My New Boss at the Yokai Pharmacy Is a Fox Who Cannot Lie novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Take With Warm Soup

Hakuro left the way he came, with a small bow and the door shutting soundlessly behind him.

Haruna turned on Kuzunoha.

"What is the fever for?"

"Ask me something else."

"You said that to him."

"I said it to you. He only heard."

"He knows something you won't tell me."

"Hakuro runs a clinic in the daytime," Kuzunoha said. "He sells comfort. I sell the truth. He'll say anything to put me out of business, and some of it will be true."

"And which part is true?"

Kuzunoha took a breath, and for a moment her amber eyes looked tired.

"That I am not telling you something," she said. "That much is true."

It was an honest answer, and it was infuriating.

Haruna opened her mouth, and Tsukumo said, "Snow woman at the door," in a bright, loud voice that meant she had been listening.

The woman who came in was pale as paper.

She wore a long white coat and she shivered, though frost was forming on the doorframe behind her.

A thin mist of cold rolled off her and across the floor.

She sat on the stool in front of Haruna and rubbed her hands together.

"I can't get warm," she said. "I've tried everything. Baths, hot water bottles, the tea your fox gave me last year. Nothing works."

"You're a snow woman," Haruna said carefully. "Aren't you supposed to be cold?"

"I'm supposed to be cool. I'm freezing."

Haruna checked her pulse, which was slow, and the skin of her palms, which was dry and cracked at the knuckles.

She asked what she ate, and the woman said, "Ice."

She asked who she lived with, and the woman said, "Nobody."

She asked when she last let anyone touch her.

The woman went quiet.

"Not for a long time," she said. "I melt a little, when I'm close to people. I don't like it."

"I think I know what's wrong," Haruna said.

"You do?"

"I'm going to say it plainly, and you can be angry if you like." Haruna leaned her elbows on the counter. "You're not cold because you're ill. You're cold because you've shut yourself out of every warm thing, because warmth makes you melt, and you're afraid of melting."

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