Hirota's work turned out to be less structured than Ma En had expected. She was a magazine editor, yes, but the job went well beyond interviewing, writing, and editing. If anything, she seemed to spend more time on miscellaneous tasks than on actual copy. Her work wasn't confined to the office, either — she was out in the field more days per month than she was behind a desk. On occasion, she even did television segments. In the end, Ma En still couldn't pin down exactly what her job was. Just as she, for her part, still had no clear picture of what kind of place his former post office had been.

"Sounds more like freelancing," Ma En offered.

Hirota didn't agree. Her counterargument boiled down to this: most freelancers didn't actually have this kind of stable pipeline. Her income wasn't limited to the magazine's salary — she earned commissions from other work too. But if she weren't on the magazine's payroll, she'd never have access to that many opportunities in the first place.

"A lot of jobs go to people you already know. My magazine has connections across every industry — not exactly the top brass, but solid mid-level people in every field. Once you've gone back and forth enough times, everyone's familiar, and everything gets easier. If you never even get the chance to meet those people, then you're stuck." As she spoke, she ladled a bowl of rice for Ma En, then opened the fridge for beer. He glanced inside. Roughly a third of the shelf space was devoted to canned beer.

She drinks that much?

It wasn't that Ma En had anything against women who drank. But someone who stocked that much beer in her fridge probably drank daily. At the post office, women who drank like that tended to be the brash, freewheeling type — and by comparison, in these few encounters, Hirota's personality had shown far more of a delicate side. He'd briefly wondered whether she might be one of those people who acted differently in private than in public, but on the whole, she still didn't match the heavy-drinking women he'd known at the post office.

Or maybe he simply hadn't met enough women during his years there.

He'd been at the post office for four years — but turn it around, and four years was all it was. Shorter than most of his colleagues' tenures. He was only twenty-four. Twenty-four years in the homeland. If he lived to sixty, his years in Japan might actually outnumber his years at home.

When that day came — could he honestly say he knew his own country?

The thought of the future ahead brought a quiet ache. Homesickness welled up again before he could stop it.

"Give me one too," he told Hirota.

"Hm?" She looked at the beer in her hand, momentarily caught off guard. Then surprise. She hadn't pegged Ma En as someone who'd ask for a drink unprompted. She studied his face — that calm surface seemed to carry a faint melancholy she hadn't seen before. Not that it stopped her from appreciating the view. The subtle sadness actually lent a fresh quality to his features. Not bad at all.

But beneath the appreciation, something else stirred — a pull toward understanding more, reaching deeper, smoothing out whatever had cast that shadow.

She said nothing. Alongside the urge to act, a quiet but unmistakable resistance rose within her, holding her back.

Hirota stood and brought him a can.

"Between the salary and the side income, you must do pretty well for yourself in a year, right?" Ma En pushed the somber thoughts aside and cast around for a topic. He didn't actually want to know her income — they weren't close enough for that. Asking made him realize his conversational state wasn't great. He half-hoped she'd let it slide.

Was he overthinking it? Something about the living room's atmosphere felt off, but he couldn't identify what. The aroma of cooking. The room's warmth. The soft carpet beneath his feet. Laughter from the TV. And woven through all of it — something else. But what? No matter how he searched, how he reached out with his senses, he couldn't isolate it.

His body — trained through years of fieldwork — gave no alarm. No sense of danger. But there was something. Not threatening, exactly — more a feeling of almost. Of things being not quite what they seemed.

"It's decent. Enough to keep me in this apartment." Hirota didn't offer a number. "I've got savings. If the right opportunity comes along, I might leave the magazine and go independent. But honestly, I go back and forth on it. I like a stable life."

"You've got savings?" Ma En sounded mildly skeptical.

One look at his expression and she knew exactly what he was thinking.

"I just like having someone else pick up the tab. That doesn't mean I'm broke." She shot him a look. Ma En couldn't tell from her eyes whether she was actually annoyed. That was the thing about Hirota — sometimes she seemed perfectly transparent, every thought on her face. Other times she turned into fog.

Whether it was the beer or something else, his body was heating up. He unbuttoned his collar without thinking — and met the full force of Hirota's stare. His hand froze. This woman, who could technically call herself his elder, had a way of generating a pressure he couldn't push back against. Whatever he did would seem wrong. Not reacting would be equally awkward.

"What?" he asked, leaning back slightly.

"Mm, nothing." She raised the beer can with an air of nonchalance, holding it in front of her lips. "Shall we toast?"

"Huh?" The question seemed to come out of nowhere.

"This is the first time I've ever had a guy over. And I'm cooking for him." She said it like she was digging in her heels, voice hard with a stubbornness that bordered on a dare. "To the first time — cheers!"

Ma En was momentarily disarmed by the force behind it. If he were facing an enemy, he'd have fired back without a second's hesitation. But enemies didn't talk like this. He'd only known Hirota for a short time, but she was categorically not someone he could treat as an adversary. How to respond to forcefulness from a friendly woman — this was a skill that twenty-four years of life had not equipped him with.

"...Fine. Cheers, then. No need to be so intense about it." He grumbled, but clinked cans with her. It was Hirota who swung hard, knocking his hand back.

"Cheers. You know what cheers means?" Her tone didn't soften. "You drain it. Got it?"

"Yeah, yeah. I know."

Ma En licked his lips. He didn't enjoy chugging beer — the bitterness, and then the belch of gas surging up from his stomach. Uncomfortable. But even without looking, he knew she was watching him.

Hirota drained hers first in a single long pull, slammed the can down on the edge of the coffee table, and let out a satisfied exhale. But her eyes never left Ma En. She was supervising him — that was exactly what it felt like. She wanted to watch this young man empty a beer in one go. She wanted to see what his face looked like after. And a step further — if he got drunk, what would he become?

Her imagination caught at the word drunk and she had to exert real effort to stop it from going further.

After watching Hirota finish, Ma En took a small sip. Then two or three more tentative tastes. Only under her unyielding gaze did he finally tip the can back and pour.

This reluctant, hedging style of drinking — in Hirota's longstanding opinion — was not how a man should drink. She'd always felt that even if a guy didn't enjoy alcohol, he shouldn't be this coy about it. But applied to Ma En, the objection dissolved on contact.

Actually... this is kind of cute. Why did I always hate it before?

It depended on the person. She thought back through every man she'd ever watched drink. Not one of them had produced the feeling Ma En did right now. She tried imagining any of those familiar faces drinking the way Ma En just had — and no. Still unacceptable.

Ma En finished the can. His body burned hotter. Both collar buttons were undone. Going further would cross a line. So he unbuttoned his cuffs instead and rolled his sleeves up, neat and even.

"It's hot tonight," he murmured, more to himself than to her. "Sorry — not the most presentable look."

"Don't worry about it. Make yourself at home." Hirota smiled. "Come on — try my hometown specialty."

She nudged the plate of inscrutable "appetizer" in his direction. Ma En eyed the so-called mixed vegetables. He still didn't want to eat them. But refusing Hirota's enthusiasm was beyond his capabilities, so he reached for his chopsticks.

He poked through the plate first. He knew it was rude, but he couldn't bring himself to dive in. She'd said it contained fruit, wild greens, and mountain mushrooms — but everything had been chopped and cooked past recognition. The colors and textures bore no resemblance to their original forms.

"Try it. It's good, I promise." Hirota didn't seem to mind the hesitation. She just kept encouraging.

Ma En steeled himself, picked up a clump, and brought it toward his mouth.

Then — BANG BANG BANG, BANG BANG BANG — !

Someone hammered on Hirota's door. Violent. Urgent. Ma En's hand stopped in midair. Hirota flinched so hard her body pitched backward — she nearly hit the floor.

BANG BANG BANG, BANG BANG BANG, BANG BANG BANG, BANG BANG BANG!

A brutal rhythm, four rounds in total. It stopped before either of them could react.

Ma En and Hirota stared at each other. Her face had gone white. Ma En felt nothing in particular. He rose and walked toward the entryway. Before he went, he checked the clock: eight in the evening.

Not late. But the savagery of the knocking was wrong. Hirota was clearly shaken — this wasn't a scheduled visitor. Uninvited arrivals, in Ma En's experience, were bad news nine times out of ten. And why knocking? Every unit in this building had a doorbell.

He wasn't afraid, but the feeling wasn't good. He thought of the knocking at his own door the day before. A flash of irritation — he'd left the black umbrella back in his apartment, when it should never have left his side. Was he getting careless, or had his state genuinely slipped? He'd already recalibrated his mental and psychological defenses, and still he'd made this error. Back home, he'd never once been separated from the umbrella.

Regardless — right now, even if Hirota tried to open the door herself, he would stop her.

Ma En reached the door and pressed his eye to the peephole.

Darkness. As if something was blocking it from the other side.

His memory snapped into focus.

Same as before — he didn't blink. Not once. He stared into the black. And in the next instant, the eye filled his vision.

The eye. Bloodshot veins threading through whites that seemed to glow. It swallowed the peephole completely.

Nothing else visible. Just the eye.

The whites were still wrong — too much of them, an amount that felt inhuman.

The faintly luminous pupil showed Ma En his own back, even more clearly than the last time. As though this eye existed inside Hirota's apartment, watching him from behind.

And Ma En knew: if he turned around, he would not find it there.

The eye seemed to be speaking to him. But in reality, it only stared. Silent.

"..." He didn't feel the impulse he'd felt last time. Precisely because Hirota was in this room, he couldn't do anything to the door. He couldn't open it.

Any sudden move might put her at risk.

"Who is it?" Hirota's voice came from behind him, shaking.

"Nobody there." That was all Ma En said. His voice was calm. Not a ripple.

In the instant before he pulled back from the peephole, the eye vanished. The hallway returned — normal, empty, not a figure in sight. No way to imagine who the eye belonged to, or how they'd left.

In that moment, Ma En's heart was quieter than it had ever been. Maybe if he'd been alone when this happened, he would have felt a spark of excitement. But Hirota was here. He could summon nothing resembling delight, because this eye — very likely — had targeted this room, targeted Hirota herself, simply because of him. If that was what was happening, the blame was his to carry.

But this was not something he could explain to her. Not now.

"Probably just a prank." That was all he said. He walked back to his seat as if nothing had happened.