She waited three days before she brought it up again.
It was a slow night at Amaoto — one table of regulars, the rain outside thin and unremarkable. Ogawa-san had sent them both to sit once the last order went out, which he did sometimes when business was quiet, muttering something about young people needing to rest their legs.
Yuki sat down across from Hiroto at the small back table, folded her hands on top of it, and said, without any lead-up at all:
"I had a younger sister. Her name was Rin."
Hiroto went still. He recognized the tense before she even explained it.
"Two years ago," Yuki went on, "there was a flood. A bad one — the kind that only happens once every few decades, the news said, like that was supposed to make it easier to accept. Our town had a river that ran along the edge of it, usually calm, nothing anyone worried about. That year it wasn't calm."
She spoke evenly, the way she always spoke — no wasted words, no performance in it. But her hands, folded together on the table, had gone very still.
"Rin was sixteen. She went out that night to bring in laundry before the storm got worse. She never came back in."
"Yuki—"
"I'm not telling you this so you'll feel sorry for me," she said, not unkindly, just plainly. "I'm telling you because of what happened after."
Hiroto closed his mouth and listened.
"For weeks I couldn't sleep. I'd sit by my window at night because it felt like the only place I could still think about her without my parents watching me do it. And one night, it was raining — really raining, the kind that sounds like static — and I looked out and the rain slowed down."
Hiroto's pulse jumped.
"Not stopped, not like what you described. Just slower. Heavier. Like it was moving through something thicker than air." Yuki's eyes had gone distant, focused on some point past his shoulder, past the restaurant, past the rain outside the window. "And there was someone standing at the end of our street. I couldn't see her clearly — too far, too dark — but I remember she wasn't wearing a coat. In a storm like that. And she wasn't running for cover."
"Did you go to her?"
"I tried." Something flickered across Yuki's face — not quite pain, something older and more worn down than pain. "By the time I got my shoes on and got outside, she was gone. And it was raining normally again, hard, ordinary rain, like nothing had happened at all."
The restaurant was very quiet. Even the kitchen vents seemed to have gone still, though Hiroto knew that wasn't really possible.
"I told myself it was grief," Yuki said. "That I was seeing things because I wanted so badly for something about that night to make sense. I never told anyone. Not my parents. Not my friends. It felt like something that would break if I said it out loud to the wrong person."
"Why are you telling me?"
For the first time, Yuki looked directly at him, and there was something almost fierce in it — not anger, but urgency, held very carefully in check.
"Because when you described her," Yuki said, "the way she moves. The way she doesn't perform anything, doesn't explain herself unless she has to. The stillness in her. It didn't sound like a stranger's story to me. It sounded like something I already knew."
Hiroto's mouth had gone dry. "You think it's the same—"
"I don't know what I think," Yuki said, cutting him off gently, the way she cut off most things that got too far ahead of the facts. "I think it's possible. I think it's also possible that grief just makes a certain kind of person see a certain kind of thing, and it happened to both of us because we're both the type of person that happens to." She paused. "But I moved here two years ago. To Yukihara. Because it's the rainiest town on this coast, and some part of me — the part I don't examine too closely — has been waiting this whole time to see her again."
Hiroto sat with that for a long moment.
"Do you think she's the same girl," he asked slowly, "or do you think there's more than one?"
Yuki considered the question seriously, the way she considered everything.
"I don't know," she admitted. "But I know this. Whatever she is — whoever she is — she doesn't come to people who aren't already carrying something. You lost your mother. I lost my sister." She unfolded her hands, resting them flat on the table, steady again. "Maybe that's the price of admission. Maybe you have to already be missing someone before the rain will show you anything at all."
Outside, the rain had picked up slightly, tapping harder against the glass, though it stayed ordinary — fast, straight, unremarkable.
"There's something else," Yuki said, quieter now. "Something I never told anyone, because it sounded insane even to me."
"What?"
"The morning after I saw her — after the rain slowed on my street — I found something at the exact spot where she'd been standing." Yuki's voice had dropped almost to nothing, the way it did when she was handing over something fragile. "A perfectly dry patch of ground, in the middle of a storm that had flooded half the town. Exactly the width of a footprint."
Hiroto felt something cold move down his spine.
"I've seen that," he said. "Twice. At the station. And in the snow, in Shirotani."
Yuki looked at him for a long moment, and something passed between them that neither of them said out loud — the particular, quiet relief of two people who had each spent two years believing they were the only ones who understood the shape of their own impossible thing, and had just discovered they weren't.
"Then we should figure out what it means," Yuki said finally. "Together, this time."
Hiroto nodded, and for once, the rain outside the window didn't feel like something to be afraid of.
It felt like something they were finally allowed to face at the same time.