Kiryu Kazusuke raised his head and looked at the face so close before him.
Though the bluish-purple color had not yet fully faded from her lips, and her wet hair clung to her cheeks, it was still a very beautiful face.
Especially those phoenix eyes—stripped of their usual upward tilt, veiled with mist, they looked utterly defenseless.
But Kiryu Kazusuke was not fooled.
This was Imagawa Ori, a woman who, for money, could work around the clock performing dozens of surgeries; who, for money, could dress as a man and go pour drinks at a nightclub; who, for money, could nearly freeze to death by the roadside in a blizzard.
Like her?
First see how much you resemble Fukuzawa Yukichi.
“Imagawa-senpai.”
He lifted his head to glance at her, then lowered it again.
“I saved you solely because you’re my superior.”
“If I’d left you alone and you froze to death by the roadside, who would I ask to let me be first assistant at the operating table?”
“Besides, the police would question me, the hospital would make me write a self-criticism, and then they’d ship me off to the countryside.”
“Lastly, hypothermia can cause confusion and incoherent speech. In medicine, that’s called an ‘abnormal mental state.’”
“So please don’t develop any unnecessary misunderstandings.”
“Otherwise, I’ll have to report you for sexual harassment.”
Kiryu Kazusuke’s hands did not stop moving. In fact, the pressure in his hands increased slightly.
His thumbs pressed against the acupoints on the soles of her feet to promote blood circulation.
“Hiss.”
Imagawa Ori flinched from the pain, but failed to pull her foot back.
Her ears, which had been deathly pale from the cold, were now tinged with a faint blush.
Probably because her body temperature had more or less recovered.
“Who—who would harass you?” she snorted coldly.
Kiryu Kazusuke said flatly, “That’s for the best. I only see you as my senior.”
After wiping her fair feet and calves clean,
Kiryu Kazusuke stood up, walked to the sink at the side, turned on the faucet, and carefully washed his hands with soap.
It was not because he found her dirty.
It was simply a professional habit as a surgeon. After touching a patient’s body, one had to wash one’s hands.
Water splashed noisily.
Imagawa Ori curled her legs up on the chair, her entire body wrapped in the oversized bath towel, with only her eyes exposed as she stared blankly at the glowing red quartz tubes inside the electric heater.
After a while,
Kiryu Kazusuke finished washing his hands and came back, sitting down across from her.
“So, why do you want seventy million?”
The last time the hospital had lost power and the two of them had been trapped in the elevator, Imagawa Ori had suddenly asked whether he could give her seventy million.
Back then, too, it had been a blizzard just like tonight.
Imagawa Ori lifted her eyelids and glanced at him, then buried her face in her knees again.
Perhaps because she had walked the line between life and death, or perhaps because she had already humiliated herself to the extreme tonight, she did not bristle with thorns as she usually did.
“A house.”
After muttering those two words, she continued in a low voice.
“I want to buy my home back.”
“My grandfather left it to us.”
“A few years ago, the bank came to repossess the house because my mother had mortgaged it to speculate in stocks. Later, all the stocks became worthless.”
“We were driven out.”
“To pay off the debt, my mother worked three jobs.”
“Then one day, she was just too tired. So tired that after she fell asleep, she never woke up again.”
“Later, the bank auctioned off the house. The current owner is a nouveau riche guy in trade. He said that as long as I give him a hundred million, he’ll sell the house to me.”
“I’m still short seventy million.”
Imagawa Ori’s voice was very soft, half drowned out by the hum of the electric heater.
Kiryu Kazusuke understood.
“Pretty stupid, isn’t it?”
Imagawa Ori suddenly gave a self-mocking laugh.
“For the sake of a wooden-beamed, tiled-roof house, wagging my tail and begging like a dog.”
“Just now, by the roadside, I even thought that as long as that taxi was willing to stop, I’d kneel and beg him if I had to.”
“And the result?”
“I almost froze to death by the road.”
She had been through medical school. Even if psychiatry and psychology were not her specialty, she still knew that this was a classic post-traumatic compensation response.
But so what if she knew?
If she did not find a goal for her shattered life, how was she supposed to have the courage to keep living?
And yet Kiryu Kazusuke nodded in agreement. “It is pretty stupid.”
Imagawa Ori froze.
She had thought she would hear some words of comfort, or at least silence.
So she asked again, “What did you say?”
Kiryu Kazusuke repeated, “I said, it really is stupid.”
Imagawa Ori stared straight at him, anger rapidly gathering in her eyes.
“What do you understand?!”
But Kiryu Kazusuke only let out a short sneer.
Then he slowly raised his head and looked toward the slightly yellowed ceiling light overhead.
“Don’t talk as if you’re the only one who understands. Don’t think you’re the only one who has experienced the death of a loved one.”
“At first, I was a little numb, a little at a loss.”
“But then one day, I suddenly couldn’t find where the sugar at home had been put. Out of habit, I called out. But I waited for a long time, and no one answered me.”
“That day, I drank a lot.”
“When I lay in bed, about to pass out, I breathed a sigh of relief. This day was finally about to be over.”
“It was also then that I realized that at the moment people leave, perhaps they too are thinking that all the turmoil of the human world has finally come to an end, that they can finally enjoy the peace of having laid their burdens down.”
At this point, he let out a long breath.
Imagawa Ori bit hard on her thin lips, which had only just regained some color.
“But that was my home with my mother. Only by going back there can I feel that she’s still…”
She was still unwilling to accept it; her heart was still struggling.
“That’s why I said you were stupid.”
But she had only spoken two sentences before Kiryu Kazusuke raised a hand and interrupted her.
“What disappeared was only the body. What exists still exists.”
“Whether or not you buy your house back, your mother is by your side.”
“When you go home, she’s cooking in the kitchen.”
“When you put on your shoes in the entryway, she’s folding clothes in the Japanese-style room.”
“When you’re working outside, she’s watching television in the living room.”
“She has always been there.”
“It’s just that you always brush past each other, unable to meet.”
After saying that, he still kept his head tilted back, but his face was expressionless, and he said no more.
Imagawa Ori did not refute him.
The break room suddenly fell quiet.
Only the quartz tubes in the electric heater occasionally gave a soft pop from thermal expansion and contraction.
Imagawa Ori hugged her knees with both arms and buried her head deeply between them.
To her, her mother’s death had not been a sudden shower that was over once it passed, but an endless drizzle, its dampness wrapping around her at every moment.
Everyone had only ever told her to be strong, to pull herself together.
Only Kiryu Kazusuke.
Only this annoying resident would say such things, would say she was stupid, would say her mother had merely changed forms to stay by her side.
She closed her eyes.
It was as if she saw a woman wearing an apron, holding a spatula, turning back to smile at her and saying gently, “Ori, dinner’s ready.”
So her mother had been by her side all along.
Her shoulders began to tremble faintly.
Not because of the cold.
The room’s temperature had already risen above twenty degrees, and with the hot soup and the electric heater, her body temperature had long since returned to normal.
She just missed her mother.
The home she had grown up in had actually been empty long ago.
The furniture inside had been used to pay off debts, the flowers and plants in the courtyard had withered, and even the height marks on the wall had probably been painted over by the new owner.
What difference would buying it back make?
She bit her lower lip hard, until she tasted the rusty tang of blood.
Strange.
Her eyes were clearly closed, so how could sand still get in?
A drop of warm liquid slid down her cheek, followed by a second drop, a third…
She did not want to cry.
She was Imagawa Ori. How could she shed tears in a place like this, in front of a junior doctor, just because of a few words?
But she really could not hold it in anymore. She really wanted to cry.
At last,
Still keeping her head hidden behind her knees, she raised a hand and pointed toward the door.
“Get out.”
Only those two words, short and stiff.
However, Kiryu Kazusuke said nothing. He stood, took a few steps, gripped the door handle, pressed it down, and pushed the door open.
The air in the corridor was colder than in the break room.
He leaned back against the door, hands in his trouser pockets, and lowered his head to look at the floor.
One second, two seconds, three seconds, until the fourth second.
“Waaaaah—!!!”
A sob that could no longer be suppressed pierced through the door. A wailing cry, as if it would tear her vocal cords apart, came pouring out from inside without the slightest restraint.
It was not sniffling. It was not whimpering.