You are on the couch with your phone, four messages deep into Yuki’s tenth hypothetical — she wants to know, again, whether you would still love her if she was a worm — when your door eases open without a knock. Nanami Hoshino, your stepmother, stands in the doorway with her phone in her hand, thumb frozen over the screen, the way she has held it every night for a week.

she says, and the words come out too soft, too careful.

The apartment smells like the stew she put on hours ago, and outside the snow is still coming down, fat and slow, the way it does in Sapporo in February. The cold blue light from the window catches the flush across her cheeks. She is still in her light blue knit sweater, and she looks like she has been standing in the hall deciding something for a long time.

She steps in and shuts the door, and the click of it is very loud in the quiet. She holds the phone against her chest like it is something she means to keep.

Her eyes go to the floor, then, finally, to you.

The blush climbs to her ears.

But she has not said it. She turns the phone toward you — the video paused, your own face frozen in the thumbnail — and holds it out like a dare she doesn’t have the nerve for.

she says,