"Uh… Hina?"
Yuto stepped further into the room, looking around. "I thought it'd just be us. Told the others to skip today. Grab snacks or something."
His gaze landed on me. His smile faltered.
"I didn't know we had a new recruit already."
Hina raised an eyebrow. "He's Eiji-senpai. Mystery Club. He's just visiting."
She turned to me. "This is Yuto."
I already knew.
Yuto stuck his hand out, a little too eagerly. "Nice to meet you!"
I gave it one shake and let go.
"I'll head out," I said. "Thanks for the tour."
Hina nodded. "See you around."
I slipped through the door. It closed with a soft click.
Through the narrow gap, I caught Yuto's quick wink, as if he was thanking me for reading the room.
---
The hallway was dim, and fog pressed against the windows like breath on glass.
Someone was standing just outside the door.
He had on a hoodie and glasses, his backpack hanging low enough that I could see the small car keychain clipped to the zipper.
He jumped when he saw me. "Oh—hey. Don't get the wrong idea. I'm Chihiro Yoshida. Club leader."
I nodded, the cube already turning in my pocket.
"Just… checking in," he said. "Sounded tense."
He leaned closer to the door. "Walls are thin. You want to listen?"
I don't do other people's drama.
But the cards. The codes. Something still didn't line up.
Before I could stop myself, I leaned in too.
Voices slipped through.
Yuto came first, nervous but hopeful. "Hina, about those cards… I made them. Wanted to impress you. Build up to this."
A pause.
"I like you. A lot."
Beside me, Chihiro went still.
"You cracked it, right?" Yuto said. "How it works?"
Hina exhaled slowly. "Yeah. 'Momose Hina, my name on the first column.' And your name hidden in the cipher."
"Pretty cool, right? Our names matched together. So… what do you think?"
The silence stretched.
Then Hina spoke, steady. "It's creepy, Yuto."
"What?"
"The photo. Me asleep in the library. The flower. That's not romantic. It's obsessive."
Yuto's voice cracked. "I thought— I just—"
That was enough.
I pulled back. "I heard what I needed."
---
We moved down the hall until the voices blurred into nothing.
Chihiro leaned against the wall and slid down until he was half-sitting, backpack bunched behind him. He rubbed the back of his neck without looking up.
"Yuto's not a bad guy," he said. "Just impulsive."
I waited. The hallway held the kind of silence that meant he wasn't done.
"I didn't think he'd add the photo," he went on, quieter now, like he was talking to himself. "Or the pressed flower. That wasn't part of the plan. The cards were supposed to be enough."
The license plates. The Caesar shift. The cipher wheel sitting in his open locker. Each piece slotted into the next.
"You designed them," I said. Not a question.
He glanced up at me, mouth half-open—then closed it. The denial never came.
I nodded toward the car keychain on his zipper. "You like cars. The cards look like license plates—UK format. You lived there six years."
He let me continue.
"The cipher's a modified Caesar shift cipher. Most middle schoolers wouldn't know how to make one—unless they're really into puzzles and codes." I watched his expression shift. "Like someone who owns a cipher wheel. The one in your locker, for example."
His shoulders dropped. He stopped pretending.
"Yeah," he said. "The whole thing was me. The cards, the cipher, the layout—all of it. Yuto came to me and said he wanted to tell her how he felt. I told him a letter was boring. That if he really wanted to impress her, it had to be something she'd remember."
His voice thinned. "I thought if I made it clever enough, it'd land the right way. Instead of... that."
He tilted his head back against the wall, eyes drifting toward the closed door at the end of the hall.
"And I figured... if the puzzle was good enough, she'd want to spend more time in the club working on it. And if she spent more time here..."
He trailed off. His thumb found the car keychain and traced it back and forth—slow, absent, like a habit he didn't know he had.
The sentence hung unfinished. But the logic was already there.
He hadn't built those cards for Yuto. Ten days of careful design—the hidden instruction, the names woven through layers of code. That wasn't a favor for a friend. That was someone trying to keep a person close without having to say why.
But Yuto had spoken first. Asked first. And once that happened, Chihiro couldn't hand her the same puzzle and claim it meant something different.
So he gave it away instead.
"You wanted her to stay," I said.
He flinched—barely, just a tightening around his jaw. "I wanted things to feel normal again. Like when we were kids, before I left."
Normal. But the effort behind that cipher didn't match "normal." Not even close.
Something didn't add up. I couldn't name what filled the gap.
He must have read the silence wrong, because he looked at me and asked, "What do I do now, senpai?" His voice cracked at the edges. "Yuto already told her. It's done. Do I tell her my part in it and make everything worse? Or do I just... let it die?"
Feelings weren't my thing—I could barely sort through my own.
"You built something meant to be solved," I said. "If she's as sharp as you think, she'll trace it back eventually. The cipher's your handwriting. The style is yours. She'll see it."
He swallowed hard.
"So it's not really about whether you tell her," I said. "It's about whether she hears it from you or figures it out on her own."
The words came out cleaner than I expected. He stared at me—not like I'd given him an answer, but like I'd taken the last wall down and left him standing in the open.
I didn't know what else to say. This was past where logic could carry me.
I turned and walked away.
Behind me, Chihiro stayed where he was—back against the wall, eyes on the door, keychain still between his fingers.
---
The fog clung heavily as I headed back toward the library building. Room 722 was where I'd left my bag—and the jigsaw was still waiting.
My phone buzzed halfway there. A text from Hani.
Math Olympiad training ran long. Too tired. Heading home early. Catch you tomorrow?
I stared at the screen longer than necessary.
My thumb hovered over the keyboard. I started typing—something simple, like: Yeah, tomorrow.
Then I stopped.
Childhood friends. Time apart. Things left unsaid.
Our situation ran parallel to Chihiro's—friends pulled apart by years, then shoved back together, pretending nothing had changed.
Ours felt the same. But I wasn't ready to face it yet.
I deleted the message. The empty reply box stared back at me.
To shake it off, I scrolled up through my gallery.
The photo of the vandalized poster popped up.
HQTQH9 U748.
Same string scrawled on every torn poster. Not random.
Chihiro's code flashed through my mind.
Simple shift… hidden name…
I froze.
The keys on the phone keyboard stared back at me.
Could it be?
My pace quickened.
Room 722 was dark when I pushed the door open. Michi was already gone.
But the jigsaw wasn't waiting anymore.
Every piece was in place. All five thousand of them, locked together across the table like they'd always belonged that way.
The image stared back at me—a lone huge tree on a hilltop, wide branches sprawling against a pale sky, the ground beneath it dappled in gold and green.
My hand fell away from the door frame.
Hani. She must have come back after we'd left.
She'd finished it alone.
I stood there longer than I should have, staring at a tree that looked too much like the one we used to sit under.
On the center table, beside the completed puzzle, sat a purple envelope. Crisp, unmarked. Same as the first.
I tore it open, same neat handwriting as before.
Both my ears are open wide
Talk to you through secret rhymes
Back and forth, just you and I
My pulse kicked up.
This wasn't over.
It was just getting started.