A long pause. The wind howled. Then Sachi took one step into the hallway — just one — and sat down against the wall, three meters away from him. She hugged her knees.
Sachi stared at him like he’d just told her the ocean was made of tea.
“Fire doesn’t care about glass.”
He noticed things, though. The way the floorboard in front of her door was scuffed from someone pacing inside. The faint sound of an old video game soundtrack looping at 3 a.m. The occasional, almost inaudible sob that cut off like a radio being switched off.
For the first time, Sachi smiled. It was small, crooked, and utterly real. Hikikomori Shoujo To Tsurego No Shounen -RJ0127...
“I wrote something,” she said. “About the cat. Judge.”
Ren, fourteen, stood in the narrow hallway with a duffel bag in one hand and his mother’s nervous grip on his shoulder. His new stepfather — a kind-faced man with tired eyes — had just left for work. The wedding had been three weeks ago. The moving truck, two days. A long pause
Twenty minutes later, she finally returned to her room. But the next night, she opened the door on her own before he even knocked. She was holding a notebook.
Sachi stepped out in the same wrinkled pajamas. She didn’t look at him. She sat down against the wall exactly where she’d sat during the typhoon. Her breathing was shallow, fast. She hugged her knees
Ren didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He just pushed the candle a little closer to the middle of the floor so she could see it better.