Evening, a few days later.
I was standing alone in the alley of a residential district. I looked at the building looming in front of me—the house where Aoi Hinami lived.
To put it very simply, I was going to ambush her.
“…All right.”
There was Kikuchi-san’s dream, then Hinami’s strange behavior. I needed to talk to her to resolve either one of these. But even saying that, I was surprised myself that I was doing something so primitive, unrefined, and frankly rude. I mean, if she had been a stranger, then I could get arrested—in fact, this was still unauthorized behavior, and even if it was Hinami I was waiting for, she could treat it as a crime if she wanted to. But I knew that I had chosen this because, at the very least, she wasn’t a stranger to me.
You might think, Don’t go lying in wait for her—just go ring the doorbell, but then she probably wouldn’t come out at all. In fact, it would let her know that I was here, which was a bad plan. Only an unexpected attack would work on NO NAME.
And so I was braced to do this. Whenever the neighbors gave curious looks at the boy hanging around in the fading light, I got through it by pretending to pick a drink from a nearby vending machine as I simply waited for what I had come to do.
“…Ugh.”
I had some dramatic notion that black coffee was the thing to drink on a stakeout, so I’d decided to live it out. Unfortunately, I’m not actually used to black coffee, and my muttered verdict disappeared unheard into the evening.
The bitter time melted away without anything happening.
✦ ✦ ✦
The last red light shining from the west finally vanished, and night fell. I must have been standing there for just under an hour. Though it was a spring night, I’d gotten rather chilly. I didn’t even know whether Hinami was in the building or had gone out, and that uncertainty was making the time feel even longer than it was. I tossed my empty can out, and it landed perfectly into the round shadow of the trash bin. It made a clanging sound as it fell to the bottom.
✦ ✦ ✦
The sun had completely set. It was dark enough that it was difficult to see the faces of passersby. I wound up staring at every single person who went by, but I wasn’t sure what to do when I made eye contact with a stranger, so I just looked away. I was doing a lot of very suspicious things, and I started to wonder with a bit of despair if I was just a weirdo. If you think about it, I didn’t have Hinami’s permission for this, so it was possible I really was a weirdo. I hadn’t thought of what I would say when I did run into her. But there were things that we could discuss because it was me and Hinami, because it was nanashi and NO NAME.
Still, I was wondering if I might get arrested, if my legs were getting too tired for this, as I leaned my weight on a nearby cement wall—and then.
“—!”
The familiar expression that I had been looking for passed right by.
The silhouette of a black-haired girl walking along down the dark path, even beyond the dim shadows, was shaped just like Aoi Hinami.
“H-hey…!” I raced out without thinking, calling out to her.
The expression that looked at me blankly was the one I’d been waiting for—
No, it was just very similar. And smaller.
“A-are you…?”
In other words, I had seen this person before, who resembled the one I was looking for.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Are you—Aoi Hinami’s little sister?”