Dead Hours — Ask Me, Page 17

About this chapter

Dawn is coming and Rin has until six to answer the scout: the blank card on the counter is a yes-or-no she has to send by morning. The dramatic question is Kaito's — is he going to ask her to stay? — and he decides on page two that it isn't his call. All night Rin engineers openings, spelling out exactly what the offer would mean: a real studio, the city, the last shift, Toma taking her stool. Three times she leaves him the pause, and three times, eyes down, he says the decent thing: "You should go." A ladder of night regulars deliver contradictory, unverifiable verdicts on whether wanting a person to stay is selfish — the tracksuit regular calls it the most selfish thing there is; a drunk salaryman says everyone says stay and nobody means it; a cheerful jogger insists it is only selfish if you would resent it, so just say what you feel — and none of them agree. Rin has one flicker of near-sincerity: she wrote the yes nine nights ago and has been waiting for a single reason not to send it, and will not explain when Kaito misreads it as money. At dawn she stands in the open doorway in exactly the blocking and camera angle Kaito had in chapter 40 with his coat on — the last, largest opening — and this time the automatic line will not come: he opens his mouth and says nothing at all, neither "go" nor "stay." So Rin turns the offer down herself, sends the no, and takes her stool back, plainly furious and refusing to say why — and he never learns he passed a test he did not know he was taking. Her last line, deadpan and ruined: "You could've just said it." The final page mirrors page one's exact camera angle in flat grey dawn — two stools, both filled, the phone raised and filming him again, exactly as the series always was and not the same at all. A deliberate inverted callback to chapter 40, "The Long Way Round," in which Rin once talked Kaito out of leaving by telling him she would be the only one left.