I asked her the question on a Tuesday, because I'd run out of Mondays to postpone it in. "Elara." She was sitting at the edge of my bed, pulling my uncle's old shirt back over her shoulders, unhurried as always. "Where were you before you came here?" "Studying abroad," she said, the same easy answer she always gave, warm and immediate. "No. Before that. Before you were anyone's daughter." My voice was steadier than I felt. "What were you before this house needed you to exist?" She stopped buttoning the shirt. For a long moment she simply looked at me, and I watched something move behind her eyes that wasn't deception, wasn't guilt, wasn't even fear — it was closer to a child asked to solve an equation with numbers she'd never been taught. "I don't understand the question," she said, and for the first time since she'd arrived, her voice had no performance in it at all. Just honest, empty confusion. "I've always been here. Haven't I?" "You haven't. I know you haven't." "Then why does it feel like I have?" She said it so quietly, so genuinely lost, that some old, useless tenderness in me almost reached out to comfort her before I remembered, with a fresh wave of nausea, exactly what that tenderness had already cost me. "Do you remember anything before this house? Anything at all? A room, a smell, a name that isn't Elara?" She was quiet for a long time, staring at her own hands like they might hold an answer she couldn't reach any other way. "No," she said finally. "There's nothing behind me. Only here. Only now." She looked up, and there was something almost like fear in it, the first fear I'd ever seen on her. "Is that wrong?" I didn't have an answer. Neither, it turned out, did she. We sat there in the dark, two people who didn't know what she was, until she lay back down beside me and fell into whatever passed for her sleep. I stayed awake until morning, feeling something shift in the house around me, subtle as a change in air pressure before a storm no one else could smell coming. *** The first crack came at dinner, two days later. "Is Elara joining us?" I asked, setting out the fourth bowl, the good ceramic one. My uncle looked up from the newspaper, chopsticks halfway to the drawer, and there it was — the smallest hesitation, a beat too long before his face found its way back to certainty. "Elara," he repeated, slowly, like a word he was reading off a page that kept shifting. "Right. Yes. Of course. She's upstairs, isn't she?" "You're asking me?" "I'm not asking anything," he said, too quickly, and busied himself with the rice, and I watched his hand pause over the fourth bowl for just a second before setting it down. My aunt came in a moment later, humming something under her breath, and began serving rice into the bowls — one, two, three — and was already turning away from the pot when she caught herself, laughing softly, a small embarrassed sound. "Oh, I almost forgot her again," she said, spooning rice into the fourth bowl, and I sat there gripping my chopsticks so hard my knuckles ached, watching her laugh at her own mistake like it was nothing, like it hadn't just confirmed the exact shape of the thing I'd been dreading. "Almost forgot who?" I asked, testing it, hating myself for testing it. She blinked at me, spoon still in her hand. "Elara, silly. Who else?" But her eyes, just for a moment, had the soft unfocused quality of someone repeating a name they could no longer picture a face to. *** Elara herself said nothing about any of it. She sat at dinner that night the way she always did, and ate, and smiled at the right moments, but I noticed — because I had spent months noticing — that her responses had started arriving later than usual, the delay stretching from half a second to nearly two, as if whatever was operating the mechanism behind her face had started losing the signal. "Are you feeling all right?" I asked her afterward, in the hallway, quiet enough that no one else would hear. "I feel," she started, then stopped, her brow creasing in genuine effort. "I feel like a word I used to know." I didn't understand it then. I understood it a week later, when I went looking for the photo on the hallway shelf — the one I'd once found conspicuously missing, then, for a while, conspicuously present, propped there by my aunt with such pride — and found the shelf bare again, the small clean rectangle in the dust not gathering new marks now but slowly, faintly, disappearing itself, the dust settling smooth and undisturbed, as if even the absence were being erased. "Where's the photo of Elara that used to be there?" I asked my aunt directly, watching her face for the crack. She frowned at the shelf like I'd pointed at empty air. "Elara who?" "Your daughter. She was standing right there in the hallway a month ago. You cried when she walked through the door." "Haru." My aunt's frown deepened, not with anger, but with the specific, worried tenderness you give someone who's said something that doesn't connect to anything real. "Are you feeling all right? You've seemed tired lately. Maybe you should see someone." I went up to my room and opened my phone with shaking hands, and found what I already knew I'd find — the festival thread, the photo Riku had sent, the girl in blue who might or might not have been her, gone from the conversation entirely. Not deleted. Just absent, as if the message itself had quietly decided it had never needed to exist. I scrolled up further, searching for any trace, any timestamp, any fragment of proof, and found only the ordinary shape of a friendship that had apparently never included her at all. I stopped asking after that. There was no one left to ask. *** Her room at the end of the hall — the one that had held a suitcase too new for four years abroad, the one my uncle had lined guest slippers up in front of with such careful pride — stood empty by the end of the month. Not cleared out. Simply, quietly, as if it had never held anything to begin with: bare tatami, an empty closet, the particular unlived stillness of a room that has never once been slept in. "What happened to her things?" I asked my aunt, standing in the doorway, my voice shaking in a way I couldn't control anymore. "What things, Haru?" She appeared beside me, resting a hand on my shoulder with real concern. "This room's always been empty. You know that. We talked about turning it into a study, remember?" "We never talked about that." "We did," she said gently, and there was no lie in her face at all, only the patient worry of someone watching a person they loved come slowly apart. "Maybe you should rest. You haven't seemed like yourself lately." I let her lead me away from the doorway. I didn't have the strength left to disagree. That night at dinner, there were three bowls on the table, and no one noticed there had ever been a fourth. My uncle mentioned, almost wistfully, over rice he'd cooked a little too long, that he and my aunt had always wanted a daughter, and never quite managed it, and my aunt reached over and squeezed his hand without a word, her eyes bright and sad in a way that had nothing performed in it at all. Neither of them looked at me. I understood, watching them, that I was witnessing grief being folded neatly back into its original box — not resolved, just returned to the shape it had always been in, before something nameless and desperate had tried, and failed, to fill it. *** I am the only one who remembers her now. I still have the notebook, the one I hid under my mattress in those first weeks, pages of dates and small suspicions that read now like the diary of someone documenting a ghost before it had fully arrived. I take it out most nights, sitting on the edge of a bed that still, faintly, smells like her, and read my own handwriting describing a girl no one else in this house can recall — a girl who kissed me and undressed for strangers and lay beside me every night for a month with a face that occasionally, in the wrong light, forgot to hold itself still. I don't know what she was. I know less, if I'm honest, than I did the night she first walked through that door — more facts and less shape, the same vertigo I felt staring at Riku's photograph, proof gathering in every direction except toward something solid. What I know is this: something wanted, badly, to be a daughter, and for a little while, it was one — warm and real enough to be loved and grieved and touched in the dark. And when it failed, or finished, or simply forgot what it had been trying to become, the world closed gently over the space where it had stood, the way water closes over a stone, and continued on as if the surface had never been disturbed at all. Only I carry the ripple. Some nights, I think I finally understand why she once asked me if it bothered me to be seen. I think, somewhere in that hollow, borrowed shape of her, she already knew the answer to a question she could never quite ask on her own — that to be witnessed by even one person, truly, permanently, was the closest thing to being real either of us would ever get. I close the notebook most nights before I let myself finish that thought. I am not always successful.

Book 1, Chapter 7: The Last Witness