“I stopped counting days after the first year,” she said. “I started counting the cracks in the ceiling instead. There were sixty-three. I memorized their shapes. They were the only things that changed—when it rained, they looked like rivers.”

The prosecution called her “Rika,” but the court records listed her as “Victim A.” When she was finally asked to testify, she stood at the podium, her hands pressed flat against the wood. Her voice came out dry and tiny, like a radio signal from a faraway star.

The trial was swift. The man, Tanaka, sat in the defendant’s box with the placid face of a retired accountant. He had been a delivery driver. He had seen Rika walking alone. And for six years, he had kept her in a soundproofed room behind his detached garage, a space no wider than a coffin, with a bucket, a mattress, and a single bulb that never turned off.

That evening, Rika walked out of the courthouse into the open air. The sky was wide and indifferent. She tilted her head up, letting the rain fall onto her face—the first clean rain she had felt in six years. She closed her eyes. And for the first time since she was twelve years old, Rika Nishimura did not count the seconds until the light went out. She counted nothing at all.