After dinner, the house seemed to sink into a deeper quiet. Not the kind that soothes, but the kind that unsettles—the kind that fills every hallway with the weight of something left unsaid.
Downstairs, the sound of Mom humming as she cleaned echoed faintly. Aoi had disappeared into her room without a word. The air felt heavier now, like even silence had learned how to linger.
I climbed the stairs slowly, each step a reluctant echo beneath my feet. The hallway lights were dim, casting long shadows across familiar walls. My hand brushed the railing, remembering how I used to race up these stairs, two at a time, breathless from laughter.
And then I stopped.
My old bedroom door was slightly ajar. I hadn't meant to go there, hadn't even realized I was headed that way. But something drew me—like muscle memory, or gravity.
I pushed the door open.
At first glance, it was the same room I remembered. But only at first.
The longer I stood there, the more foreign it felt.
My breath caught in my throat. What used to be my space—my world—was no longer mine. It had been claimed, reshaped… quietly reimagined by someone else.
By Aoi.
The walls were lined with carefully framed photographs—of us. From when we were kids. The kind of pictures you forget even exist until they look back at you, frozen in laughter, unaware of the distance the future would bring. At the beach, grinning with our arms covered in sand. On a snowy mountaintop, her tiny fingers tugging at my jacket sleeve. There was something deeply personal in the way she had chosen those moments, as if she were clinging to the pieces of a bond we had once taken for granted.
And then I noticed the little things—her books, her trinkets, her soft-pink bedsheets draped across what used to be mine. It wasn't just a borrowed room anymore.
It was hers.
And I was the ghost.
I stepped in slowly, each footstep hesitant, like I was intruding on sacred ground. I paused in front of one of the photos—the beach one—my fingers brushing lightly over the glass. I could almost hear our laughter in the waves. Could almost feel the sun on my face. She'd placed it in the light, where it would catch the sun at just the right angle. It wasn't just decoration. It was preservation. Memory, sealed in stillness.
I sank down onto the edge of the bed, the unfamiliar softness of the sheets pressing up against the cold of everything else I was feeling. My throat tightened.
It wasn't just the room that had changed. I had changed. We both had. And now I was sitting in a version of my past that had evolved without me.
A soft knock startled me.
"Riku?" Aoi's voice was barely above a whisper.
My heart skipped.
"Yeah?" I said, my voice rough.
The door creaked open. She stepped in slowly, her eyes flicking over the room before resting on me. For a second, she looked uncertain—like she'd crossed some line even she didn't fully understand. She didn't sit. Just walked to the window and stared out into the dark.
"I didn't mean to change your room so much," she said finally. "I just… I guess I wanted to keep you here somehow. Even when you were gone."
Her voice trembled around the edges.
I couldn't speak. Couldn't say all the things caught in my chest.
"It's fine," I said at last, the words brittle. "It just feels… different now."
She nodded but didn't turn around. "Yeah. I guess it does."
I looked at her—really looked at her. Her shoulders, once so familiar to lean against, seemed weighed down by something she wasn't ready to name. I wasn't sure I could name it either.
"I'll leave you alone," she said softly, backing toward the door.
But before she left, she paused. Looked back.
"Riku… I missed you."
And then she was gone.
I stayed there, surrounded by the relics of a shared childhood and the echo of a sister's voice that felt both too close and too far away. I didn't know where I belonged anymore. Not in this room. Not in this version of us.
And that hurt more than I wanted to admit.