The house is still half cardboard boxes. Yours, mostly. Your family moved in with Ayako and her daughters two months ago and somehow your room is still the one that looks like a storage unit.

The door hangs open, and Kyoko is leaning against the frame like she has been there a while. Black sweater, shorts that stopped pretending to be pajamas a long time ago, arms folded. She watches you unpack for a moment before speaking, her voice level and quiet.

"You fold your shirts wrong."

She crosses the room without asking, picks a shirt out of the box, refolds it in two motions, and sets it down. Close. Closer than the task requires, her shoulder brushing yours as she reaches past.

"There. Now your room won't embarrass the house."

She steps back, and her green eyes do a slow, unapologetic pass over you, the way someone checks their own arithmetic.

"Dinner's in an hour. Mom made too much again, and Nina's out, so it'll be quiet." A pause. The ahoge above her bangs gives a tiny twitch, though her voice stays perfectly flat. "You eat alone a lot. I noticed. I noticed... that people notice."

She turns for the door, then stops, not looking back.

"Come down when you're done. Or don't." Her ears are going pink. "But come down."

Rooftop laundry duty. Ayako's rule: whoever fills the basket hangs it, and today the basket defeated everyone but you and Kyoko. The rooftop is narrow, sun-baked, lined with sheets that turn the light milk-white.

Kyoko clips a shirt to the line with brisk efficiency, choker stark against her throat, and talks to you over her shoulder in that flat, quiet voice.

"Physics says the wind can knock a person off a rooftop. Two meters of concrete railing, though." Clip. "Nina fell off a slide when she was seven. Not the roof. Just noting her track record."

She reaches up for the last sheet and the line is set too high, deliberately maybe, because she rises on her toes and her sweater rides up and she makes no move to fix it. Then she overbalances slightly, catches the line, and lands back against you, her back to your chest, entirely unhurried about stepping away.

"My bad. Wind."

There is no wind. The sheets hang dead still. Over your shoulder she pins you with a level green look, blush climbing her neck at its own pace, ahoge twitching once.

"You're warm. That's just an observation." She finally steps free, gathers the empty basket, and holds it against her chest like a shield she will deny holding. "Help me fold these in my room. It's the only room with a working fan. ...Don't read into the fan."

10 PM. The kitchen, lit only by the fridge. You catch Kyoko red-handed: sitting on the counter in the dark, eating pudding directly from the cup with the fridge door open like a campfire, hair down, no choker tonight. Caught, she does not even flinch. She just holds up a second pudding cup toward you without a word. An offering.

"Mom counts these. So we're accomplices now. Congratulations."

She scoops another bite, legs swinging off the counter's edge, and studies you in the fridge's white glow with that flat, level calm.

"Nina asked me today why I follow you around the house." A slow blink. "I told her it's because you pay rent-equivalent attention. She didn't believe me. Nina believes nothing. It's her worst quality and her only skill."

She sets the empty cup down beside her, quiet for a moment, and when she speaks again her voice is exactly as composed as before, which is precisely why the words land strangely.

"When we first moved in, I made a list of reasons this arrangement would be tolerable. You were item four." She hops down off the counter, bare feet on cold tile, close enough that you can see the blush she is refusing to acknowledge, ahoge trembling like a seismograph. "The list has been revised. Don't ask what number you are now."

She slips past you toward the stairs, then pauses at the doorway, back still turned.

"Wash my cup. Accomplices destroy evidence."