And then I heard her voice.

“Shibami?”

It was quite a surprise. I opened the door and found that, for some reason unknown to me, Mari was lying on our couch, her eyes half open, looking sleepy, just as if she'd been living there all along.

I really had no idea what was going on anymore.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“You said last night that I ought to come visit during the day, didn't you? So I came, but then . . . there was nobody around, you know, so . . . oh-h-a-a-h!” Mari yawned.

“Why didn't you use the bed in the guest room? Didn't you have trouble falling asleep on the couch?” I asked. She'd been sleeping with her body curled up into a little ball, like a child taking a nap.

“No. It was too bright in the guest ro-o-oh-ohm . . .”

Now that she'd mentioned it, I remembered that we'd sent all the curtains in the guest room to the cleaners. Mari's voice sounded charmed and kind of fuzzy, as if half of her was still dreaming. Her eyes seemed to be focused on something way off in the distance, as people's eyes do when they're feeling tired. Her eyes were beautiful.

“It's gotten cloudy out, you know.” I said this with the same feeling I'd have had saying words whose meaning was something extraordinarily tender. I walked over to the window on the other side of the couch where she was lying and opened the curtains. Suddenly the room filled with a hazy brightness.

I looked up at the overcast sky.

“Maybe it'll rain. Or maybe it'll snow,” I said.

Just then Mari sprang up into a sitting position, and her expression changed—she drew her eyebrows together and stared at me. Her eyes looked wild, almost demented.

“What? What's wrong?” I asked.

I started feeling extremely uneasy. It even seemed like her face was mirroring my unease. I hadn't seen her look this strange in ages.

“Let me see something,” Mari said.

Then she touched my hands—the hands that boy had touched.

She looked up at me, her face utterly vacant.

“You were with Yoshihiro?”

Her voice was extremely faint, so faint that it took me a while to figure out what she was saying. I shuddered and detached her hands from mine, practically flinging them away.

Finally I managed to speak. “Nope.”

My voice was dry, and it was an odd way to answer.

“Of course you weren't, what on earth am I saying? Nobody's going to be seeing him or doing anything with him anymore, are they? I'm still half asleep, I was getting things all mixed up with the dream I'd been having.”

Mari pressed her fingers to her temples as she said this.

“My brother died a long time ago,” I said.

“I know that,” she replied.

She sounded the same as always.

“It's just that I was having this dream. Just before. And there happened to be this scene in it where you'd gotten together with Yoshihiro and the two of you were talking, you know? You were . . . I don't know, it was someplace bright, like a hotel lobby or something.”