How many times did you press it?"
"...I do not remember."
Koyomi lowered her eyes.
"I had decided it would be only once. If a different Akizuki came to the door, I would apologize and go home. I meant to leave it at that."
"There was no answer. ...I pressed it once more. There was still no answer."
Her fingers were clasped tight on her knees.
"The more I pressed, the more frightened I became. I tried to think you were simply out. ...I could not."
"So," I said. "What did you do?"
"I went to the park."
Straight there, Koyomi said.
"...How did you know it'd be there?"
"From what you wrote," Koyomi said.
"Whenever someone had nowhere left to go, you always had them sit on a bench. On rainy days. At night. ...I counted through three years' worth. That park was the most likely."
She'd worked out where I'd be, by probability, from three years' worth of my text.
In the rain. The six-minute walk.
"I left the car behind. The attendant, too. ...I did not want anyone to see."
"I did have my umbrella up. Otherwise the notebooks would have gotten wet."
The thick bundle wrapped three times over in plastic.
And on the bench, that umbrella had been over my head, and only one of her shoulders had been getting wet.
So it was an umbrella she had never once held for herself.
"At the entrance to the park, I fixed my hair. I caught my breath."
Koyomi smiled, just a little. It was a smile on the verge of tears.
"I was about to exchange words with the person I had prayed to for three years."
That posture, as straight as a line drawn with a ruler. That silver hair without a single strand out of place. What I had thought was the perfection of the Ice Princess had been made at the entrance to the park, by someone who had been running through the rain thirty seconds before.
"Why did you even bring the notebooks?"
"In case you did not believe me," Koyomi said.
"I meant to show you these. Three years' worth of 12:02 a.m. ...To tell you that your stories have a reader. Only one, but here she is."
I looked up at the ceiling.
And I remembered. That room, just a few hours after that evening. The chair with the deep backrest. The wall-to-wall shelves, full of nothing but the kind of books I might use for research.
Back then, I'd felt a chill. Not at the kindness. At the thought that she'd gone this far in a few hours. At that level of detail.
"Koyomi. That room."
My voice wouldn't come out right.
"...How long had it been there?"
Koyomi didn't answer. That was the answer.
"You were on the bench," Koyomi said.
"So I spoke to you."
Akizuki, was it not? From my class.
The first words she'd said to me in a year of being in the same classroom. The line that sent me floating because she'd remembered my name.
Koyomi lowered her eyes.
"I practiced it many times. Pretending to be a classmate speaking to you for the first time. Holding out the umbrella and saying, You will catch a cold. ...I practiced that one line alone at least thirty times."
"Why pretend?"
"Because I was not yet certain," Koyomi said.
"I had watched you for a year, and everything matched. But I could not rule out that it was someone with the same name. ...So I meant to ask whether you were Fuyuno Yui, watch your reaction, and be sure."
So that was why she spoke to me. Holding out the umbrella, saying, You will catch a cold.
"If it had been someone else," Koyomi went on.
"I meant to hand over only the umbrella and go home. Just a kindness from someone in the same class, I would say. ...That way, no one would be troubled."
"...And if it wasn't someone else?"
Koyomi didn't answer right away.
"I meant to bring you with me."
I looked at her.
"From that rain, straight to that room. ...I had decided everything, right up to the point of saying, Please, let me provide for you."
It was what she'd said to me that night, pressing her fingertips to the floor and bowing beside my futon that never gets put away. I'd thought those words had come out after she showed me that room and saw how I reacted.
I was wrong. They had been inside her since before she ever sat down on that park bench.
"But before I could confirm it," Koyomi said.
"You nearly dropped your phone."
"The screen turned toward me. ...It was the dashboard for A Star in the Mud."
A Star in the Mud.
The title I had written, all alone, for three years.
"Right there, before I could ask, I was certain, and I trembled."
And her lips shaped that name.
"—Fuyuno Yui."
For a while, I couldn't say anything.
That day, I'd thought a miraculous coincidence had happened.
There hadn't been a single coincidence.
"Koyomi."
Maybe it would have been better not to ask.
"What if, that day. What if I really had quit writing?"
"I do not know," Koyomi said quietly.
"Only, I thought that if you disappeared, my morning would never come again. ...That much, I did know."
And she smiled, just slightly.
That smile was what frightened me most of all.