“By the way, senpai — what about dinner? It’s getting quite late.”
She glanced at the clock, and Hatano, who had come back upstairs for a coffee after walking Shinomiya home, looked too. Between the lantern painting and the commission piece, they hadn’t left the workshop until well past nightfall; it was already nine o’clock. A little late even for dinner.
There were lectures tomorrow. If she stayed too long and missed the last train, she’d have to spend the night, and while she could technically commute to campus from here, she’d need to swing back for her things, which was a nuisance. She thought it over, then answered with some apology in her voice.
“I’d love to take you up on that, but it’s too late now. I’ve got a first-period class tomorrow, and catching the first train back, picking up everything, and getting there in time would be an ordeal. I’m sorry — I’ll head back while I can.”
Hatano gave a small yawn at the end of it, the picture of orderly living. Shinomiya nodded with a faint look of something slightly forlorn. “Understood,” she said.
Then she went still.
“Oh.”
As though something had just surfaced. She glanced at Hatano, and Hatano tilted her head at the look, not sure what it meant. Shinomiya kept watching her with a faint pink in her cheeks, as if working something through. She made a pained sound, thinking hard, and then with an air of great reluctant necessity began rummaging through the wardrobe in the bedroom.
She came back holding something that caught the light. She came over quickly, and with an expression that was embarrassed but was hiding it under careful blankness, held it out.
When Hatano understood what she was being offered, she lost her words entirely and stared.
She looked at Shinomiya’s face. Shinomiya had gone red to the ears and was looking steadily away.
“A spare key. Just — I thought I’d give you one.”
The overhead light caught the silver of it, sitting in Shinomiya’s small soft hands.
Hatano looked at the key and couldn’t quite work out what to do with herself. She supposed the thing to do was take it, but what was she to make of the gesture? Insurance for if something came up, or a standing invitation to come whenever she liked? If the latter, it was very nearly a confession, and accepting it would mean answering that in kind.
She stood with a rather severe expression, turning it over, and then caught the faint flicker of anxiety that had come into Shinomiya’s face. In that moment, the option of not taking it ceased to exist. She extended her fingers. “Well then,” she said, and took it from her hands. A plain, simple key, no keyring.
“I’ll hold onto it.”
She said it with a small smile. That a spare key implied affection of some kind — friendly or otherwise — was not in doubt. And that this particular girl had found the courage to act on it was something she should sit with rather than brush past.
Shinomiya, on receiving confirmation that the key was taken, let herself look quietly relieved, still shy about it. If she was going to show a face like that, then yes, Hatano thought, she would very much like to use this key and come back one day. She tucked it into her wallet while thinking this, and was getting ready to leave when the lanterns on the shelf caught her eye.
Indigo and ultramarine blue, a scene of water that was almost unbearably beautiful. One artist’s first step back toward the world she’d left, or rather not quite a step — more like the moment of gathering herself to take one, the planting of a foot.
Carrying this home would definitely attract attention.
Hatano, who understood this work’s worth better than almost anyone alive, stood looking at it for a moment, then at her own meagre piece beside it. The difference was almost funny. She looked, and something that had been forming vaguely in her feeling came into words before she’d decided to say it.
“Shinomiya.”
Shinomiya looked over. Hatano indicated the lanterns.
“Would it be all right if I left this here?”
Immediately, Shinomiya’s expression went uncertain. As though she were asking: was it so bad that even taking it home wasn’t worth doing?
“…You don’t want to take it back?”
A small voice, making no attempt to hide the disappointment. Hatano understood the misreading and told herself off for being inarticulate. She picked up Shinomiya’s lantern from the table and held it beside her own on the shelf, and looked at them together.
The gap in skill was still funny, even looking at them side by side. But there was something unexpectedly reassuring about the two of them together, so completely different in what they could do. These were gifts for each other, made in the same hour in the same place, and Hatano wanted to keep them that way — as a record, side by side.
“I just — want to keep the two of them together.”
No particular logic. The same way she’d reached out to Shinomiya in the first place, not because of a reason but because something in her said this is the right thing to do. Shinomiya heard this and looked briefly puzzled, and then something seemed to reach her as she looked at the mismatched pair on the shelf. Like a pair of teacups that don’t match but belong on the same shelf, different in form and finding a new meaning beside each other. She softened.
“Are you sure it’s all right? Next to yours?”
“What, are you making fun of me? That’s a beautiful piece of calligraphy.”
“The calligraphy is excellent. The calligraphy.”
Shinomiya reached up and touched Hatano’s lantern gently, running a finger over the assorted scribbles — a pink lopsided heart, something that had intended to be a cat and gone wrong, a dark brown star. She had thought of Hatano as a capable person, and finding this particular incompetence was, for that reason, somehow endearing. And whatever the object, the feeling in it was real. “I like the painting too,” she murmured, soft enough that it almost wasn’t audible, and put the lantern back on the shelf.
Hatano set hers beside it. Then, quietly:
“I’ll come again.”
That was what the key meant, after all. Said with that intention woven in, Shinomiya’s eyes opened with a slight surprise, and then she looked down, flushed, a little embarrassed. She started to say something, stopped, smiled, and then said “yes” — just that — letting whatever was welling up inside her come through without trying to hold it back.
They stood for a while, both of them looking at the two lanterns. No words, only the sound of the second hand in the room. The silence that broke it, when it broke, was Shinomiya. She looked at the easel folded against the wall, and the old canvas propped beside it, and then looked back at the lanterns and closed her eyes as though swallowing something.
“Thank you.”
Hatano looked at her to ask what for, and Shinomiya smiled.
“For everything. All of it. Really.”
The words carried the weight of all the time between them. Hatano felt it and let her face warm with it.
Their meeting had been the worst possible beginning. Dislike on both sides, that was where it had started. But the fact that time had accumulated between them was because somewhere in the midst of the dislike, each of them had taken half a step toward the other, and found something underneath that they could understand. So she hadn’t been able to leave Shinomiya alone, and Shinomiya had let her stay. And today, Shinomiya had managed to take a step. This was, perhaps, her way of marking that.
It deserved to be received honestly.
“You’re welcome.”
When it matters, you don’t need to dress words up. Between people who know each other, expression and voice and history say more than the words themselves. And Shinomiya, hearing this plain, undressed reply, pressed her lips together against the warmth that was spreading across her face anyway, laughed in spite of it, and said, a little shyly:
“Make sure you come back, all right?”
The smile on her face was nothing like the face of the girl Hatano had met. Hatano smiled back. And then, surprising herself, she felt the pull of separation — leaving someone who had started showing her faces like this — and instead of saying of course and nodding, she put her arms around Shinomiya’s slight frame and held her. There were several feelings in her that she couldn’t account for yet, and probably shouldn’t act on, but for now she didn’t reach for an answer. Just the embrace.
“Oh—”
Shinomiya went stiff with surprise.
Then, slowly, as though choosing to trust her weight to something, the tension left her body. She wrapped her small hands around Hatano’s waist and rubbed her forehead against her shoulder like a small animal. Hatano laughed quietly at the ticklish sensation and stroked her hair.
“Just going to borrow your bathroom before I head off.”
“Of course!”
The embrace over, ready to leave, Hatano set her coat and bag on the sofa and headed to the bathroom. Shinomiya watched her go, feeling thoroughly, cheerfully flustered and not minding that she knew it.
She watched until Hatano disappeared behind the door, then pressed a hand against her own heart. Still beating — good, confirmed. Still unsteady, both heart and body, she raised both hands to her head and tried to recapture the sensation of Hatano’s hand there.
“Ehehe.”
She let out a deeply undignified sound of happiness. Maybe she’d shower a bit late tonight. She let herself stay in the warmth of the moment a little longer.
Then she looked at the lanterns on the shelf. She had painted again — for the first time in a very long time. The arm had lost its fluency, and her sense of colour was rougher than it had been when she was small. The technique had rusted. But for the first time, she had put something of herself into the painting.
Whether it was because she finally had something to put in, or because time had given her a fuller sensibility, or simply because this was a place where she hadn’t been afraid to try — she didn’t know. But the world of painting, which she had wanted so badly to keep her eyes away from, felt, just slightly, like something she might be able to like again.
All of it was because of Hatano.
At the beginning, she’d been an unpleasant person. She had criticised the only way of living Shinomiya thought she had, and refused to give her the particular kind of acknowledgement she was used to. She had been the one person who wouldn’t accept the broken version of herself, and at the same time the one person who had actually looked at the girl trying to be a painter — at the effort that had gone into that. Unpleasant person had somewhere become strange person. And if the thought of her now turned her heart into something thoroughly churned up, then strange person had somewhere become someone special.
If her heart moved this much, then this feeling must be—
At exactly the moment Shinomiya was about to give it a name, a low vibration hummed through the quiet living room. She touched her own phone instinctively, but the buzz hadn’t come from there.
She listened, and traced the sound to Hatano’s phone on the sofa, sitting on top of her coat. The screen had lit up. Shinomiya made a small sound of realisation — someone had sent a message. She almost looked, caught herself, and carefully directed her eyes away from someone else’s private life.
Half a second later, she noticed that the sender’s icon was a picture she recognised.
She stopped. Her eyes went wide.
The icon was a watercolour of a puffer fish. The puffer fish she herself had painted as a child.
She stood there with her heart going wrong at speed, pressing a hand to it. Someone had set that image as their messaging icon. That someone had just sent a message to Hatano’s phone. The two facts connected themselves in her mind, and even though she knew she shouldn’t, she heard herself say “I’m sorry” to no one and looked at the screen.
It’s been a while. How is my sister doing?
Please let me know regularly, when you’re able — Rōkai\
Rōkai, Shinomiya mouthed, her mouth suddenly dry.
Her mind began to heat like an overloaded machine. She pushed it, harder than it wanted to go, trying to work out what it meant that Rōkai had sent this message to Hatano. But she didn’t need to work it out. It meant they had a connection. It meant Hatano had known Rōkai.
And why had Hatano said nothing about it. After all the conversations they’d had about her. Not a word, not once. This was not a matter of forgetting to mention something. Hatano had deliberately kept the connection from her.
“Why?”
A dry, ragged sound, barely a word. Her vision swayed. As though things had warped in the heat, the room bent around her, and dizziness came up. She closed her eyes and breathed, pressing it down. She knocked her restless heart into something like order and made herself think.
The shock of the hidden connection was real.
But the real question was: when had they met? She started to think, and the cold wouldn’t stop. Under normal circumstances she would tell herself that warm-hearted Hatano, learning her situation, had found a way to reach Rōkai and made contact. And in that case, the secrecy would make sense — she knew their relationship was troubled, and guessed that telling her would have made her hesitate to open up. That conclusion was probably correct.
But if it wasn’t. If Rōkai had asked Hatano to make contact from the beginning.
Calling her out of nowhere on a holiday. Crepes together. The aquarium. The lantern painting today. Everything she’d understood to come from Hatano’s own heart — if all of it had been arranged by Rōkai.
The thought reached her, and something in her mind turned rotten.
Her heart was in pieces. Her breathing went shallow.
She didn’t hate her sister. She had no objection to the two of them knowing each other. The hidden connection was a shock, but it could be understood as consideration. Sadness had no place in any of that.
But the possibility that Hatano’s kindness had been Rōkai’s was eating her from the inside.
If the warmth that Hatano had given her was actually from Rōkai — then this feeling that had been growing in her, what was she supposed to do with it? She pressed a hand against her chest where it hurt, and bit down hard.
Actually, it made sense. Why would Hatano have any reason to go that far for her on her own? The hidden connection, the behaviour, all of it fit together if Hatano had been acting on Rōkai’s behalf. It was a bleak coherence, the worst kind, and yet even so — even if her actions hadn’t been for Shinomiya — everything she’d given was real and tangible, and she couldn’t hate her. She was caught between loving Hatano and believing that love might have been purchased by her sister, and the pain of it was almost physical.
Then the toilet flushed, and she came back to herself.
She checked that the phone screen had gone dark, bit down hard, pinched her arm, and killed the feeling enough to arrange her face. There was some guilt at having looked at someone else’s messages, but beyond that — if Hatano had been trying to keep this from her, she didn’t have the right to expose it.
“Right — I’ve taken up enough of your evening.”
Hatano came back drying her hands on her handkerchief. Shinomiya’s heart lurched. How should she be with her now. Whether to ask. But whatever turbulence she was carrying, Shinomiya had grown very good, over many years, at managing what showed on her face.
“Please come again.”
A smile goes like this. She confirmed the shape of it as she made it, and let Hatano out. The message, the secret — she wanted desperately to ask, and the world was swimming and strange right now, and she was doing everything she could to just keep seeing it clearly.
But if Hatano had been trying to hide it —
Shinomiya stopped herself mid-justification and refused it.
She was frightened of the truth. And some part of her had already made up its mind.
Hatano’s kindness was probably Rōkai’s.
That Rōkai was involved, that Rōkai had acted for her — those were things that should make her glad. But what was painful, unbearably painful, was the thought that the kindness she’d been receiving from Hatano, all the real and tangible things that had accumulated between them — might have come from her sister. Pathetic as she was, she had let herself believe there was something mutual in it. Something of a shared feeling.
What a thoroughly one-sided thing to have felt.
And yet what she’d been given was too real to deny, so Shinomiya made herself smile. She saw the person she cared about to the door. Please come again, she told her, with no idea what face she’d be able to wear the next time they met.
The carriage was almost empty. Heating on, warm and soporific. Hatano looked out at the stars scattered beyond the dark window.
Shinomiya wouldn’t leave her mind.
The image of her burned in the back of her eyes, her voice wouldn’t leave her ears. Her nose was still trying to work out the brand of the shampoo, and her hands remembered the feel of her. Shinomiya, taking up most of the space inside her. She had hugged her before she left, and it had felt reasoned and natural in the moment, but looking back it had been half-impulse at least.
Which probably told her something.
Hatano acknowledged this to herself in a slightly detached way, and thought that there was no point turning it over on a train moving away from her, and reached into her pocket for her phone as somewhere to put her attention instead.
She looked at the screen and found a message waiting.
From Rōkai. A note asking after Shinomiya, same as ever. Hatano smiled faintly at the predictable older-sister devotion, and was composing a reply in her head, thinking that with a sister like this there was perhaps less room for her to intervene than she’d thought, when her thumb paused over the screen.
The timestamp: just before she’d left Shinomiya’s flat.
For a moment, the image of Shinomiya’s smile as she’d left crossed her mind. Natural enough that she hadn’t noticed it at the time, but set against the full-face smile from just before, something in it had been set.
Hatano had kept the Rōkai connection from her the whole time. And she had left her phone on the sofa while she went to the bathroom.
Separate lines connecting themselves. Unease came up in her chest. If it turned out to be nothing, good. But if it wasn’t nothing — she stared at Rōkai’s message and thought hard. The train arrived at a station and she didn’t register which one. She considered how to confirm it, and concluded the only way was to ask directly. So she shifted the question: if Shinomiya had seen this message, what would she have made of it?
She would assume things. She might think the connection had been there from the beginning. And if so, she might conclude that everything Hatano had done had been arranged by Rōkai behind the scenes. That the sister who had consumed all the recognition that might have reached her, who had loved her most fiercely in the family, who was the reason she’d run — had been the one to reach out, again, even now. The one who kept her connected, even now, to the thing she’d run from.
The thought completed itself, and “Shinomiya” came out of her mouth.
She was on her feet before she’d decided to be, stepping off the train, receiving the puzzled look of a salaryman who’d had the carriage to himself, and standing on the platform scrolling to Shinomiya’s name. She found it and called.
Paranoia was fine, if that’s all it was. But if it wasn’t.
Each ring added to the tightness. Eight rings — she was about to give up, wondering if she was in the bath — when the line connected.
Hello? What’s wrong? Did you forget something?
Bright and easy. Hatano almost exhaled with relief. Then she listened more carefully, and the voice was trembling, just slightly. The uncertainty became certainty. She stood for a few seconds, working out what to do. No answer came. She said her name.
“Shinomiya.”
Serious. No cushion around it. The feeling behind it would be obvious to anyone listening. On the other end of the phone, silence. She didn’t need confirmation any more, and she added her own failings to the list of things she was angry at herself for.
Close to a minute of silence, and then a trembling voice.
…I’m sorry. I saw the message from my sister.
On the edge of tears. Hearing it, Hatano went back over her own mistakes and thought carefully. She could have easily deflected — checking other people’s phones isn’t something you do — but she had hidden something much worse than that from her. She wasn’t going to raise that. Not now.
“Shinomiya, I’m sorry. Keeping the Rōkai connection from you was entirely my fault. I thought telling you would cause you pain, and I made the call on my own, and I kept it from you. That’s on me, completely.”
A pause, and then a small, weak voice.
No — I’m the one who looked at something I shouldn’t have. I’m really sorry.
An apology, and then silence. She said nothing more. The quiet between them was unlike anything Hatano had felt with her before — this was the first time it had been uncomfortable. She cursed herself steadily, chewing on the inside of her cheek, and thought. The shock was obvious. The misunderstanding, if there was one, needed to be cleared. She wet her lips to speak.
But Shinomiya got there first, squeezing the words out.
…You don’t have to push yourself to see me anymore, you know. It’s all right.
Trying to end things, voice forced bright, failing at it. Hatano heard it and lost her words entirely.
She tried to say her name, to stop the thought from finishing itself, and what came out was a breath. She closed her mouth, eyes wide, opened them again, shut them hard. Swallowed. Told herself, in the silence of the platform, what she had done by hiding this.
“Why.”
She needed to know where the thinking had gone, in order to help it. So she asked, though it came out clipped and hard, almost like an accusation. She was trying to soften it when Shinomiya answered first.
My sister asked you to check on me, didn’t she. “How is my sister doing” — that’s what that means, isn’t it?
The words laid out the exact misunderstanding Hatano had feared.
“That’s not—!”
She started to deny it, loudly, and a very quiet, very desolate voice came through and stopped her.
My sister asked you to be kind to me, didn’t she.
On the edge of tears. And a beat later Hatano understood that the misunderstanding wasn’t quite where she’d expected it. She had thought Shinomiya would recoil from being helped by Rōkai. But that wasn’t what this was. Shinomiya was afraid that Hatano’s actions hadn’t come from Hatano. That Hatano’s feelings weren’t pointed at her. The importance Hatano had acquired for her was far greater than Hatano had let herself see, and she had been too careless with it.
That landed with real weight. She breathed, settled herself, and spoke clearly.
“No. That’s not it, Shinomiya. Listen. I met Rōkai after I already knew you, not before. She asked me to look after you, yes, and I didn’t turn that down — but acting on someone else’s request isn’t how any of this has worked. Everything I’ve done has been my own decision.”
No lies in any of it. Every word was true.
Silence again when she finished. On an open platform in the cold, with almost no one around, the early winter wind came through. Her body was growing very cold, though whether from the season or something else she didn’t know. She waited. Then she heard a sound through the phone — a sniff, a swallowed sob — and then Shinomiya’s voice, shaking, scraped out:
Then why are you kind to me, senpai?
“Because—” she started, ready to answer.
And then she stopped and couldn’t.
Why had she invested so much in this person? It was the simplest question and the one Shinomiya most needed answered, and she didn’t have a response to it. She stood there with her mouth open and nothing coming, and worked back through it. A vague feeling that she couldn’t leave her alone the way she was, and no particular conclusion ever reached about what she wanted for her, just the persistent need to do something. But why.
She knew herself well enough to know she didn’t act without reasons. But she’d never put this one into words. And she was supposed to be a writer.
“Because—”
She almost offered something convenient and empty, caught herself, stopped, and went silent.
The doors are closing. Please stand clear. A rush of air, and a train she’d completely forgotten existed closed its doors and moved off in the direction of home. She watched it go without caring, and stood in the empty space, unable to answer.
Shinomiya broke the silence herself, eventually. She swallowed something small, and spoke in a voice kept deliberately soft.
…I’m sorry for being unkind. But whatever started all of this — everything you’ve given me is something I treasure. And because of you, I’ve been able to move forward a little. I was able to start to like something I hated. So I’m all right now. Please tell my sister the same. …I love you. Goodnight.
A sound like something being cut, and then her voice was gone.
“Shinomiya.” She said the name into the phone, and a second later registered that the call had ended. That the fact that she’d done that anyway was evidence of how badly she was shaken. She lowered the phone from her ear and looked at the screen.
Shinomiya. Call ended.
She stared at them for a while. Then the full compound of feelings she was carrying — too many, too mixed to name — settled into an expression. All the strength went out of her at once. An awful exhaustion, a dull headache, a heaviness everywhere, and the phone slipped from her hand onto the platform. It hit with a terrible sound and bounced. She crouched to pick it up. Reached for it. And then couldn’t quite make herself close the hand, and stopped.
She ran the hand that had been reaching for the phone through her own hair instead.
She had planned to bring them together when the time was right, when they were both steady enough. She had hidden it for Shinomiya’s sake, she had thought, and it had done this instead. An utter failure.
Rōkai hadn’t done anything wrong. Shinomiya hadn’t done anything wrong. Every bit of this was her own mistake.
“Damn it.”
She said it to the empty platform, blaming herself, and meant it.