Summer is ending.

The sound of cicadas grows thinner by the day. She hated that.

The coverage is almost over. Once summer ends, he won't come anymore. That was the promise from the start, and no one had broken it, but she couldn't get used to that obvious sentence.

So she thought she had to say something today. She hadn't decided what to say. She just pulled two cans of barley tea from the vending machine. One for her, one for him. She knew this was what people called an excuse.

The hallway was quiet. The cans had already become lukewarm during the walk.

The door was half-open. Just as she was about to put her hand on the knob, the sound of a chair leg scraping the floor came from inside.

She stopped.

The clubroom was dark. It seemed the sun had set completely without the lights being turned on. The two people were visible only as black silhouettes. There were no faces. Only the line of shoulders and the outline of hair.

Two shadows that should have been sitting with a desk between them were, for some reason, missing that space.

"...Hey,"

Her breath hitched. It was a familiar voice. A voice she heard every day by her side. But that wasn't the voice of the girl she knew...

"...When summer... ends,"

One shadow moved. A hand stopped at an ambiguous height, neither grabbing a sleeve nor holding a hand.

"...You won't come anymore..."

There were words after that. There definitely were, but they couldn't be heard. They were the exact same words she was going to say.

The outline of hair. The tilt of shoulders. The pieces overlapped and stopped on a single name.

This is definitely—

Caw!

A crow cried outside the window.

And inside, the distance narrowed. She saw the two shadows overlap into one. To the height where bangs touched a forehead. The hand that was holding the sleeve moved up and stopped near the front of the shirt. The fingertips were trembling. Enough to be seen even as a silhouette.

In the overlapped shadow, one head slowly tilted.

Thump

Strength left her hand. A can dropped and rolled across the floor, stopping in front of the door.

The two shadows inside looked this way.

And she ran. She hit her shoulder against the railing halfway down the stairs but didn't stop. She didn't let go of the remaining can in her hand until the end.

A can was rolling in front of the clubroom door. When picked up, it was already lukewarm.

The Next Morning

An email had arrived for you. That there was a story left untold. That she wanted to talk just the two of you. To come to the clubroom after school. That she would be waiting.

No matter how many times you re-read it, you couldn't tell. Whether the person who sent this was the one who approached that closely yesterday, or the one who saw everything through the door and fled.

After School

In front of the clubroom door, no sound came from inside.

The handle was warm.

You opened the door.

And the girl who was inside—