――Shiho has sharp hearing.
For her, who was born with acute hearing, “sound” was a sixth sense surpassing the five senses.
She distinguishes people’s emotions by sound.
Cheerful people emit lively sounds.
Calm individuals produce relaxed sounds.
Angry people emanate rough sounds.
Sad individuals emit lonely sounds.
Various sounds express the “nature” of a person.
Usually, one can only grasp someone’s personality through conversation, but she can instantly discern it.
There’s no principle to it.
Simply because she has good ears, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it a supernatural sense that ordinary people cannot understand.
It’s a unique trait she has since birth.
In her childhood, she struggled due to oversensitive hearing. Her difficulty in socializing is also a side effect of her heightened sensitivity.
The only reason she could truly be defenseless was because of her parents’ unconditional love.
Everyone else were just strange noises to Shiho.
Of course, there’s no human without desire. It’s a necessity in life, something everyone possesses but hides. Despite everyone knowing this, relationships still function.
However, Shiho was excessively fastidious.
Merely hearing the creaking of desires made her wary of others.
Being raised by affectionate parents was both a blessing and a curse for her.
Her resistance against malice was incredibly weak.
She kept distancing herself from people.
Because of that, she couldn’t make a single friend.
As a result, she was often followed by Ryoma Ryuzaki.
――But all of this is a story until high school.
Now, she’s innocent, bright, and laughs often, but until middle school, she was a cold girl who rarely smiled.
Expressionless, keeping others at bay, spending every day in solitude.
However, her essence is that of a “lonely” and “needy” girl, yet also a “clingy” one.
In such circumstances, it was inevitable for her to suffer.
Until high school, she bowed her head every day.
There were times she felt uncharacteristically negative, wondering if she would continue to live such a lonely and dark life.
Shy, bad at conversations, timid, shy, always enduring… “Shiho Shimotsuki” from Kotaro’s perspective is such a person.
That’s why “Kotaro Nakayama” is a truly special existence for her.
Not like Shiho or Ryoma, possessing a specialness — no.
For Shiho, Kotaro was an irreplaceable existence.
For the first time in her life, she met someone without malice.
A person who emitted such transparent, beautiful, and pleasant sounds.
Thanks to him, Shiho could talk to people without nervousness. Recently, she can naturally talk to Azusa too… surely from now on, she’ll be able to talk to strangers without a problem.
Shiho changed for the better, all thanks to Kotaro.
Being by Kotaro’s side is an absolute condition for her happiness.
If that’s the case… one question arises.
Why isn’t she dating Kotaro?
What does Shiho think, why doesn’t she want to be Kotaro’s lover?
Even now, they are close enough.
But they haven’t taken that one step further.
The reason for that is simple.
“Kotaro-kun. I am not… the main heroine.”
She’s aware of it.
That Kotaro is fixated on ‘something’ that doesn’t exist.
She somehow senses that he’s bound by the story, fitting characters to the people around him, treating everyday events as a “story”.
In other words, the final chapter is a story for him to break free from the story.
It’s a tale for Kotaro, who sees nothing but stories instead of reality, to properly “see” and “love” Shiho.
