The truth was that, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to me, I’d panicked. The surveillance job hadn’t been that bad, but it had felt weighty and involved in a way that I didn’t feel capable of dealing with. Perhaps it just wasn’t a job suited to a chronic over-thinker like me. I doubted I could ever feel the affection that Mr Someya clearly felt towards it, and I wasn’t by nature as rule-abiding as Mrs Ōizumi. I could see how people like that could do the job without losing their minds, but I also understood that it was bound to send someone like me funny in the head sooner or later.
