He didn't sleep, not really. He lay on the futon listening to the rain fade back into ordinary snowfall sometime past midnight, and every time he closed his eyes he saw her hand lifting, slow and certain, like she'd done it before — like she'd done it a hundred times, in a hundred different weathers, to a hundred people who weren't him.
By morning the snow had stopped. The window showed a clean white silence, the kind that swallows sound, and for a moment Hiroto lay there and let himself believe none of it had happened.
Then he saw his own hand, still faintly raised on top of the blanket where he must have fallen asleep without lowering it.
He got up.
Breakfast was laid out on the low table when he came downstairs — grilled fish, pickles, rice, a bowl of clear soup with a single sprig of mitsuba floating in it. The old man from the night before was sweeping snow off the entryway step, unhurried, the broom scraping in slow even strokes.
"Sleep all right?" the old man asked, not looking up.
"Not really," Hiroto admitted.
The old man made a small sound, something between a laugh and agreement. "First night in a new bed. Happens to everyone." He set the broom against the wall and came inside, stamping snow from his sandals. "You're not from around here."
"No. Yukihara."
"Long way." The old man poured himself tea, sat across from Hiroto without being invited, the way old men in small towns often did. "What brings you up the mountain in this weather?"
Hiroto considered the question longer than it probably warranted.
"I don't know," he said finally. "I needed to go somewhere."
The old man nodded slowly, as if this were a perfectly reasonable answer, which — for once — someone seemed to think it was.
Hiroto hesitated, turning his cup once on the table. "Can I ask you something strange?"
"Strangest things are the only interesting ones."
"Is there anyone in this town — a girl, young, dark hair — who wears a blue dress? Even in the snow?"
The old man's hands went still around his cup for just a moment. Not long. If Hiroto hadn't been watching closely he might have missed it.
"No one dresses like that here. Not in winter." The old man's voice hadn't changed, but something behind his eyes had gone careful. "Why do you ask?"
"I thought I saw someone. By the guardrail, across from my window. Last night."
The old man was quiet for a moment. Then he said, in the tone of someone repeating something he'd heard as a child and never quite believed, and never quite disbelieved either:
"There's an old story about this pass. Travelers used to say that when the rain comes strange — falls out of season, falls when it should be snowing — someone appears at the roadside to see them off. Not to harm them. Just to watch them leave." He sipped his tea. "My grandmother used to say the mountain doesn't like to let people go without saying goodbye properly. So it sends someone to do it, when the person leaving doesn't have anyone else."
Hiroto sat very still.
"Do you believe that?" he asked.
The old man smiled, faint and unreadable. "I believe a lot of travelers come through here alone. And I believe some of them look a little different by the time they leave." He stood, gathering the tray. "Eat. The soup's getting cold."
—
After breakfast Hiroto put on his coat and walked out to the guardrail across from the ryokan, where the snow had drifted knee-deep against the wooden posts and the valley fell away grey and enormous below.
He stood in the exact spot she had.
The snow there was undisturbed — no footprints, no depression, nothing to say anyone had stood there at all. He crouched down anyway and brushed his glove across the surface, the way he had at the station, half expecting to find some small precise anomaly waiting for him.
There was nothing.
Only, near the base of the guardrail post, a single patch where the snow had melted down to bare wood in a shape too round and too clean to be accidental — about the width of a shoe's heel, the frost around its edges glittering faintly where the morning sun had started to catch it.
Hiroto stared at it for a long time.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He almost didn't check it. When he did, it was a message from Takumi, sent twenty minutes ago:
oi, you never showed up to your shift last night. Yuki asked where you were. told her you probably fell in a ditch somewhere. you good?
Hiroto looked at the screen, then back at the small round patch of melted snow at his feet, then up at the empty white valley stretching out below the pass — vast, silent, and giving nothing back.
Yuki asked where you were.
He didn't know why that detail, out of everything, was the one that settled somewhere warm in his chest.
He typed back: I'm fine. Long story. Tell her I'm sorry.
He put the phone away and stood a while longer at the guardrail, snow gathering slowly on his shoulders, thinking about a mountain that supposedly didn't like to let people leave without saying goodbye — and about a girl in a blue dress who had looked back over her shoulder at something he couldn't see, right before she vanished, as if she were the one being called away.
Or maybe, he thought, she wasn't seeing me off at all.
Maybe she was the one leaving.