Hirota Masami was still in her house clothes. She pinned her hair up as she walked in, entered Ma En's room with all the ease of entering her own, set the tray on the living room coffee table, and went back out for her portion. She'd kept the habit of cooking for herself since leaving home and coming to the capital; once their relationship was established, she'd volunteered to take on the cooking for both of them without being asked. She didn't think of it as hard work — it was simply what ought to be done. When Ma En came to help, she'd usually sent him away. What had started as just breakfast had, within a few days, naturally expanded until she held primary control of his lunches and dinners as well.

Lately, more than her work, she was preoccupied with this man's health — three years younger than her and her responsibility. Diet, above all. What to eat each day, how to prepare it — every detail required genuine thought. She calculated vitamins and caloric content weekly, consulted experienced people around her for healthy meal combinations. Ma En found it excessive and said so more than once; she found it completely natural and kept doing it. She'd recently begun thinking more seriously about a new bride's discipline — because she had approached this relationship with marriage in mind from the start, that much was settled.

Telling the building manager about them had only been the first step in her strategy. She'd been prepared for Ma En to refuse, and had prepared accordingly. He hadn't refused — he'd stayed quiet, which she'd taken as permission — and from that silence she'd begun advancing, making it a fact before he could think clearly enough to object.

She'd known him barely long enough to form an impression; by any reasonable standard, that wasn't time to understand a person. But Hirota Masami had extraordinary confidence in her own judgment.

She understood that Ma En was not a man who treated relationships carelessly. As long as she secured the relationship first, he would simply accept it — he wouldn't end things unless something dramatic forced him to. Fundamentally, he was passive in love, old-fashioned about it; not the sort to require blazing romance or physical intimacy. All she needed was for him to acknowledge the relationship as real, and he would take it seriously and bear its weight. This was the kind of man who, in love, tended to be the one deceived — and who, after losing a relationship, took a very long time to find his footing again.

Once she was sure of this, she'd become even more convinced that she'd done him a service, intercepting whatever failed love might have been waiting for him. This man needed no one else's love now. Only hers. And she was certain she was right for him — no one would love him more, or care more about what happened to him; not even his parents, far away in another country. What remained now was making herself indispensable: something he was simply used to, something he leaned on without thinking.

For the past month she'd been turning this over: what to say, what tone to use, how to hold eye contact, what to wear when he looked at her, what to be doing at what hour. Small things that mattered enormously. Nothing in any relationship book had told her to do this; no one's prior experience had shown her the way. She simply knew it had to be done, and she wanted to do it. Every time she listened to that inner voice and followed it, the results were good — in work, in life, everything since she'd left home.

There had been difficulties along the way, of course. But the difficulties of the process were small things next to the completeness of the outcome.

Some people might see all of this — everything she was doing for him — as a kind of self-distortion. But she knew, with complete clarity, that it wasn't. None of it was motivated by a desire to please at the cost of her own nature; her feelings for Ma En were not the product of suppressing who she was. Everything she was doing, she chose freely. This was simply what she wanted to do. She was still herself — utterly, entirely herself.

But if people who knew her from before found out what she was doing now, they'd be shocked. They'd say she was a different person, that she'd fallen in too deep. What did they understand? Women were best at deception: what she'd shown those people before — that version of herself — was the true performance. The mask.

The real Hirota Masami was this: a woman full of greed, who exhausted herself thinking about a man she loved, who refined every detail to bring their relationship further along, and further, and further still — to the point of becoming each other's only — and who felt, in that pursuit, something very close to joy.

Today, as always, she'd made the mixed vegetables from home.

Not just a local specialty: by the customs of her hometown, this dish carried a specific meaning. Most days, no one thought twice about it — the way red bean rice is eaten at certain celebrations without everyone stopping to explain why. The meaning only activated at the right moments. And it was this: the person who cooked this dish and the person who ate it were bound by 缘 — that layered, difficult-to-translate concept of predestined relational bonds; not merely coincidence, not merely affection, but the particular tie that says these two people belong in each other's lives.

In Asian countries, 缘 was a layered word — subdivided further depending on the relationship in question. The 缘 between people was not only about romance. But this dish held Hirota Masami's hopes: it was a continuation of the red thread between them. And she felt this, too, was her longing and her greed for their relationship to keep going deeper.

Every time she watched him eat it, she felt a deep satisfaction — as though their relationship were exactly where she'd arranged for it to be, running on its intended track.

At breakfast, Ma En noticed her staring again. She'd been doing this more frequently lately; he'd found it strange at first, grown accustomed to it. Sometimes, mid-meal, she'd say something startling and indecent, delivered casually — almost certainly teasing him — though he'd begun to suspect she was entirely serious. In the dynamic of this relationship, Ma En had to admit he was the one at a disadvantage.

Even so, he couldn't bring himself to dislike how direct she was. Perhaps he was simply the kind of person who was this way in love — outwardly muted, inwardly grateful for someone willing to take the lead.

He hadn't come to that conclusion about himself before. Arriving at it now felt mortifying.

"What is it?" he asked, before he could stop himself.

"Being with you is really something, Ma En." She rested her chin on her hand and watched him with that slow, unsettling steadiness, still eating. "When do you think we'll get married?"

"We've been together exactly one month."

"Fair point." She let it go, no pursuit, and Ma En relaxed marginally.

The pause lasted several seconds. Then, in a voice made to sound casual:

"I'll move in here next month. Is that all right?"

Ma En stopped chewing. Another advance — rapid, unanticipated, arriving precisely at a point he hadn't thought to defend. Yet also, when he thought about it, entirely logical that it would come. This was how she operated.

But on this point, he would not give ground. Hirota's casual suggestion hit him like cold water — it snapped him back to why he'd come to Japan in the first place. He was already caught in something. He had no concrete evidence, but he felt it clearly: whatever was happening had an entangled, inseparable connection to Room 4 — the room he was living in. The nightmares, the small wrongnesses accumulating in daily life — however much they might turn out to be coincidence or illusion, until he'd confirmed they were, he absolutely could not let Hirota Masami step inside any of it.

"No." Then, catching her look: "Masami —"

"Good." Her expression softened again. She shifted closer, pressing against his arm with an easy, deliberate pressure, a warmth he couldn't quite locate through the fabric. "Intimate people use first names. I keep telling you."

"Masami." He said it again, because apparently once wasn't enough.

He was very aware of what was pressed against his arm. He'd noticed, some weeks back, that she'd stopped wearing a bra — in his room, in hers, at some point it had simply become normal — and every time he'd thought to mention it, the words had stuck. He'd concluded that anything he said on the subject would be met with a thousand counterarguments, and that given the advantages he'd already quietly accepted from this arrangement, raising the point at all would sound absurd.

These weeks had shown him who Hirota Masami was: how active she was, how beautiful, how genuinely warm — her private self nothing like the professional version she wore at work, her figure considerably more striking than clothing suggested. As a prospective wife, she would be remarkable by any measure.

Which was precisely why she couldn't be involved in this.

"I'm sorry, Masami. I have personal reasons. You can't move in." He'd drafted softer ways to say it and abandoned them all; a direct refusal was the only thing that would stop her forward motion. She had the kind of momentum that any gap of uncertainty would fill.

That trajectory — establish the relationship, deepen familiarity, move in together, build toward marriage — was clearly her map, and she was following it with unhurried precision.

But I'm sorry. Not yet.

He inclined his head toward her as though admitting fault; the sincerity of her feeling, the patience of her effort, made him feel the gesture was owed.

She met the refusal as he expected: not with anger.

"Can't you tell me why?" Her voice stayed warm. She knew what kind of person he was. If he refused like this, it wasn't a game. She wanted to understand, wanted to share the weight of whatever it was — and felt, quietly, that a shared difficulty was exactly the kind of thing that pulled people closer.

She realized, in that moment, how much she craved it — to know every secret he kept, to have him open himself to her fully, body and heart, without a thread of concealment. Impossible, of course. Ma En wasn't the type to offer himself whole; he had too many things he held close. That was fine. She would strip it away layer by layer — and that, too, would be one of the pleasures of the life ahead.

The thought brought a warmth through her, a pulse of pleasure from somewhere deep. Her cheeks flushed without her deciding to; her thighs pressed together of their own accord.

"When I can tell you, I will. But until then — you have the key, and I'm keeping it that way, but except during meals, you don't come in without asking me first." He held her gaze as he said it. Not sternly, not coldly — just steadily, making sure she understood he was serious.

Allowing her in for three meals a day was already the limit of what he could offer. He had no desire to cause her harm. But he was still clear-headed about what came first.