Doubt

“Heh. She’s completely fooled.”

I looked at the message Yūha had sent me and became certain of my victory.

It was noon, and my morning work had finally settled down. I got up to make lunch and checked my phone while boiling some pasta I had bought on sale.

“Saburō-san, what do you usually do on your days off?”

That was what she had sent me. Oh? Ohhh? Are you that interested in Saburō-san?

Too bad!

That’s your brother!

Fwahahaha! Sorry that the version of me in that photo just happened to be exactly your type.

“What I do on my days off, huh…? Eh, I can just make something up.”

I was a beginner when it came to dating apps, but I knew how I was supposed to answer a question like this.

Telling the truth was no good.

You told them something they wanted to hear.

Even if it was a lie.

And what did women like?

Stylish hobbies.

Which meant the message I should send back was—

“On my days off, I have breakfast at a café, take a walk by the sea, go to a Korean restaurant for lunch, browse vintage clothing stores and dessert shops, and at night I make myself a simple full-course meal with whatever ingredients I bought. During long weekends, I go hiking or camping, but I also like lazing around at home!”

“What do you usually do, Yū-san?”

Perfect.

“Doubt.”

The moment Yūha saw Rokurō’s message, she made her judgment.

That man had always been perfectly comfortable lying.

Sometimes it was for self-preservation, but more often than not, there was a much more malicious motive behind it.

He used lies as a tool to manipulate how much people liked him or to make things unfold the way he wanted.

But this message was so blatantly false that anyone could see through it.

If a man actually spent his days off like this, he probably wouldn’t be using a dating app in the first place.

He would already be living happily with a girlfriend.

Yūha sighed.

“Doesn’t lying like this just make you feel pathetic…?”

She felt an indescribable sadness at how desperate her brother was to make himself look good, but this was also undeniable proof that Rokurō had been fooled.

He must have been telling suspicious lies like this because he was trying to impress her.

“Did my charms scramble your brain or something?”

She taunted her absent brother and cheerfully typed out a reply.

“I usually go shopping or to karaoke with my friends from school. Cafés and camping sound so mature—I really admire that!”

She played up the fact that she was younger than him as much as possible.

Even she thought the message was pretty cute when she sent it.

“—Not that I actually have any friends.”

She placed her phone on the bench.

The uniformed Yūha was not at school.

She was sitting in a deserted park in a residential neighborhood.

“Doubt.”

One look at Yūha’s message was enough for me to know she was lying.

I checked my phone after finishing my evening newspaper deliveries and buying groceries for dinner.

I hadn’t received a single “Like” from any other woman.

The only thing waiting for me was a reply from my stepsister.

So this was life, huh?

Pretty harsh.

As usual, I scattered “Likes” around at random.

I had already drawn the worst possible card—my own stepsister—so conversely, there was no longer any chance of matching with my stepsister from here on out.

That meant I could focus on looking for romance without worrying.

What kind of backwards risk management was this?

After finishing my obligatory round of Likes, I went back and properly read Yūha’s message.

She was probably trying to make herself sound like a cute girl too.

We weren’t related by blood, but she really was my sister after all. She had quite the personality.

Yūha had never cared about shopping.

She always said cheap clothes were good enough, and she never paid any attention to the fashionable things other girls carried around.

Maybe she liked karaoke, but I had a hard time imagining what kind of songs she would even sing.

Had she changed a little after we hadn’t seen each other for two years?

“…Wait, maybe the shopping part is actually true?”

She was already in her third year of high school.

Maybe she had become at least a little more feminine.

If she had started keeping up with trends and posting selfies on social media, that would be pretty amusing in its own way.

I wondered.

Truthfully, I had no idea.

Whatever.

Now then, what should I reply with next—

Actually, she replied pretty damn fast.

I realized it while staring at the chat screen.

Whenever I sent her a message, she replied within thirty minutes.

Meanwhile, I usually took three or four hours to respond.

I vaguely remembered reading on some website that it was better to match the other person’s messaging rhythm.

So should I start checking every thirty minutes?

I looked at the timestamp in the bottom-left corner of her message and started thinking about how I could keep fooling her when…

“Wait… could she possibly…?”

An unpleasant possibility occurred to me.

“Is school fun?”

“Yes. It’s really fun. Very much so.”

—Doubt.