The snow really was incredible—it hopped around chaotically right in front of your eyes, like it was dancing. The street just in front of our house was lost in the darkness and the snow. You could hardly even make it out.

“Hey,” Mari said, laughing. “Wouldn't it be chilling if you got a notice tomorrow morning saying that I'd died sometime late tonight? Don't you think maybe I'm really a ghost?”

“Don't even say stuff like that! I'll be up all night, you know, all alone!”

I'd practically shouted this. But it was true, I'd been thinking all along that this was an awfully spooky situation—almost like a haunting.

A barefoot cousin who bangs on the window late one snowy night.

“Which reminds me, I had a dream about Yoshihiro yesterday afternoon,” Mari said. “It was the first time I'd dreamt about him in ages.”

She'd taken a pair of bright red gloves out of her pocket, and as she spoke she slipped her hands into them, clomping her feet around in the much-too-big shoes I'd lent her. Her clear voice glittered in the night; the air was so cold it felt like pinpricks.

“It's been months since I dreamt of him, seriously. In the dream I only saw his back, and he was wearing that jacket—the black one. I was walking down some street when I noticed that there was a back I sort of recognized, up ahead of me, in the middle of a crowd of people. So I'm thinking, Who can that be? Who on earth can that be? And then I decide to go find out, right, so I chase after him. And as I get closer and closer I start feeling so confused and so nervous that my chest starts to ache. I'm really upset. That back seems to be so precious to me. I don't exactly understand why, somehow it just seems precious to me. So precious that I want to hurl myself onto it and hold it tight and squeeze it to a pulp. And then all of a sudden, just as I'm about to lay my hand on his shoulder, I remember his name. ‘Yoshihiro!’ I actually called his name. And that woke me up. I was sleeping on the sofa in the living room, you know, and I shouted so loudly that my mother came in from one of the rooms in the back of the house and asked if I'd called. I told her I'd had a really scary dream. And it's true, isn't it? It really is scary.”

Having said this, she waved and called good-bye, smiling.

And then she vanished into the snow.

Something about my brother's tone of voice when he called us up long-distance to tell us that he'd be returning immediately to Japan told me that things were over between him and Sarah. I didn't know what had happened. I just had a feeling that things were over.

“There's nothing keeping me anymore. I'm coming home,” he said.