For a long time afterward, Rié would sometimes wonder why she had cried at that moment. All she could think in the end was that she had been profoundly psychologically unstable. It was as though her feelings about the circumstances of her life, including her sadness over the deaths of Ryo and her father, had been building up imperceptibly since her return until, with the addition of these last trifling drops of emotion, the surface tension had finally broken and it had all spilled out.
