The rain never just fell in this city. It lingered. It blurred the edges of everything, turning streetlights into hazy stars and sidewalks into dark, reflective rivers. Kaito watched it from his usual spot in the café, the one by the window with the slightly wobbly table.

His coffee had gone cold twenty minutes ago.

Across the street, under the glowing sign of Patisserie Soleil, he saw her. Mizuki. She was holding a small, elegant box tied with a ribbon, laughing at something her mother was saying. Even from here, through the grimy window and the curtain of rain, she looked… effortless. Like she belonged in that world of warm light and delicate pastries.

His own reflection in the glass—the worn collar of his school jacket, the tired slope of his shoulders—superimposed itself over the scene. A perfect contrast.

“Kaito. The time.”

His mother’s voice, gentle but edged with a familiar fatigue, pulled him back. She was already standing by the door, her own cheap umbrella dripping a small puddle onto the floor. She’d finished her shift at the market and had come to walk him to the station. The kindness of it, the effort, sometimes felt heavier than any burden.

“Right. Sorry.”

He shrugged on his backpack, its strap fraying at the edge. His umbrella, a bargain-bin special with two broken ribs, fought him as he pushed the door open. The cold, wet air hit him like a slap.

They walked in silence for a while, the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of rain on nylon filling the space between them. His mother cleared her throat.

“The application. For the technical college. You’ll finish it this weekend?”

“Yeah. I will.”

“Good.” A pause, filled with the swish of passing cars. “It’s a good path. Solid.”

He knew what she meant. Solid meant a job. Solid meant not living with the constant, low hum of anxiety that filled their small apartment. Solid was the opposite of his father’s quiet desperation, buried in spreadsheets for a company that kept “restructuring.”

At the station entrance, she reached up and adjusted his collar, a gesture so maternal it made his chest ache. “Study hard,” she said, the same words she said every day. Then she was gone, swallowed by the grey afternoon.

The train was a humid capsule of damp wool and muted conversations. He leaned against the door, watching the monotonous parade of apartment blocks. His phone vibrated.

Mizuki (4:32 PM):

Hey.Library still on? Brought those notes you wanted.

He stared at the message. The letters seemed to pulse. He typed a quick Yeah, thanks, then deleted it. Typed Sorry, can’t today, deleted that too. He just… stared. The train lurched, and his thumb hit the power button, plunging the screen to black. He sighed, shoving the phone back into his pocket. He’d answer later. Maybe.

---

Three Years Earlier

The cicadas were screaming. It was that heavy, golden hour of late summer where the air itself felt like bathwater. Kaito, twelve and all scrawny limbs, was glaring up at a particularly stubborn persimmon.

“It’s mocking you,” Mizuki announced from below. She was perched on the old stone lantern, one year older and infinitely more smug.

“It’s not mocking me. It’s a fruit.”

“It’s a fruit that’s beating you.”

He shot her a look.Her grin was wide, a little gap between her front teeth he’d always found strangely fascinating. With a grunt, he hoisted himself onto the lower branch of the tree in her grandmother’s garden. The bark scraped his palms.

“Careful, genius!”

“I’ve got it—OW!”

The world tilted.The branch, rotten on the inside, gave way with a sad crack. He landed flat on his back in the soft dirt, all the air punching out of him in a loud oof.

Mizuki’s face appeared above him, blocking the sun. “You’re an absolute disaster.” But her hands were already hooking under his arms, hauling him up with a strength that belied her slender frame. “Are you broken? Please don’t be broken. Obaachan will kill me.”

“I’m… fine,” he wheezed, pointing a dusty finger. “Got it, though.”

The perfect, orange persimmon lay cradled in the grass, completely unharmed. Mizuki looked from the fruit to his dirt-streaked face and let out a laugh, clear and loud enough to startle a sparrow from the bamboo. It wasn’t a mean laugh. It was the kind that made you laugh too, even when your ribs hurt.

Later, sprawled on the cool wooden planks of the engawa with bandaged knees and sticky-sweet fingers, she produced a small pocket knife.

“For proof,”she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. She pried up a loose floorboard near the edge. In the hidden space beneath, she carved two sets of initials: K & M.

“No matter what happens,”she said, her brow furrowed in serious concentration. “This is our place. Okay? Promise?”

The wood was soft.The letters were clumsy. He nodded, the promise feeling as solid and real as the earth beneath them.

“Promise.”

---

Present Day

He avoided her all day at school. It was a practiced skill now. Different hallways. Timing his lunch to miss hers. Keeping his head down. He saw her once, by the shoe lockers, her head thrown back in a laugh with friends. The sound, even from a distance, was a specific key that turned something tight in his chest. He ducked into a stairwell.

After school, he took the long way home, adding an extra twenty minutes to his walk just to avoid passing her street. The drizzle had returned, a fine mist that beaded on his jacket. He was two blocks from his apartment complex when the sleek, black sedan purred to the curb beside him.

The passenger window slid down silently.

“Kaito.”

Mr.Aoki. Mizuki’s father. He wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t frowning either. His face was a study in neutral politeness. “A moment?”

What could he say? No? He stopped, his school bag feeling like it was filled with stones.

The car door opened.Mr. Aoki stepped out, not a single drop of rain daring to land on his tailored wool coat. He didn’t speak, just began walking slowly. Kaito fell into step beside him, his broken umbrella suddenly childish in his hands.

“You’re a diligent boy, Kaito,” Mr. Aoki began, his voice calm, measured. “Your teachers speak well of you. Your family… they are persevering. That is an admirable quality.”

Kaito said nothing. The compliment was a cage being built around him.

“My daughter,”Mr. Aoki continued, gazing ahead at the wet street, “is at a critical juncture. University entrance exams. Future planning. The path she is on requires focus. Undiluted focus.”

He stopped then, turning to face Kaito fully. His eyes were like polished stone.

“Affection…friendship… at this age, it is often a powerful distraction. It clouds judgement. It leads to choices made with the heart, not the mind.” He paused, letting the words sink into the damp air. “I believe you care for Mizuki. So I will ask you to consider what is truly best for her. A shared struggle, or a clear path forward?”

The knife was in, and it was so very, very gentle.

“My father…”Kaito started, his voice barely a whisper.

“Is a loyal employee in a struggling sector,”Mr. Aoki finished, not unkindly. “Loyalty is commendable. But it does not guarantee stability. Do you understand what I am saying?”

Kaito looked down. A rivulet of water was tracing the cracked leather of his shoe. He understood. He understood with a clarity that was humiliating.

“Some probabilities,”Mr. Aoki said softly, placing a firm, final hand on Kaito’s shoulder, “are not simply low. They are… inconsiderate to bet on.”

With that,he returned to his car. It pulled away without a sound, leaving Kaito standing alone in the rain, the ghost of that handprint heavy on his shoulder.

---

The ceiling of his room had a water stain that looked like a lumpy continent. Kaito traced its borders for the hundredth time, the scholarship application blank on his desk. His phone glowed beside him.

He picked it up.

Kaito (9:17 PM):Can we talk? The park by the river.

The reply was almost instant.

Mizuki (9:18 PM):Now? It’s pouring.

Kaito (9:19 PM):Please.

She was there in fifteen minutes, a spot of bright yellow under her umbrella by the empty swings. Her hair was damp at the ends.

“What’s going on?You’ve been weird all week.” Her smile was tentative, worried.

He had a whole speech prepared. About futures and focus and being realistic. But looking at her face, the speech evaporated.

“Your dad talked to me today.”

Her smile vanished.“What did he say?”

“He’s right,Mizuki.” The words tasted like ash. “We’re… we’re just from different places. This… us… it’s a distraction. From the stuff that actually matters.”

She blinked. “A distraction.” She repeated the word slowly, as if tasting it. “Is that what I am? A distraction from your important stuff?”

“You know that’s not what I—”

“Then explain it,Kaito! Because from here, it sounds like you’re just scared. Or worse, you believe whatever crap my father sold you.”

Her eyes were glistening,but not with tears yet. With a fierce, burning hurt.

He couldn’t meet her gaze. He looked at the chains of the swing, rusted and wet. “It’s better if we just… stop. Before it gets more complicated.”

The silence that followed was deafening,filled only with the drumming of rain on nylon and earth.

“Okay,”she whispered, the fight draining from her voice all at once. It was the quiet acceptance that shattered him. “If that’s what you want.”

She turned and walked away. The yellow umbrella receded into the dark, growing smaller and smaller until it was just a faint smudge of color, and then nothing at all.

Kaito stood there until the cold seeped through his jacket, through his skin, and into his bones.

---

It was past midnight when the rain finally ceased. A deep, dripping quiet settled over the neighborhood. Unable to sleep, Kaito got up and went to the window, wiping a circle in the fogged glass.

The street below was empty. The puddles shone like scattered pieces of a dark mirror under the single working streetlamp.

His breath caught.

There was someone under the light.

A girl. Her posture, the way she stood—it was achingly familiar. But she was taller. Her hair was longer, falling past her shoulders in a way Mizuki’s never had. She wore a simple dress, not a school uniform.

And her face. It was Mizuki’s face, but not the one he knew. This was a face etched with a sadness so deep and weary it seemed to pull at the very air around her. She was looking directly up at his window.

Their eyes locked.

A jolt, electric and cold, shot through him. It was her. It wasn’t her.

He blinked, hard.

When he looked again,the space under the streetlight was empty. Just a patch of wet concrete shimmering in the glow.

He spent minutes searching the shadows, the alleyways. Nothing. No footsteps, no trace.

A trick of the light, he told himself. Exhaustion. Guilt conjuring up phantoms.

But as he crawled back into bed, the image wouldn’t leave him. Not just her face, but her eyes. In that fleeting moment, they hadn’t looked angry, or sad, or even surprised.

They had looked like they were saying a goodbye that was years too late.

---

End of Episode 1.

Kaito became a ghost in his own life.

It was easier than he’d thought it would be. Avoidance, once you committed to it, had its own rhythm. You woke up earlier to catch the 7:02 train instead of the 7:17 she took. You ate lunch on the north stairwell landing, where no one ever went. You kept your head down in the halls, your eyes on the scuffed linoleum, counting the tiles until you were safely in class.

The hardest part was the silence. His phone, which had once buzzed throughout the day with Mizuki’s messages—a funny sign she’d seen, a question about homework, a simple hey—was now ominously still. He’d catch himself checking it, his stomach clenching at the blank screen, before shoving it back into his pocket with a quiet self-loathing. He’d done this. He’d asked for this silence. It was what was best.

A week after the park, he saw her at the station. He was hidden behind a vending machine, tying a shoe that didn’t need re-tying. She stood alone on the platform, her face turned toward the tracks. She wasn’t reading a book or listening to music. She was just… standing there. The empty space beside her, where he usually stood, seemed to radiate a palpable cold. She looked smaller somehow, as if she were folding inward. The train arrived, and she boarded without looking back.

He missed the next three trains.

---

The sightings began in earnest.

It was never when he expected it. Not in the places they’d shared, but in the mundane corners of his new, solitary routine. He’d be stocking shelves at the convenience store after school, the fluorescent lights humming overhead, and he’d see a reflection in the glass door of the drink cooler. A girl with Mizuki’s profile, but her hair was longer, tied back in a way she never wore it. He’d spin around, heart hammering, but the aisle would be empty except for an old woman comparing brands of tea.

He was taking out the garbage behind his apartment building, the smell of wet cardboard and decay thick in the air, when he saw her. Not a reflection, but a full figure, sitting on the damp steps of the neighboring fire escape. She was wearing a simple blue dress, her knees drawn up to her chin. She was staring at the wall of his building, at the specific window that was his bedroom.

His blood turned to ice water. “Mizuki?”

At the sound of his voice, her head turned slowly. It was her, but it wasn’t. Her features were sharper, older. The youthful roundness of her cheeks was gone, replaced by a quiet, gaunt solemnity. Her eyes, when they met his, held a depth of sadness that made him take a physical step back.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. Her voice was Mizuki’s, but weathered, like a stone smoothed by a relentless river.

“What are you… How are you here?” He stumbled over the words, the garbage bag forgotten at his feet.

She didn’t answer. She just looked at him with that unbearable sorrow. “You’re going to forget the sound of my laugh,” she said, as simply as someone might comment on the weather.

Then, a delivery truck rumbled by on the alley’s main street. He glanced away for a fraction of a second. When he looked back, the fire escape was empty. Only a few droplets of water, shaken from the railing above, fell onto the spot where she had been.

He stood there for five full minutes, the cold seeping through his shoes, before he could make himself move.

---

Mizuki, in her world of crisp uniforms and predetermined paths, was unraveling.

The confusion had curdled into a cold, hard anger, which then melted into a bewildering grief. Kaito hadn’t just left; he had erased himself with a chilling efficiency. Every shared joke, every secret place, every promise—it was as if he was retroactively deleting them from their history.

She threw herself into studying, into club activities, into being the perfect daughter her father expected. But her focus was a fragile pane of glass, and the ghost of Kaito’s absence was a constant, throwing pebbles at it. She’d be solving a calculus problem and see his doodle in the margin of her old notebook. She’d hear a certain song from a convenience store speaker and her throat would close up.

Her mother noticed the quiet. “Are you feeling alright, Mizuki? You’ve been so pale.”

“I’m fine.Just tired from exams.”

Her father said nothing,but his approving nod when she reported her practice test scores felt like a verdict.

The only place she felt any semblance of peace was her grandmother’s old kominka. Her family used it sparingly now, a weekend retreat. That Saturday, under the pretext of needing quiet to study, she had her mother drop her off.

The house welcomed her with its familiar smells of tatami and aged wood. It was quiet, but not an empty quiet. It was a listening quiet. She cleaned a little, made tea, and tried to read a novel. But her eyes kept drifting to the closed door of her grandmother’s old weaving room—the one room she’d always been told not to play in as a child.

Pushing the door open felt like disturbing a tomb. Sunlight streamed through the dusty window, illuminating motes of dust dancing in the air. The old loom sat in the corner, a giant, silent insect shrouded in a white cloth. Her grandmother’s small writing desk was against the far wall.

Driven by a loneliness she couldn’t name, Mizuki began opening the drawers. They stuck with disuse. In the bottom one, beneath a stack of faded furoshiki cloths, she found a simple, cloth-bound journal.

Her grandmother’s diary.

The entries were mundane at first—notes on the garden, the weather, visits from neighbors. Then, after the death of her grandfather, the tone changed. The handwriting grew shakier, more fervent.

“The rain today was the same as the rain on the day we first met. The room showed me. I sat in the stillness, held his old watch, and for a moment, the air smelled like his tobacco and the rain of 1957. It is not a ghost. It is a memory the house has kept safe. A piece of time, folded away.”

Mizuki’s breath caught. She turned the page, her heart pounding.

“The rules are simple. You must be still. You must hold something tied to the memory. And you must want to see it more than you want to breathe the present air. But it is a thirsty magic. It drinks from your now to water the past. Do not visit too often, little sparrow. You might forget the way back to your own nest.”

A chill, different from the house’s cool air, traced her spine. A piece of time, folded away.

Her hands trembled as she closed the journal. Her eyes fell on the old, worn tatami mat in the center of the room. The one her grandmother had always sat on. Without fully understanding why, Mizuki took the silver bracelet from her wrist—the cheap, charm bracelet Kaito had saved for months to buy her for her 14th birthday. She clutched it in her fist until the metal bit into her palm.

Then she lay down on the tatami, in a beam of watery sunlight, closed her eyes, and thought not of grand memories, but of a tiny, stupid one: Kaito, trying and failing to whistle through a blade of grass last summer, his face turning red with effort.

She focused on the sound of the cicadas that day. The feel of the dry grass. The ridiculous, endearing look of concentration on his face.

She fell asleep, tears drying on her cheeks.

---

She woke to the sound of laughter.

Her laughter.

She was standing in her grandmother’s sun-drenched garden, but it was greener, more vibrant. The air was thick and warm, not the crisp autumn air of the present. And she was looking at Kaito.

He was younger. Fourteen, maybe. He had a smudge of dirt on his nose and was holding a wriggling beetle in his cupped hands, grinning triumphantly. “Told you I’d find one!”

Mizuki looked down at herself. She was wearing the old, paint-stained shorts she’d loved that summer. She could feel the sun on her bare arms. The urge to run to him, to shove his shoulder and demand he let the beetle go, was overwhelming.

She took a step forward. “Kaito?”

He didn’t look at her. He didn’t seem to hear her at all. His attention was on the beetle.

“Kaito!” she called again, louder.

Nothing. It was like she was made of glass. Of air.

A younger version of herself, the one whose body she seemed to be wearing, bounded into her field of view. Past-Mizuki peered at the beetle. “Ew! It’s gross!” But she was smiling.

“It’s not gross, it’s cool,” past-Kaito insisted, his eyes shining with the pure, uncomplicated joy of sharing a discovery.

Present-Mizuki watched, a silent, invisible spectator to her own happiness. She reached out a hand toward Kaito’s arm. Her fingers passed through him. A sensation like static electricity, cold and brief, danced across her skin, and for a flicker, Kaito’s smile faltered. He shivered slightly, glancing around as if a cloud had passed over the sun.

“You okay?” past-Mizuki asked.

“Yeah.Just got a chill.”

The scene began to waver, the colors bleeding like wet watercolor. The laughter faded. The sun-drenched garden dissolved into streaks of light.

Mizuki opened her eyes.

She was on her back on the tatami in the silent, dim weaving room. Late afternoon light now slanted through the window. Her face was wet with fresh tears. Her fist ached. She uncurled her fingers.

The silver bracelet lay in her palm, warm from her grasp.

And for the first time since he’d left, the hollow ache in her chest was filled not with emptiness, but with a devastating, beautiful, and utterly terrifying hope.

---

Kaito, meanwhile, was in the convenience store cooler, staring at a carton of milk he wasn’t seeing. The reflection in the glass showed the aisles behind him. And for a moment, just a moment, it showed a girl with long hair and a blue dress, walking slowly past the rack of magazines, her head turning as if she were looking for someone.

He didn’t turn around this time. He just closed his eyes, waiting for the image to fade.

When he opened them, the reflection showed only a tired-looking salaryman buying a bento.

But the chill remained. It was inside him now.

End of Episode 2.

Next: Episode 3 - 病院 (Byōin - The Hospital)

The call came on a Tuesday afternoon, while Kaito was trying to fix the wobbly leg of the kitchen table with a folded piece of cardboard. His mother answered, her voice shifting from tired to concerned in the span of a few syllables.

“Oh, Aoki-san. Yes… I see. When?... Of course. We’re so sorry to hear that.”

Kaito’s hands stilled. Aoki. The name landed in the quiet apartment like a stone.

His mother hung up, her face drawn. She looked at him, and in her eyes, he saw a reflection of his own dawning dread. “That was Mizuki’s mother,” she said quietly. “Mizuki is in the hospital.”

The world narrowed to a pinprick. “What? Why?”

“She collapsed. At her grandmother’s house in the countryside. They found her unconscious in an old room. She’s stable, but… she won’t wake up properly. She’s in some kind of deep sleep. The doctors are running tests.”

The cardboard slipped from his fingers. The image of Mizuki, sitting on the fire escape in that blue dress with ancient eyes, flashed behind his own. “You’re going to forget the sound of my laugh.”

“Can I…” His voice cracked. “Can we go see her?”

His mother looked pained. “Her mother said she’s not accepting visitors. Family only. She sounded… frightened, Kaito. Not just worried. Frightened.”

The rest of the day was a blur of silent panic. He couldn’t study. He couldn’t eat. The ghostly sightings now felt like premonitions, like pieces of a puzzle he was too stupid to put together. He’d driven her away, and now she was unconscious. The two facts linked in his mind with the brutal, simple logic of guilt.

He couldn’t wait. The next morning, he told his mother he had a group project meeting. He bought a ticket for the rural train line, the one that wound out of the city and into the mist-cloaked mountains. The journey felt endless, each stop leaching more color from the world outside the window until everything was a palette of greens and greys.

The countryside hospital was small, white, and quiet. It sat on a hill, surrounded by cedar trees that dripped with residual moisture from the previous night’s rain. It felt more like a secluded sanitarium than a place of healing. His heart hammered against his ribs as he approached the main entrance, his schoolbag feeling like an absurdly normal accessory.

He didn’t get far. As he was scanning the directory for the neurology ward, a voice, cold and sharp, cut through the sterile air.

“Kaito.”

Mr. Aoki stood near a bank of vending machines, holding two coffees in a cardboard carrier. He looked like he’d been carved from the same stone as the hospital. His usual impeccable composure was still there, but it was stretched thin, revealing cracks of exhaustion and something else—a simmering, directionless anger.

“What are you doing here?” The question wasn’t curious. It was an accusation.

“I… I heard. I wanted to see if she was okay.”

“She is not okay.”Mr. Aoki set the coffees down with a precise click. “The doctors cannot explain it. Her vitals are stable, but her brain activity is… unusual. She sleeps, but she does not wake. They use words like ‘dissociative state’ and ‘psychological trauma.’” He fixed Kaito with a stare that felt surgical. “What happened between you two?”

The question was a trap. Any answer would be the wrong one.

“We…we stopped being friends,” Kaito managed, the phrase tasting like ash.

“You ended it.You told her it was a ‘distraction.’” Mr. Aoki’s voice remained low, but each word was a needle. “And then she retreats here, to a house full of memories, and does this to herself. Do you understand the connection I am forced to make?”

Kaito felt himself shrinking, the linoleum floor seeming to tilt beneath him. “I didn’t… I never wanted…”

“What you wanted is irrelevant,” Mr. Aoki interrupted, his control slipping for a flash, revealing raw, paternal fear. “This is the result.” He took a breath, reclaiming his composure. “You need to leave. Your presence is not helpful. It is a reminder of the… the complication that preceded this.”

It was a dismissal, absolute and final. Kaito opened his mouth to protest, to beg, but no sound came out. He simply nodded, a jerky, mechanical motion. He turned and walked back down the brightly lit corridor, feeling Mr. Aoki’s gaze burning into his back until he turned the corner.

He didn’t leave the grounds. A kind of desperate stubbornness took hold. He circled the building, finding a small, neglected courtyard at the back, shielded by overgrown hydrangeas. And there, on the second floor, he saw a window with a nameplate he could just make out: Aoki, M.

The blinds were half-drawn. If he stood on a mossy retaining wall and craned his neck, he could see a sliver of the room.

He saw Mizuki’s mother, her shoulders slumped, holding her daughter’s hand. He saw the foot of the hospital bed. And he saw her.

Mizuki lay perfectly still, her hair fanned out on the pillow, darker than he remembered against the white linen. An IV line snaked from her arm. She looked like a porcelain doll, beautiful and utterly vacant. The vibrant, laughing girl from his memories, the angry, hurt girl from the park, even the sad ghost from the fire escape—they were all gone. This was an absence. A shell.

A sob choked in his throat. He pressed his forehead against the cold, rough brick of the building. This is my fault. This is all my fault.

He didn’t know how long he stood there, watching the unmoving sliver of her form, the slow rise and fall of the sheets over her chest that was the only proof she was alive. The sky darkened, threatening more rain.

Finally, as the first drops began to fall, he forced himself to step down. His legs were numb. He turned to trudge back to the station, the image of her lifeless face seared onto the back of his eyelids.

He took a few steps down the rain-slicked path before he stopped.

Sitting on a wet bench under a large pine tree, watching him, was the ghost.

Not the fire escape ghost. This one was different. She looked younger, maybe sixteen. She was wearing the summer yukata she’d worn to the local festival two years ago, the one with the tiny white cranes. It was slightly too big for her, the sleeves covering her hands. Her hair was in twin braids, a style she’d only worn that one night.

She was soaked. The rain fell through her, making her shimmer like a mirage. But she didn’t shiver. She just looked at him with those same impossibly old, impossibly sad eyes.

This time, he didn’t speak. He just stared back, rain mixing with the hot tears on his own face.

She lifted a hand, not to wave, but to point. A slender, translucent finger directed his gaze back up to Mizuki’s hospital window.

Then she looked back at him, and slowly, deliberately, she brought that same finger to her own lips.

Shhh.

And then she was gone. Not with a fade or a blink. One moment she was there, a sad painting in the rain, and the next, there was only empty bench and falling water.

Kaito stood frozen, the shhh echoing in his head not as a sound, but as a feeling—a cold, gentle pressure against his mind. He looked up at the window again. The room’s interior light was on now, a soft yellow square in the gathering gloom.

And for one heartbeat, he thought he saw the Mizuki in the bed—the real, present, unconscious Mizuki—turn her head just a fraction on the pillow.

A trick of the light. A desperate hope. A hallucination born of guilt.

He repeated the words in his head like a mantra as he finally walked away, leaving the hospital and its silent occupant behind. But the seed was planted. The ghost in the festival yukata hadn’t just been a memory. She’d been a messenger. And she’d pointed him toward a mystery that was lying in a hospital bed, breathing but not alive.

The rain fell harder, washing his tears away but doing nothing to cleanse the cold, certain dread now taking root in his soul. She wasn’t just sick. Something was wrong with time itself.

End of Episode 3.

Next: Episode 4 - 織り機 (Oriki - The Loom)