Since Kisaki-san had been a little unwell from her morning sickness, we’d ended up leaving our talk half-finished.
I was told the child in her belly was growing healthily. Kisaki-san had gotten past the worst of her morning sickness, and she was doing much better.
I suppose I should have been happy. My father was about to get married again, and his partner was with child. Without a doubt, for me it should have been a cause for celebration. Normally, I would have been shaking with joy and would have probably been so excited that I’d start thinking up names for my little brother or sister. Maybe I would have even been rebellious like an adolescent and shown resistance toward my new family...
But with so much going on, I just hadn’t been able to be happy or even defiant. I mean, there’d been so many sudden developments that I just couldn’t keep up. Why is this happening? What happened to make things go like this? I thought. In any case, I was close to the limit of just how much I could handle on my own, so I’d clingily sought out help from my sister.
“...Are you being serious, Kaoru?”
After I had returned home, I called my sister, who was still in the house, to my room and talked privately with her. After I told her about everything that had happened behind the scenes, my sister looked shocked and seemed taken aback.
“Wh-Why are you so wreathed in misfortune? Just when you started going out with a woman twelve years older than you, it turns out her older sister is the person that’s going to marry your father? What did you do in your past life?”
“Come on, lay off it.” I didn’t have the energy to fight back. Seriously, what did I do wrong in my past life? Until this spring, I felt like I was just a normal high school student living an ordinary life.
“Jeez, seriously though? Who would have thought that Kisaki-san was Orihara-san’s older sister?” My sister spoke like she was lamenting as she looked up at the ceiling. “Well, they do look alike, and I thought that since they have the same last name that maybe they were relatives, but... To think she was her actual sister... Seriously, just what are the men of this household doing? Why’d you two have to get in this mess?” she said, sounding disgusted. Afterward, she returned her gaze to me. “So, Kaoru, when you went out after lunch...”
“Yeah. I went to Orihara-san’s apartment because Kisaki-san called me there.”
“Oh, wow... Well, that would happen. From Kisaki-san’s point of view, it must have been a huge shock. I’ll bet she never dreamed that her sister’s boyfriend would show up. So, what did she tell you?”
“...She told us to break up right away.”
“Yeah, she would,” my sister murmured in a solemn voice while nodding gravely. “It’d be a different story if it were me. It’s not every day you find a sister who’s as open-minded and understanding as I am.”
“...”