He left Shirotani two days later than he had planned.
He told the old man it was because the roads were bad. That was true. But the real reason was simpler: he wasn't ready to leave the place where he had last seen her.
Still, nothing was calling him home. His father was gone. The house would be just as empty as he'd left it. So instead of turning south, he bought a train ticket north instead — further than he had ever traveled in his life.
Hokkaido.
He didn't think too hard about the decision. It didn't feel like a choice. It felt like something he was simply continuing.
The train ride blurred in strange places.
He would look up from his phone and the scenery outside would have completely changed — flat white fields one moment, dark mountains the next — with no memory of anything in between. Once he checked the time and found that forty minutes had disappeared. He didn't remember them passing at all.
I'm just tired, he told himself. That's all this is.
He almost believed it.
Near Aomori, waiting for the ferry that would carry his train car across the strait, he stood at the railing and watched the grey sea rise and fall beneath a sky that couldn't decide whether to rain. His phone buzzed.
It was Takumi.
Are you coming back this week, or did you move to Shirotani for good? Also — Yuki says, and I quote, "If he's not back by Wednesday, I'm giving his shift to someone reliable." Her words, not mine.
Hiroto almost smiled. That was so exactly like Yuki — not soft, not worried out loud, just a flat little threat delivered like a fact.
Don't apologize. Just remember, she had told him, that first night at the restaurant.
And without meaning to, he thought of the girl at the guardrail — the way she hadn't smiled when she waved. She had simply done it, then looked away, as if the gesture had cost her nothing and everything at once.
The same directness, he thought. The same refusal to say more than she meant.
Why had he thought of them together?
He didn't have an answer. He put his phone away and watched the water instead, telling himself it meant nothing. Two women, both plain-spoken. That was all.
He didn't quite believe it.
Hokkaido met him with real cold — the kind that settled into his knuckles and stayed there. He hadn't chosen a destination. He'd simply followed the map north the way water follows a slope downhill, without asking why, until he found himself in a small coastal town with a guesthouse that had one room free and no questions.
It was there, on the second night, that he understood something was wrong. And this time it had nothing to do with the rain.
He was brushing his teeth when he looked up and caught his own reflection in the mirror. For one long, sick second, he didn't recognize himself. His face hadn't changed. It was his eyes. They looked distant — like they belonged to someone standing very far away, watching him through the glass.
He blinked, and it passed.
But when he glanced at the little clock on the shelf, it read three hours later than it should have.
Three hours he could not account for. Not asleep. Not daydreaming. Simply — gone, the same way the fields outside the train had gone.
He sat down on the edge of the futon, his heart racing, and made himself count.
Once, at the station, in the rain. Once, at the window, watching Takumi's mouth move without sound. Once, faintly, in the library — a thread of water curling back on itself. Once, at the guardrail, in the snow, her hand lifting to wave.
Four times.
He didn't know why the number frightened him. But it settled into his chest like a stone dropped into still water, sending out one slow question he couldn't stop asking:
How many more times can this happen before it takes something from me I can't get back?
Outside the window, the sea stretched dark and endless. And somewhere far south of it — in a small, rainy town called Yukihara, in a restaurant that smelled of rain and broth — a girl who never wasted her words was, for reasons he didn't want to examine too closely, the only thing keeping the thought of home from feeling like something already lost.