Finally this thought—something that Yōko must have understood a good deal earlier—welled up inside me, accompanied by a burst of shock. Kyōichi and the future meant less to her than this—that’s how badly she’d wanted to carry this through. Tsugumi had tried to kill a person. At the end of all the work, after struggling through labor so intense it passed well beyond the limits of her body’s strength, she seriously believed that the high school kid’s death would be a less weighty matter than the death of a dog she had loved.
